Adobe's iPhone Hail Mary 115
snydeq writes "Fatal Exception's Neil McAllister questions whether the move to port Flash to the iPhone isn't a last-ditch effort on Adobe's part to remain relevant in the quickly evolving smartphone market. By allowing developers to compile existing Flash apps into native binaries, Adobe believes it has found a way around Apple's requirements that no non-Apple API interpreted code may be downloaded and used in an app, a clause that has also prevented Sun from porting JVM to the iPhone. The resulting apps will be completely stand-alone, with no runtimes and no Flash Player required — if Apple lets Adobe get away with it, no small feat given how protective Apple has been about its app market. But as much as Apple has at stake here, Adobe may actually have more, McAllister writes. 'Already the idea of using Web languages and tools to build smartphone applications is taking hold. Palm has built an entire smartphone platform around the idea. Apple supports the use of Web technologies like AJAX to build applications based on the iPhone's Safari browser. And developers will soon even be able to build Web-based applications for BlackBerry handsets, thanks to a new SDK from Research in Motion. As late to the game as it is, what Adobe needs now is to convince developers that Flash is better than the other options — and that could be a tough sell.'"
PHP for mobile phones (Score:3, Interesting)
Flash might be great for action games, but I'd really like to see support for PHP in some mobile phone. There's already PHP-GTK [php.net] and several other frameworks that let you do it in Windows/Linux. Powerful, and still easily learned and used language would make wonders in mobile development (man does Symbian C++ suck) and because PHP has so many functions and api's build-in, it would be easy to program lots of things quickly for your phone.
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While PHP was originally developed to be a server-side scripting language to generate dynamic websites, it's really capable to work in CLI and even in GUI applications. I do most of my server scripts with it instead of bash or the other popular ones, just because it's a lot more readable and quicker language to work with.
So, you might want to tell me why would I be joking? The only problem currently is that there's no support for multiple processes in PHP and you have to use hacks and forking to accomplish
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No, you do all of your scripts with PHP because you're too fucking stupid or ignorant to learn a proper language like Perl, Python or Ruby.
Says the one who's too fucking stupid or ignorant to learn a proper language like C or Assembly.
Once you've moved on as a developer, and learned some decent languages, you'd see how much of a fetal abortion PHP is. It's literally a stillborn programming language.
So what? If he's quicker with it, who are you to decide he shouldn't use it? You already established you don't care about performance.
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Can't someone please berate me for developing web apps in ASP Classic. I know that my clients are happy because I always deliver the features they want on time and on budget and my apps always pass website security audits and are very stable and all but surely there must be someone out there who can tell me how wrong I am for using it.
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People like you are why I read at -1
LMFAO
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You really have alot of bile towards PHP. Why, if so many people are using it, and continue to use it, do you think it's a bad language? You have yet to say *why* it is a bad language, all you've spouted some blue language and shown us your vitriol.
As for Crayons. Alot of nice art can be done with crayons, if they're in the hands of someone competent.
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You might find the following link more informative than the vitriol of the parent as I think it explains the bafflement that some developers with experience of a few other, saner, languages feel when they encounter PHP:
http://www.ukuug.org/events/linux2002/papers/html/php/index.html [ukuug.org]
The trouble with PHP is really that it has outgrown its origins (a very simple templating language, for simple web pages), and yet has not been adapting fast enough to the new uses it is being put to. It still has a lot of legacy
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It's a great pity you didn't get modded up and that the parent with his bitterness and hatred managed to sidetrack the conversation. PHP is indeed good for small adhoc projects, butneeds careful use for larger ones. People complain all the time about almost every language, but I've found those with a design goal behind them, such as Java and Python, tend to cause less problems with the language itself during development. The languages that have accumulated too much cruft, and I include Bash and Perl along w
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I think someone needs a hug
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And a blanket and cup of hot cocoa.
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A large portion of PHP's library is just a thin PHP wrapper around C libraries. If you just port PHP to an embedded platform, you won't get most of the library without a lot of extra work.
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So, you might want to tell me why would I be joking?
Because PHP is an awful, awful, mess of a language, in fact it's more like a framework + language, but anyway. Just because you could use it to make a GUI application, doesn't make it close to the right tool for the job.
Do yourself a favour and look into other scripting languages, like perl, ruby or python - you would at least learn why people complain about PHP.
I always wish other languages would have such by default
Taking the iPhone as an example, C, Obj-C and C++ all have extensive libraries, and many actual application frameworks available for free, which co
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Re:PHP for mobile phones (Score:5, Informative)
Can you cite an actual example of something wrong with it?
