This tweet and subsequent blog post talking about Apples Failure by blocking Adobe and possible implications for eMagazines built on Flash/Adobe AIR after my intial gut reaction of 'great news, good on Apple' it got me thinking maybe I was just hating Adobe and loving Apple without proper consideration or real thought.
Did Apple thus ban the new ipad wired mag and other emags ? Did it mean there would be a unnescesary need to make different versions for different platforms a new reality. Well Apple did slow Adobe from closing the market up with AIR becoming a xplatform defacto and thus Flash/flex/ActionScript dev enviromemt and that as far as I'm concernced that is good. Did they lock developers into iPhone APIs well yes but that was the case anyway even the Adobe Packager would only be able to use Apple APIs, same as Objective C via cocoa touch.
Having looked at another publisher example Mag+ demo'd here on ipad http://vimeo.com/10630568 (video plays on iPhone/iPad) I see nothing that requires flash type stuff (I did have a horrible thought that Quark might boom again with it's straight out to flash output option and Flash straight to iPhone. The fear of paper to digital without thought for interface) , in fact it could all be a web app I would say, the same applies to wired mag ipad demo.
Maybe the original prototypes where developed in flash but I expect again more power can come from Xcode/objective C and is worth pursuing above Flash/Actionscript, if the native iPhone things are infact needed.
html5 is getting pretty powerful and all the discussions I have had re most iPhone based dev seems to suggest that this will get you very far without learning new programming languages. Not to forget html5s offline capablities. See also developments like jqtouch and my recent delicious links tagged iPhone.
This would also means the content of the magazine is more accesable and searchable and in fact probably more xplatform than anything else.
What Apple have set out is that if you want a native iphone app you need a set language and Xcode ( free dev software on mac) to compile. Not much different to other OS's and app development.
So I was pleased to see Adobe continuing to be forced to rethink Flash and any push that even sideways helps adoption of open standards like html, css and html5 video via the web (thus webkit) for content delivery over closed propriority software was good. (I maybe cutting close to Apple's other lockdown issues but let's leave that on the side for now)
However it then struck me that I had intially thought Flash CS5 was just making an Xcode project and that Xcode would compile much like Unity3d which got me more concerned, would this 'lock down' effect other 'better' dev platforms ?
Discussion with a good friend Paul seemed to indicate that this was probably Apple just clarifying the rule that was always there,you cannot use interpreted code at runtime, Unity had got 'around' that by translating everything to an xcode project which produced a pure xcode output. If the Adobe packager had not done that (or close equivalent) then they are breaking current agreements anyway. Seems odd they never thought about it before !
Or if I misunderstand how unity does it then maybe Unity could be in trouble. Seems like a few other Unity people got worried about this too.
It took Unity a while to solve the problem in the first place in order to meet Apple's requirements & within this post it seems to suggest that Unity is okay.
It would though appear Apple have already broken their rules by letting namco games and c64 emulator in as they appear to be using a runtime translation of non-native machine code.
So what is the real war here ? Is there one ?
Im not sure but control over the way your write native applications is not new, ok Adobe Air let you wrap up any old code (actionscript, html etc) into an x platform 'app' but on the iPhone so does webkit (safari)
On the desktop mac I prefer to use Fluid over AIR apps - I mean tweetdeck was the only good AIR app I used ? & look even they wrote a native app to take advantage of iPhone API.
As Jobs stated 'Flash is not good enough for the iPhone', in fact I'd say it's not good enough for Apple. Click to Flash & Flash block for firefox are installed as standard on my macs!
Adobe sort it out and then maybe you can play with Apple. This guy puts it pretty straight too.
Oh and this from @maxvoltar is very nice
Hey Adobe, random thought: Why don't you make software people actually want to use instead of suing Apple for being excluded from the iPad.
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Comments
Craig Baldwin
April 10, 2010
This is precisely what I was worried about yesterday, that Apple would be blocking eMagazines - that show a genuinely innovative use of the interface - built using AIR like Wired's. I'm not worried that they won't custom build them if needed, it is currently the only real platform to have a large touchscreen, I'm more concerned about being locked in if I wanted to take my digital magazine subscriptions elsewhere. But I guess Apple being Apple, that's precisely what they want. That and to avoid having their platform diluted by multi-platform apps that don't take advantage of the hardware. Reminds me of mulit-platform game releases; they're always rubbish because they don't tailor specifically to the hardware.