iPhone OS 4

[photon]

Originally Posted by FanIn80

Adobe is crap software on any OS. Photoshop might run better on a Mac (although I actually prefer it on a PC), but all of their apps are garbage. I have no clue why people care so much about a company that clearly has no regard for the machines their software gets installed on.

People care not specifically because it's Adobe, but because it steps over a perceived line (I'm talking specifically about the restriction here, not flash). Just another case of Apple jerking their developers around not caring one whit how their decisions impact them. People looking to use CS5 aren't the only ones impacted.

This is business, people put their lives into making things to make money and a living, but Apple continues to arbitrarily change the rules for their own needs and whims without caring about the impacts on others. Someone who'd made a business plan based on how things were two days ago now has nothing. No warning.

Microsoft was crucified in the public opinion for far less.

Originally Posted by FanIn80

As for the .Net stuff... are you saying I can write and compile VB apps using an environment other than .Net?

Sure.

Originally Posted by FanIn80

The comment about the 3rd party tool kit is valid. What happens if someone else develops some Windows IDE toolkit for developing iPhone apps?

http://www.dragonfiresdk.com/index.htm

You can already do that. The only part you can't do is get the app signed and submit it to Apple, but the rest (coding, compiling) can be done on Windows. And they have tools to do the submitting too.

How the code is written doesn't matter, you can use notepad because at the end the code is just a text file full of code that makes calls to APIs.

What machine the compiler runs on doesn't matter, because the compiler just takes the code file and translates that into machine code or bytecode specifically for whatever hardware it's going to run on.

It doesn't matter what created the text file that has a line in it that has a method call of getTouchInput(), it's an identical API call in the end.

Originally Posted by FanIn80

You should compare apps that are written entirely for (and on) a Mac vs apps that are written for Windows and then ported over to a Mac. They are night and day in both appearance and performance.

That's not a relevant comparison because the APIs for Windows and OSX are completely different, and when someone ports an application they usually create some kind of layer in between to translate, or write their own modules to do things the OS already does but they can't call because of the differences..

Apps written in Adobe Flash CS5 or Dragonfire or Unity3D all call the exact same APIs and leverage the same OS.

Now those tools might create less than stellar code in some cases, but developers do that as well, and Apple isn't banning developers.

It's a spiteful move by Apple, throwing developers under the bus to further some game they're playing with a superficially reasonable reason to placate the media.

[ZedMan]

Originally Posted by FanIn80

As for the .Net stuff... are you saying I can write and compile VB apps using an environment other than .Net?

You absolutely can. Say hello to Mono

[FanIn80]

I just want to make clear, however, that I'm not in favour of just closing off 3rd-party IDEs for the sake of selling more Macs or something like that. While my understanding of the nuts and bolts of the issue is elementary at best, I am very much in favour of a closed OS because I've seen both sides of the fence.

On my Windows laptop, I am extremely picky about the applications I install. I even wipe my entire drive and reinstall everything from scratch to get rid of garbage apps that I see as being more harm than good.

On my Macs, I don't tend to worry about it too much. I know that (in my experience) 99% of the time an app that has been built and designed from the ground up to only work on a Mac isn't going to screw anything up if I test it out.

With that knowledge in hand, and because of the limited resources available on the iPhone, I really don't have a problem with Apple being picky about which apps can run on it. At the end of the day, the last place I want to dick around with crashing and performance issues is on my phone.

[psicodude]

Not to derail the Flash or multi-task fights, but I found this article interesting: http://www.infoworld.com/d/mobilize/...0-939?page=0,0

Now to use it to talk the boss into letting me do a proof of concept...

[FanIn80]

Originally Posted by photon

People care not specifically because it's Adobe, but because it steps over a perceived line (I'm talking specifically about the restriction here, not flash). Just another case of Apple jerking their developers around not caring one whit how their decisions impact them. People looking to use CS5 aren't the only ones impacted.

This is business, people put their lives into making things to make money and a living, but Apple continues to arbitrarily change the rules for their own needs and whims without caring about the impacts on others. Someone who'd made a business plan based on how things were two days ago now has nothing. No warning.

