321–330 of 522 posts
If Jobs had provided this type of specific detail before releasing 3.3.1, we could have saved ourselves lots of blogspam.
I love this. Apple clearly laid out their reasoning, using facts and persuasive argument. The world needs more of this. Obviously, there is some spin in the post, and I don't completely agree with 100% of it, but I love the level of discourse.
"Open" is irrelevant. Apple is certainly no more open than Adobe.
The Full Web - whatever. Don't support it in the browser, don't support browser plugins, fine. Safari on iPhone still crashes all the time.
Reliability, security, performance - these are all things that apply to native apps built for the App Store, so why are apps built with Flash excluded in particular?
Battery life - more irrelevance. I'm pretty sure that there are games on the App Store right now that will suck away your battery's life faster than most cross-compiled Flash games. Game loops are intrinsically always busy - they don't necessarily have a natural idle point like GUI event loops do, especially if they are running at less than their desired framerate.
Touch - this is an application quality issue. I don't see any difficulty in simply not approving apps that have awkward non-touch interfaces.
The last reason, it being another layer, is the most insidious. UI difference, performance, etc. are all irrelevant - games have weird UIs, drain battery, and poor performance is a quality issue. The truth is Apple doesn't want to be disintermediated. Apple wants developers to be strictly dependent on its tools and APIs, and not use anything between the app and the platform. This is particularly offensive to me as a software developer, and it's far worse than anything Microsoft has ever tried to pull. It's the reason why 3.3.1 is phrased the way it is, and it has nothing to do with Flash and everything to do with locking developers in.
As I see it, Flash on the web is used for three things: (1) video, (2) casual games and (3) ill-advised corporate intro screens.
I'd love to see video not needing flash, but it isn't, yet. Having a sand-boxed third-party FLV player, so that it didn't need to infect the Safari process, would be nice to have. I don't really see that approving such a process would be necessarily harder than approving any other native application on the App Store.
I'd love for (3) to disappear. I can't bear those things.
And it would be great if HTML5 was universally usable and performant enough to work for (2), but it isn't, yet. I know of many casual Flash games, though, that would work really nicely as apps, and Apple is hurting me personally by increasing the barriers preventing those apps on the web from being available on my device. This policy is both anti-consumer and anti-developer. Only in the short-term is it pro-Apple, but I hope and expect Apple will fade in the longer term in competition with Android.
This is where he loses me: "Though the operating system for the iPhone, iPod and iPad is proprietary, we strongly believe that all standards pertaining to the web should be open." Adobe can just as easily say: "Though Flash products are proprietary, we strongly believe that standards pertaining to what software is allowed to run on your computer should be open." It's doublespeak either way, and it's crazy to think th…
> [Jobs:] "we strongly believe that all standards pertaining to the web should be open." Consider Python. Is it a standard? Yes, because there's an open source reference implementation. Does it pertain to the web? Yes it does, because http clients and servers can be, and often are, written in this language, and its standard library and 3rd-party open source libraries support http and other web protocols such as HTML.…
Does it pertain to the web? It doesn't. Python isn't used 'on the web', it's used on the backend to generate web pages, as is C#, Erlang, and pretty much every other language ever. Are you suggesting that Apple should include a Python interpreter in WebKit? It sounds like that's what you're suggesting.
The simple answer would be 'because Python is not a language that is used in client-side scripting anywhere on the web'. No other browser supports it, and even if they did it wouldn't be widely used.
Your argument seems not only spurious but nonsensical. Python is used to send or receive documents over HTTP, so therefore I should be able to write a web app in Python to run on the iPhone? It doesn't make sense.
My home cable internet 'pertains to the web' too, and it uses documented standards like DOCSIS, so why doesn't my iPhone support DOCSIS? It's a ridiculous argument, as is yours.