Sure. I've used it, and it gets the job done, but I didn't much like it compared to the many other options - trying to force development of a GUI application into PHP is my idea of a nightmare, and comparing it to C and saying that it has far more libraries is laughable, considering that most PHP additions (image manipulation for example) are just wrappers around C based tools. My object to PHP is not that it is impossible to use, it's that it's messy and not very well thought out in many regards. It's quick and dirty, with the emphasis on the dirty.
A few problems with PHP off the top of my head:
There is no clean separation of logic and view (or MVC if you prefer that split) - the language itself encourages mixing code and presentation, often with horrendous results. You can work against this, but you're always going against the flow - see the many examples of PHP CMS etc for great examples of this kind of mistake in action. They work, but only just, and the internals are often very messy.
The naming conventions for the API are all over the map - any language that has functions named stuff like mysql_real_escape_string, as opposed to the still extant mysql_escape_string, has obvious problems with design philosophy. Maybe next year they'll come out with mysql_really_escape_the_string_this_time? It is very difficult to guess function names because there are no clear conventions, and the whole thing has grown organically to a huge bundle of disparate functions, some of which definitely do not belong in a language and should be broken out into modules or put into objects like strings. Stuff like eregi_replace, str_ireplace and str_replace is needlessly confusing because the naming conventions are inconsistent and cryptic.
Strings and arrays are not proper objects, so you have to use a mix of procedural and oo code everywhere - it'd be nice to be able to call methods on strings and chain stuff like Ruby. The object model was also weirdly broken till PHP5 and is really bolted on.
Doesn't have closures (just added to C/Obj-C by Apple).
Unicode strings are still not properly supported.
The syntax inherits everything which is bad about perl (it's quite possible to write very difficult to read code), and doesn't improve on it one iota.
I'm sure I could do a search and turn up a few more issues, but it generally just feels ungainly compared to any other language I've used (Ruby, Objective-C, C, Python). I think the author of the above comment saying everything could be done better in PHP really should explore other languages before dismissing them as somehow lacking, and understand that different languages have different strengths, and learning to use other languages could teach them something about how to write good code in PHP.
Having worked with it, PHP doesn't strike me as a very good language by most metrics, and it certainly is not more complete than the many other options in any arena. There is simply no comparison in my opinion with a properly structured API like cocoa for GUI apps.
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To Serious Callers Only:
We should all agree to disagree (i.e. everyone is allowed their opinion) but I just want to thank you for taking the time to write out your thoughts in a civil, intelligent way.
You don't get this very often on the internet and this is only the second time I've written on Slashdot since I've been visiting starting in 2003.
Great to read :)
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Don't forget the archaic parsing system that requires all variables, even those in script assignments and function parameters, to be prefixed with dollar signs. Looking at a PHP script makes me feel like I'm back in the '70s writing BASIC programs. ($A=$B vs A$=B$)
Or PHP object methods ignoring the standard dot reference convention in favor of C's pointer convention. ( obj.function() vs $obj->function() )
I know I just love typing three special characters for each and every method reference when one would
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PHP's biggest advantage is the documentation, which is easily the best out there (well written Javadoc style + examples + comments). It's biggest problem is that you NEED the documentation. Constantly.
Also, in PHP classes, you HAVE to use $this everytime. So if you have public $foo in a class, it's always going to be $this->foo, which
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"It's one extra letter and makes it much easier to read the code sometimes..."
It's one extra letter each and every single friggin' time you want to type a variable name.
Most every development environment on the planet already colorizes variable names and function names anyway.
Look at the following function, for example.
function IDDF_search($array, $var, $depth=100)
{
for($i=0; $i$depth; $i++)
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echo "Customer Name: $customer_name\nAddress: $st_address $city, $state\nOrder: $order_info";
is much better than:
echo "Customer Name: " . customer_name . "\nAddress: " . st_address . " " . city . " " . state . "\nOrder: " . order_info;
$var isn't bad at all compared to ".var." when writing a string (and I'm guessing more than 6% of my php code is writing strings like this).
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"$var isn't bad at all compared to ".var.""
So? Try #var# or %var%
Which also makes for easy subtitution of functions inline, as in #now()#
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Objective C
NSLog(@"Customer name %s\nAddress %s %s\nOrder :%s\n", customerName , streetAddress , city , state , orderInfo );
Normal C is pretty similar more or less.
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The real problem here is that PHP was designed to be embedded in a static web page as an 'escaped sequence.' to create dynamic html. It has evolved from that into a horrendous mess that some seem to think is a viable, general purpose scripting language.