Microsoft was crucified in the public opinion for far less.



Sure.



http://www.dragonfiresdk.com/index.htm

You can already do that. The only part you can't do is get the app signed and submit it to Apple, but the rest (coding, compiling) can be done on Windows. And they have tools to do the submitting too.

How the code is written doesn't matter, you can use notepad because at the end the code is just a text file full of code that makes calls to APIs.

What machine the compiler runs on doesn't matter, because the compiler just takes the code file and translates that into machine code or bytecode specifically for whatever hardware it's going to run on.

It doesn't matter what created the text file that has a line in it that has a method call of getTouchInput(), it's an identical API call in the end.



That's not a relevant comparison because the APIs for Windows and OSX are completely different, and when someone ports an application they usually create some kind of layer in between to translate, or write their own modules to do things the OS already does but they can't call because of the differences..

Apps written in Adobe Flash CS5 or Dragonfire or Unity3D all call the exact same APIs and leverage the same OS.

Now those tools might create less than stellar code in some cases, but developers do that as well, and Apple isn't banning developers.

It's a spiteful move by Apple, throwing developers under the bus to further some game they're playing with a superficially reasonable reason to placate the media.

Ok, well that's fair enough. I'd like to see what someone like sclitheroe has to say about it, too.

Also, just something I like to point out once in a while... I was an avid defender of Microsoft during that whole anti-trust garbage with IE and especially with the MS VM. I am still pissed to this day that I have to install Sun's JRE in order to run Java apps. So this isn't only about Apple for me. I've always been more concerned with looking after the user's experience than I have the developer's.

Ironic, I know, since I'll be one of those developers in a few years... perhaps my allegiances will change then...

[QuadCityImages]

Originally Posted by photon

How the code is written doesn't matter, you can use notepad because at the end the code is just a text file full of code that makes calls to APIs.

What machine the compiler runs on doesn't matter, because the compiler just takes the code file and translates that into machine code or bytecode specifically for whatever hardware it's going to run on.

It doesn't matter what created the text file that has a line in it that has a method call of getTouchInput(), it's an identical API call in the end.

....

Apps written in Adobe Flash CS5 or Dragonfire or Unity3D all call the exact same APIs and leverage the same OS.

There's some discussion around the internet that Apple won't really be able to tell what you used to originally write your app.

While I actually agree with FanIn80 that just about everything Adobe makes is annoying garbage, I think all of these little "Apple=Controlling" stories can start adding up into something that non-nerds know about. Its kind of like in the US AT&T's network was known by nerds and iPhone fanatics to be crap, and that knowledge spread to the mainstream. Suddenly you have Luke Wilson in commercials trying to convince people that AT&T isn't as bad as they've heard. What may now be something that only bothers developers and nerds might eventually hurt Apple's rep with the regular folks.

[photon]

Originally Posted by FanIn80

Maybe I'm misunderstanding the issue. I see this as Apple telling developers that, if they want to build iPhone apps, they have to do it on a Mac using the tools and languages that Apple provides for it.

And they're telling them they can't develop tools to make the job easier.

Originally Posted by FanIn80

I don't get how something written in Flash can just be magically translated to work on the iPhone. Wouldn't you have to write the thing from the ground up using Apple's APIs?

Computer languages are very simple at their core.. you have code to do stuff, and you have code to ask other things to do stuff.

The code to do stuff is trivial. Add this number, compare this string, evaluate this boolean expression and decide what to do based on that. Every language boils down to similar sets of things.

The code to call stuff is also trivial, just call the thing and give it the right information.

The hard part is deciding that parallels there are... If I'm going to draw a button on Flash I might call a drawButton() method, but on the iPhone it'll be named something different. And they may want different information in different formats, but once you've figured out an abstraction of both and a translation between both, that's all you need. For easier cases like 90% of apps probably use it would be quite straight forward.

And for cases where there is no abstraction, no analogue, you just expose the native API directly.