This is where he loses me: "Though the operating system for the iPhone, iPod and iPad is proprietary, we strongly believe that all standards pertaining to the web should be open." Adobe can just as easily say: "Though Flash products are proprietary, we strongly believe that standards pertaining to what software is allowed to run on your computer should be open." It's doublespeak either way, and it's crazy to think th…
> [Jobs:] "we strongly believe that all standards pertaining to the web should be open." Consider Python. Is it a standard? Yes, because there's an open source reference implementation. Does it pertain to the web? Yes it does, because http clients and servers can be, and often are, written in this language, and its standard library and 3rd-party open source libraries support http and other web protocols such as HTML.…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It is true that some of these links are from evangelists. But we're not saying Steve Jobs is neutral are we? Battery Life: It's a bit of hyperbole. We don't watch videos on the iPhone for 10 hours. Would it matter if Flash could play videos for 11 hours? It is a misdirection or a sidestep of an original claim that Flash would kill the iPhone inside of 2 hours. Touch/Scroll: Another sidestep. A Flash issue? With that…
Battery Life: It's a bit of hyperbole. We don't watch videos on the iPhone for 10 hours. Would it matter if Flash could play videos for 11 hours? It is a misdirection or a sidestep of an original claim that Flash would kill the iPhone inside of 2 hours. If a phone can watch 4 1/2 hours of flash in software before the battery is drained this means that watching a two hour movie will eat half of my battery. By comparis…
In both cases, he's talking about H.264. An end user might not even realize there's a difference. But some encoders produce H.264 that can hardware decode, and some encoders do not. Not all H.264 is created equal, and this is one area that really matters.
You want an H.264 encoder that produces hardware decoder compatible video.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Point 1 is talking about websites / web applications. Point 5 is talking about native apps. Two different domains entirely. With point 1, if developers are going to make a website, and they ditch flash, their work would work everywhere well (iPhone/iPad/iPod, Android, WebOS, Symbian, and Blackberry OS 6, as well as on the desktop). They wouldn't be limited to the platforms Adobe decides to support (or decides to supp…
I do understand your point about using the right tool for the right job, however Apple is arguing both sides. Either cross platform standards are a good thing, or platform specific features are a good thing. While web applications and native applications are different domains, they are not different enough to mean different reasoning can be used. An end user doesn't really care if something is built using HTML5, flas…
Remember, this is not an essay about why everyone else should support Apple's actions. It is an essay about why Apple thinks its actions are good for it.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't disagree that Flash has the potential to create issues. The argument just suffers from the fallacy of composition. The standoff motif is getting old. We're talking about software, not cold war against another country. Apple doesn't want you to notice Steve behind the curtain. With Adobe we tend to pick and choose what we agree with and ignore the points that don't support our bias.
In what way is saying "Flash has problems, therefore putting Flash on your platform will expose it to those problems" a fallacy of composition? I don't see it at all. It's not wrongly attributing an attribute of one small part of Flash to the whole. Or are you saying the fallacy is somewhere else?
He just claimed Apple created WebKit, noted it's being used everywhere, and gave no nod whatsoever to the KDE team. Classy, Jobs, classy.
"For example, Apple began with a small open source project and created WebKit, a complete open-source HTML5 rendering engine that is the heart of the Safari web browser used in all our products." He only failed to mention KHTML by name. He most certainly did not claim that they made WebKit on their own.
But failing to mention KHTML by name is an act, indeed.
Reminds me another masterpiece by Microsoft: "Java is a programming language proposed by the JavaSoft company", or something like that.
What he describes as the "most important reason" is also the big mistake here. If using certain libraries or cross-platform development tools truly did result in worse apps, then the market would take care of that. He also doesn't seem to understand that such tools do not all totally hide the underlying APIs. They fall along a continuum in that respect. And in trying to ban extreme cases like Flash, Apple has also ba…
I do think it is reasonably evil, but I'll be very surprised if, say, Apple enforces this against somebody writing software in a lisp, or all the games using Lua or Unity. But saying literally "You can't write software in Flash" makes for somewhat questionable legal language.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> H264 is not open. There are multiple implementations and Apple can tweak how it runs. It is open enough for their purposes. > Objective+C++ is not open. He never said it was. He said Apple has several proprietary products but believed the web should be open. > Flash (SWF) has a fully published spec and anyone can write tools to create, or play, SWF content, without royalties, or without having to respond to any ent…
> It is open enough for their purposes. Ok great, so Flash is also "open enough": fully published specs, anyone is allowed to use the format (creating, playing) without royalties. SWF is more open than h264. > He never said it was True. But if he wants to make this conversation an open-versus-closed conversation, I fully expect to compare the platforms in general instead of just a tiny bit of it. > There was spin in…
This is clearly not true, though. The only implementation is closed and fully controlled by Adobe. Maybe it is more open in spirit but that doesn't mean crap in practical terms. In fact Silverlight is more open (in practical terms) than flash since at least there is a usable open source project. There exists right now a full featured and heavily developed open source h.264 decoder. You can't say the same for Flash. It is either Adobe Flash or spend a bazillion dollars trying to re-implement open flash that doesn't exist yet Flash. That's a non-starter.