Tying it back to a real(?) world analogy: Flat bladed screwdrivers make nice pry-bars, scrapers, and even phillips-head drivers in a pinch... but this is generally considered a bad idea: You are more likely to damage yourself, the work piece or the screwd
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A few problems with PHP off the top of my head:
There is no clean separation of logic and view (or MVC if you prefer that split) - the language itself encourages mixing code and presentation,
And how would a language discourage mixing code and presentation? You've got frameworks and language confused. Cake is ok MVC.
The naming conventions for the API are all over the map - any language that has functions named stuff like mysql_real_escape_string, as opposed to the still extant mysql_escape_string, has obvious problems with design philosophy. Maybe next year they'll come out with mysql_really_escape_the_string_this_time?
Yeah this is a good rant.
Strings and arrays are not proper objects, so you have to use a mix of procedural and oo code everywhere
Yeah, another good point. Doesn't exactly encourage the use of objects when manipulating your primitives reverts back to procedural.
- it'd be nice to be able to call methods on strings and chain stuff like Ruby.
Could not disagree more. Chaining is evil. Hard to debug and hard to read. Good programmers do NOT chain.
Doesn't have closures (just added to C/Obj-C by Apple).
Gahh. Neither does Java,C++ and lots of other decent languages. Closures are cool but only convenient in dynamic
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No actually, I don't. I've never had occasion to use it.
Ah, that explains your question. If you had used it, and have used other languages, I honestly don't think you would have to ask.
It's worth a look just to see what happens when a language grows rather than being designed.
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I've made a good living building and maintaining php-gtk apps for Windows/OSX. However, I've never seen GTK bindinngs for mobile anything, and porting over PHP-GTK apps to mobile platforms is at the point a non-starter.
I would be looking at this very seriously - at this point I've pretty much decided to move everything (eventually) to HTML/javascript because of its cross-platform capability even if it sometimes makes me want to gouge my eyes out with a toothpick.
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Apple has made it pretty clear in the TOS for developers that embedding scripting languages into an app is going to get a rejection. If you want to play in their sandbox, you don't get to port general purpose script languages to the platform.
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Flash might be great for action games, but I'd really like to see support for PHP in some mobile phone. There's already PHP-GTK [php.net] and several other frameworks that let you do it in Windows/Linux. Powerful, and still easily learned and used language would make wonders in mobile development (man does Symbian C++ suck) and because PHP has so many functions and api's build-in, it would be easy to program lots of things quickly for your phone.
There are many problems with PHP in the scenario you describe (and many others):
1. The existing implementation is very slow. Heck, it's slower than Ruby, much less Python or Perl! On the web, this can be kinda-fixed by caching, but for a desktop application there's no such dirty tricks available.
2. Its "many built-in functions and APIs" are an extremely inconsistent mess. Part of it is to blame for the lack of namespaces until recently. Another part is for the fact that most APIs are really, really old, and
That's a silly conclusion (Score:5, Insightful)
It's not a "last ditch effort" to remain relevant. It's just Adobe continuing the tradition of ubiquity of their platform. Apple won't let them put a runtime on the phone, so they'll deploy native code instead.
Sorry, but there's a big difference between an AJAX app and a native app. Try writing a browser based graphical game on the iPhone; it's going to fall on its face pretty quickly.
Hmm, convince developers to learn a whole new SDK for a single platform, when they can stick with a mature language and toolset they already know, deploy it in the browser, on the desktop (via Air), and on basically every phone on the planet that can run custom apps, including the BlackBerry?
Sorry, this whole article is bunk. Adobe isn't struggling with relevance, they're just making sure it doesn't start to slip, as Apple is so strongly trying to make it. In fact, this probably backfired on Apple a bit - Flash apps running as a native binary will probably have access to device functions which the normal Flash runtime wouldn't have.
I'm guessing this sale has already been made. A lot of developers like working in Flash. Actionscript is a surprisingly elegant language. Based on the number of Flash apps which already turn up all over the web, a whole new segment of developers are seeing this as access to a development platform which was previously closed to them.
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Certainly, this is true, but that doesn't mean the technologies of an AJAX app can't be used to develop an app on a native platform. Appcelerator's Titanium [appcelerator.com] is a platform that specifically compiles down javascript, css, and html into an application that can run on the Android or the IPhone, with promises for more platforms on the way. I actually found that to be a glaring omissio
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Javascript is an OK language, but it doesn't really have anything ActionScript doesn't have. They're both based on ECMA Script, so the syntax is similar. They both have event systems.