This kind of thing isn't new. I can write .NET apps in hundreds of languages. I can write Java bytecode in C# or hundreds of languages. It's a very very common thing.

Originally Posted by FanIn80

Like how can Apple trust that Adobe's "Save As... iPhone App" button will recode the Flash app to correctly use everything that Apple requires it to?

Well the app works or it doesn't. It still gets submitted, it still gets tested by Apple.

How can Apple trust that Developer A will write an app that correctly uses everything that Apple requires him to do? The exact same process applies.

Originally Posted by FanIn80

What happens when Apple puts out a new OS and people are still using Flash CS5 to compile iPhone apps which aren't built properly for iPhone OS 5?

They do the same thing everyone else does. There's nothing magic about Apple's environment that makes developers immune to this, every OS release there are apps that are written in X-Code that all of a sudden don't work. The developer would have to go back and figure out why it doesn't work and fix it and release an updated version.

If that "why" happens to be in way that CS5 is generating code (i.e. it's generating code that doesn't work under the new OS just like a developer made code that didn't work under the new OS), then Adobe would have to fix CS5.. that's why there are beta releases of OSes so everyone can test their stuff and make sure it works.

Originally Posted by FanIn80

At the end of the day, all I care about is a quality OS running quality apps. I honestly don't care if Flash developers can't just save their apps as an iPhone app.

Exactly, for you you don't care as long as the app works. There's no reason to think that the app wouldn't work (and if it didn't it wouldn't get approved) or that it would be a bad app (or any worse than what developers already make by hand). So there's no reason for them to do this except political reasons.

But if you were a developer that had secured $2 million in funding to create an app and today you have nothing, you would care.

Originally Posted by FanIn80

Again, if I'm completely off-base on this, I'll shut up and let others with more knowledge of what's actually happening figure this out. I'm in the early stages of learning dev terms, and I am more than outmatched in terms of knowledge in this area by more than a few people here.

And that's fine, it's a complicated thing. Apple trusts that the media will take no notice because most people don't get the problem, and developers have been conditioned to drift with Apple's whims so it'll just be business as usual.

Unless someone goes to court in the EU as has been suggested.

[photon]

Originally Posted by FanIn80

I am still pissed to this day that I have to install Sun's JRE in order to run Java apps.

You don't have to, there are other implementations out there. JRockit is now back with Oracle but was independent. Apache Harmony is an independent implementation too.

Originally Posted by QuadCityImages

There's some discussion around the internet that Apple won't really be able to tell what you used to originally write your app.

That's kind of what I was thinking, though as part of the translation there will have to be some libraries that will be part of the process I'm sure, and those libraries will be common between all apps derived that way and you could probably detect them in the source files.

That's why I mentioned and obfuscation tool might become popular

[FanIn80]

Originally Posted by photon

You don't have to, there are other implementations out there. JRockit is now back with Oracle but was independent. Apache Harmony is an independent implementation too.

Oh nice. This is obviously fodder for a different thread, but what is the best JRE to install for someone who hates resource hogs and apps that constantly feel like they have to check for updates all the time... etc...

Mind you, most of my hatred of Sun's JRE is historical. It was garbage back in the days when we were forced to have to download it instead of MS's VM. Maybe it's gotten better in the last 10 years or so.

[FanIn80]

Originally Posted by photon

And they're telling them they can't develop tools to make the job easier.



Computer languages are very simple at their core.. you have code to do stuff, and you have code to ask other things to do stuff.

The code to do stuff is trivial. Add this number, compare this string, evaluate this boolean expression and decide what to do based on that. Every language boils down to similar sets of things.

The code to call stuff is also trivial, just call the thing and give it the right information.

The hard part is deciding that parallels there are... If I'm going to draw a button on Flash I might call a drawButton() method, but on the iPhone it'll be named something different. And they may want different information in different formats, but once you've figured out an abstraction of both and a translation between both, that's all you need. For easier cases like 90% of apps probably use it would be quite straight forward.

And for cases where there is no abstraction, no analogue, you just expose the native API directly.