ActionScript has strong typing as an option (though you can elect to go with weak typing if you wish), implicit getters and setters for properties (eg, function get foo():String { return this._foo; } function set foo(newFoo:String):void { if (newFoo != 'bar') this._foo = newFoo; }) which allow you to start adding data validat
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Adobe TV (Score:2)
Adobe shipped "Adobe Media Player" on Air platform and they recently converted it to "Adobe TV" which gives free videos/TV shows to Developers, designers and so on. I just checked and it has some Actionscript stuff.
As Adobe Air is available for all OS, better check it out http://www.adobe.com/products/mediaplayer/ [adobe.com]
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Yeah, there's no PM system here. I'm sorry to say I don't have any dead tree books to offer advice on. I learned ActionScript in the 1.0 days and have advanced my knowledge each time the language advances mostly through either in-program Help files or online documentation.
Today I'm working on connections to and passing data around in Flash Media Server. I'm working my way through examples in the documentation that comes with Flash Media Server, and Googling for more details on specific methods and their
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On a side note, not sure why my parent post got marked as Troll; I'm guessing someone has a beef with the politically based comments I posted yesterday in a different thread, and is trying to punish me here.
Nah, more likely it's because Adobe is a company that it's currently fashionable to bash in the open-source community, and on Slashdot in particular.
And it's *definitely* unfashionable to say good things about Flash -- heavens, it's not open source!
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In fewer words, all Adobe is doing is greatly reducing the bar for 'developers' to put even more crap on far more devices. No frikkin' thanks.
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I'm sorry, but based on the quality of quite a few offerings currently on Apple's app store, I don't see how it could get any worse.
As for lowering the bar... sure, if it were by me, I'd made a requirement for all code to be written in assembly but I don't see how it's Adobe's fault for creating a platform fun to develop on.
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Indeed. Whilst Flash and Java may have some drawbacks, the advantage of cross-platform applications is huge. With desktop computing, we had to go through the painful ordeal in the 80s and 90s where every platform were incompatible, making it a pain both for developers and users. Finally we've got to a stage where most platforms run the same code - but only due to having a monopoly platform of Windows, running on only Intel CPUs or clones; not because of any standardisation (well, PC hardware is now standard
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I think part of the appeal of the iPhone to developers (not me, I don't like the iPhone personally) besides the large market, is that when you develop an app, it looks exactly the same on every iPhone. You don't have to worry about screen size or hardware capabilities. There's some divergence now since the iPhone 3GS is considerably faster than the older iPhones, but it's not nearly as big a difference as other phones.
Android has a similar problem to the old JavaME model. You have to design for the lowest c
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The whole premise of the article is bullshit too. The article seems to be suggesting that apple are trying to restrict the APIs you write apps with, what they're actually trying to do is to stop you downloading random malicious code and running it, without it going through their checks.
I'm pretty sure apple will be rather happy about the fact that now *even more* developers can write apps for the iPhone.
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Try writing a browser based graphical game on the iPhone; it's going to fall on its face pretty quickly.
I'm wondering if HTML5 SVG support is going to change that? Also, I'm wondering if HTML5 is going to have a stripped down version of HTML5 on mobile phones (just like Adobe has Flash Lite -- a stripped down & older version of Flash to put on mobile phones)?
One thing that Flash does have is excellent video-codec support... I'm sure that this isn't about to change soon, but even there I'm wondering, some of the browsers-makers have been hard at work trying to build better video support directly into thei
Question for iPhone devs (Score:2)
I've got a question that I haven't seen raised yet, maybe I've just missed it.
The company I work for produces online training courses, usually written using Flash. We've delivered some of our courses in the past for use on PDA devices.
If one of our customers asks for their course to be delivered to the iPhone, what are our options? Is the only way to get one of these loaded to post it in the app store? Would it be possible to load a Flash course like this onto an out-of-the-box iPhone without making the
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You're wandering out of my area of expertise, but the way I understand it, if it's a corporate deployment, it's possible to have an internal corporate app store, and I think it's even possible to push apps to phones (so they'll have an icon on their springboard for the training without having to go explicitly install it).
If you're talking about a public deployment, then you could push your app through the App Store like any other.
With Flash, you should be able to have it load training materials from an Inte
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Sorry, this is hyperbole. Lots of decent (though not immersive) games written for iPhone in-browser use before the iPhone SDK came out; During that time I had my iPhone2G, my sister would often play these web games and said there were better than anything on her blackberry phone as far as gaming went.
And that was back in 2007 befo
They'll lose to Gnash (Score:2)
Adobe has to scramble now because otherwise the gadget makers will invest in GNU gnash [gnu.org].