This kind of thing isn't new. I can write .NET apps in hundreds of languages. I can write Java bytecode in C# or hundreds of languages. It's a very very common thing.



Well the app works or it doesn't. It still gets submitted, it still gets tested by Apple.

How can Apple trust that Developer A will write an app that correctly uses everything that Apple requires him to do? The exact same process applies.



They do the same thing everyone else does. There's nothing magic about Apple's environment that makes developers immune to this, every OS release there are apps that are written in X-Code that all of a sudden don't work. The developer would have to go back and figure out why it doesn't work and fix it and release an updated version.

If that "why" happens to be in way that CS5 is generating code (i.e. it's generating code that doesn't work under the new OS just like a developer made code that didn't work under the new OS), then Adobe would have to fix CS5.. that's why there are beta releases of OSes so everyone can test their stuff and make sure it works.



Exactly, for you you don't care as long as the app works. There's no reason to think that the app wouldn't work (and if it didn't it wouldn't get approved) or that it would be a bad app (or any worse than what developers already make by hand). So there's no reason for them to do this except political reasons.

But if you were a developer that had secured $2 million in funding to create an app and today you have nothing, you would care.



And that's fine, it's a complicated thing. Apple trusts that the media will take no notice because most people don't get the problem, and developers have been conditioned to drift with Apple's whims so it'll just be business as usual.

Unless someone goes to court in the EU as has been suggested.

There's a lot there for me to digest. Thanks for taking the time to go over this stuff, btw. This is certainly a lot more useful to me than the "Apple is evil" comments I was expecting to see. While it may boil down to them actually being evil, I have more respect for someone who will actually explain it than not.

[photon]

Originally Posted by FanIn80

Oh nice. This is obviously fodder for a different thread, but what is the best JRE to install for someone who hates resource hogs and apps that constantly feel like they have to check for updates all the time... etc...

Mind you, most of my hatred of Sun's JRE is historical. It was garbage back in the days when we were forced to have to download it instead of MS's VM. Maybe it's gotten better in the last 10 years or so.

For the desktop? Avoid Java apps lol, I still don't like them much. Though I do use Eclipse, and I just use the standard Sun Java. And I still don't like the Windows installer and stuff for Java, at the very least I turn off automatic updates.

But I do Java server side development and I really like it for that.

[Azure]

Well to chime in here as someone who is just a consumer who likes to keep up with these things.

I use Adobe products. Acrobat is garbage, Dreamweaver is good, and photoshop is also good. I use Acrobat the most though, and I agree that it is bloated and ridiculous. I won't be buying it again.

And yet, I still side with them in this issue.

IMO, Apple has no problem with Adobe. The only reason they're 'banning' Flash is because they're competing with Android and the openness of the Android system. The more you push Apple, the more set in their ways and stubborn they become.

[sclitheroe]

3.3.1 -- Applications may only use Documented APIs in the manner prescribed by Apple and must not use or call any private APIs. Applications must be originally written in Objective-C, C, C++, or JavaScript as executed by the iPhone OS WebKit engine, and only code written in C, C++, and Objective-C may compile and directly link against the Documented APIs (e.g., Applications that link to Documented APIs through an intermediary translation or compatibility layer or tool are prohibited).



Soooo...it turns out that some alternative development platforms for the iPhone/Touch/iPad, such as Monotouch, should be able to skirt around this fairly easily. Monotouch in particular can already compile to a C + XCode project intermediate, which you then compile in XCode, submit to Apple, and away you go. Since it’s XCode that is doing the final compilation and linking against the API, there is no issue here.

It will be interesting to see how it plays out. Apple should really do themselves a favor and explain why the put this limitation in - I suspect its not just to spite or crush Adobe, there’s something else to it. There has to be, because Flash isn’t an attractive development environment on any other platform, and I fail to see how it could suddenly become compelling on the iPhone - it doesn’t make sense to look at this restriction solely as a means of foiling Adobe.

[BlackEleven]

Originally Posted by sclitheroe

3.3.1 -- Applications may only use Documented APIs in the manner prescribed by Apple and must not use or call any private APIs. Applications must be originally written in Objective-C, C, C++, or JavaScript as executed by the iPhone OS WebKit engine, and only code written in C, C++, and Objective-C may compile and directly link against the Documented APIs (e.g., Applications that link to Documented APIs through an intermediary translation or compatibility layer or tool are prohibited).



Soooo...it turns out that some alternative development platforms for the iPhone/Touch/iPad, such as Monotouch, should be able to skirt around this fairly easily. Monotouch in particular can already compile to a C + XCode project intermediate, which you then compile in XCode, submit to Apple, and away you go. Since it’s XCode that is doing the final compilation and linking against the API, there is no issue here.

It will be interesting to see how it plays out. Apple should really do themselves a favor and explain why the put this limitation in - I suspect its not just to spite or crush Adobe, there’s something else to it. There has to be, because Flash isn’t an attractive development environment on any other platform, and I fail to see how it could suddenly become compelling on the iPhone - it doesn’t make sense to look at this restriction solely as a means of foiling Adobe.

I like this twitter comment, personally:

Ultimately the language of Section 3.3.1 is perfectly designed to be leniently or severely enforced depending on how much Apple likes you.

http://twitter.com/danielpunkass/status/11883284437

ArsTechnia has a really great article on this subject. They spectulate that it may be to hurt Android as well. Specifically, by limiting developers ability to cross compile with tools such as Flash or Monotouch, they force developers to chose one platform or spend a lot more time developing for many platforms. And most, if forced to chose only one platform, will chose the biggest -- Apple. (btw, they disagree with you about Montouch being allowed. I've never used it so I won't comment on it personall).

http://arstechnica.com/apple/news/20...or-android.ars

[Yeah_Baby]

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___________________

My Head.

[BlackEleven]

Originally Posted by FanIn80

I just want to make clear, however, that I'm not in favour of just closing off 3rd-party IDEs for the sake of selling more Macs or something like that. While my understanding of the nuts and bolts of the issue is elementary at best, I am very much in favour of a closed OS because I've seen both sides of the fence.

On my Windows laptop, I am extremely picky about the applications I install. I even wipe my entire drive and reinstall everything from scratch to get rid of garbage apps that I see as being more harm than good.

On my Macs, I don't tend to worry about it too much. I know that (in my experience) 99% of the time an app that has been built and designed from the ground up to only work on a Mac isn't going to screw anything up if I test it out.

With that knowledge in hand, and because of the limited resources available on the iPhone, I really don't have a problem with Apple being picky about which apps can run on it. At the end of the day, the last place I want to dick around with crashing and performance issues is on my phone.

Apple, in this case, is being picky about the language you can write the program in, which has nothing to do with the the quality of the program. I've seen some brilliant Python code and I've seen some awful C++. Just because someone is forced to write something in objective-C or C++ does not guarantee any quality. In fact, I think it may hurt it in many cases.

Consider developers that are not used to any of the limited set of languages and now permitted and must switch over and work in a language their not as comfortable with. Do you think the quality of those apps will increase or decrease?

Also consider developers that use higher-level languages (like scripting languages) which in many cases can take care of the low-level details for the developer. Not only will these developers not have to do a lot more work if they want to abide be Apple's rules, they'll also be forced to write new code to replace what was already done (and known to work) for them before. Replacing known tested code with new code is not a great way to improve quality.

Forcing you to use a particular language doesn't have anything to do with a closed system or the limited resources of the phone. All it does is restrict your ability to select the right tool for the right job.

[BlackEleven]

Originally Posted by Yeah_Baby

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___________________

My Head.

To use a simple analogy:

Imagine your a home builder, and if you want to build a home in neighbourhood X. To do so you are required to follow certain stanards to ensure a nice look and a high standard of quality. I think that's a fairly reasonable expectation. However, imagine you are now only allowed to use a certain subset of tools to accomplish the task. No air guns or power tools are allowed, only manually powered tools can be used. You now make handmade houses which sounds great, but does it guarantee any better quality? Or may it hurt the quality in some cases?

Obviously this issue is not as cut and dried as that, but it's the best analogy I could come up with...

[FanIn80]

There's no comparison between a Mac app that was built on a Mac, using Apple technologies, vs one that was built on another platform and then just ported over to a Mac afterward.

[FanIn80]

Here's something interesting. I quoted a different portion of it yesterday, but I'd like to get some comments on this portion. I tend to agree with this assesment, but I'm getting a differing sense from reading the posts this thread.

(Again, from daringfireball.net)

Flash CS5 and MonoTouch aren’t so much cross-platform as meta-platforms. Adobe’s goal isn’t to help developers write iPhone apps. Adobe’s goal is to encourage developers to write Flash apps that run on the iPhone (and elsewhere) instead of writing iPhone-specific apps. Apple isn’t just ambivalent about Adobe’s goals in this regard — it is in Apple’s direct interest to thwart them.

So consider how this change affects the various parties involved:

APPLE: Good, they maintain complete control over native iPhone OS app development.

ADOBE AND OTHER PRODUCERS OF CROSS-DEVICE MOBILE META-PLATFORMS: Terrible, because they can’t target today’s leading mobile platform. And they’ve wasted a tremendous amount of effort creating tools to generate iPhone apps.

WEB DEVELOPERS: No change. The iPhone remains completely open to web apps. The difference between the web, as a competitor to native iPhone apps, from something like Flash is that the web is not controlled by anyone. There is no platform vendor for the web — and Apple has complete control over WebKit, its implementation for the web.

IPHONE DEVELOPERS: No change. If you’re a developer and you’ve been following Apple’s advice, you will never even notice this rule. You’re already using Xcode, Objective-C, and WebKit. If you’re an iPhone developer and you are not following Apple’s advice, you’re going to get screwed eventually. If you are constitutionally opposed to developing for a platform where you’re expected to follow the advice of the platform vendor, the iPhone OS is not the platform for you. It never was. It never will be.

(And, in one sense, this is good news for existing iPhone developers: their skill set is now in even greater demand.)

FLASH AND C# DEVELOPERS: Bad news, if you were hoping to target the App Store with your products. If you want to write iPhone OS software, follow Apple’s advice, not Adobe’s or Microsoft’s.

IPHONE USERS: I can see two arguments here. On the one side, this rule should be good for quality. Cross-platform software toolkits have never — ever — produced top-notch native apps for Apple platforms. Not for the classic Mac OS, not for Mac OS X, and not for iPhone OS. Such apps generally have been downright crummy. On the other hand, perhaps iPhone users will be missing out on good apps that would have been released if not for this rule, but won’t now. I don’t think iPhone OS users are going to miss the sort of apps these cross-platform toolkits produce, though.

My opinion is that iPhone users will be well-served by this rule. The App Store is not lacking for quantity of titles.

Consider, for one example, Amazon’s Kindle clients for iPhone OS and Mac OS X. The iPhone OS Kindle app is excellent, a worthy rival in terms of experience to Apple’s own iBooks. The Mac Kindle app is a turd that doesn’t look, feel, or behave like a real Mac app. The iPhone OS Kindle app is a native iPhone app, written in Cocoa Touch. The Mac Kindle app was produced using the cross-platform Qt toolkit.

[sclitheroe]

Originally Posted by BlackEleven

ArsTechnia has a really great article on this subject. They spectulate that it may be to hurt Android as well. Specifically, by limiting developers ability to cross compile with tools such as Flash or Monotouch, they force developers to chose one platform or spend a lot more time developing for many platforms. And most, if forced to chose only one platform, will chose the biggest -- Apple. (btw, they disagree with you about Montouch being allowed. I've never used it so I won't comment on it personall).

http://arstechnica.com/apple/news/20...or-android.ars

I think this is probably the most accurate assessment - they want the iPod apps to be first class, purely native apps - not a part of a cross platform collection.