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A Flash animation writer wouldn't be far off (Score:2)
And if when we have software to play the format, do you think it will be long before we have software to write it?
Oh, but free software will never have a desktop, ah.. graphical web broswer, ah.. office suite, ah.. Flash player, ah... Flash writer. Yeh, that's the application that progress will never reach.
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Re:A Flash animation writer wouldn't be far off (Score:5, Insightful)
The Flash specification has been open for people writing authoring tools, but not people writing players, for over ten years. There are a few other flash authoring tools besides the Adobe ones. Hardly anyone uses them, because Macromedia / Adobe Flash is much better, and for most Flash developers / artists it doesn't cost much in terms of hourly rate (and can be offset against income for tax purposes anyway).
Flash is in the same sort of market as Photoshop. The GIMP does more than the average user needs, but it doesn't do what the person willing to pay $500-1000 for a piece of software needs. There will almost certainly be open source things for creating flash apps (there are a few things that output flash already), but none are in the market where Adobe is and wants to be.
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Just to let you know, I recently became aware of Silex [silex-ria.org], a competitor to Adobe's Flash creation suite. It appears to have recently gone from commercial license to Open Source. I'm not a Flash developer, no have no idea how good it is. Anyone?
Gnash is a joke compared to Flash 10.1 (Score:2)
I have, had to use Gnash on PPC Linux, on a very high end PPC G5 (quad G5) with 4+ GB of RAM. In fact, that was when I lost my hope about PPC/Linux. That Linux distro I used was entirely designed for PPC/Apple for almost a decade so I can't really claim it was badly packaged etc.
Are you serious that Gnash is/can be an alternative to Flash? Ever used/experienced Flash Lite 3 on a high end ARM Symbian phone such as N95, new N97?
It's about the tools (Score:5, Interesting)
The flash player is a nice Smalltalk VM with a PostScript-like vector drawing model. It's a (very nice) incremental evolution of the Smalltalk 80 system. The Flash authoring app, however, is one of the best rapid application development tools on the market today. You can do everything that Flash can do with JavaScript, the canvas tag, and SVG, but there aren't (yet) any development tools that are anywhere near as nice as Flash for this environment.
Adobe doesn't make much money from the Flash player; they give away the desktop one and sell the mobile one to OEMs quite cheaply. In contrast, they charge $700 for a license for the developer tools. A lot of money, but not much in comparison to the cost of the person using them.
In the long term, the flash player will probably go away. They've already made some first steps towards this, donating the ActionScript VM to the Mozilla project, and producing things like AIR which let you run Flash apps as stand-alone binaries. I wouldn't be surprised if future versions of the Adobe Flash can target HTML5 as well as the Flash plugin, and eventually just HTML6 or a native environment.
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Not only that, but based on some demos from Adobe MAX, the next version of Dreamweaver will support the canvas tag while Illustrator (and most likely Flash) will be able to output to SVG, so you'll be able to use their tools to create HTML5 content.
They don't care what you prefer, as long as you're using their tools to del
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Illustrator has supported SVG for years. Adobe was one of the main companies behind SVGs creation. They completely dropped it when they bought Macromedia.
SVG was infact, Adobe's plan to compete with Macromedia until they purchased them.
Since then, Adobe has made it VERY clear they have no intention of supporting web standards, everything they do for the web is a proprietary version of an open standard. I don't think adobe did any of it first, unless you include postscript and pdf.
They do care what you pr
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Adobe has made it VERY clear they have no intention of supporting web standards
[citation needed]
Dreamweaver, Fireworks, Photoshop... all about as web-standard-supporting as it gets.
Flash's ActionScript3 was spec'ed to an early draft of the (sadly torpedoed) EcmaScript4 spec.
SVG not that bad (Score:2)
Finally, SVG support in browsers sucks complete ass. ... Add animation or interactivity too it and you are in for a freaking world of pain.
Eh, it's not that bad for interactivity. Simple things like the FindTheCountry [myopera.com] interactive geography quiz done entirely in one SVG file, and interactive map layers [carto.net] work in all good (non-IE) browsers. Animation through SMIL support seems pretty limited, but nowadays people are more likely to modify the SVG directly using DOM calls.
The <canvas> tag gets all the
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Phew. (Score:1)
I was really struggling getting my head round the iPhone Dev Kit.
In a fraction of the time, I have learnt Actioscript 3.0 and have workable code up and running. It is SO much easier.
I, for one, can't wait for CS5 now.
A.
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I still hate flash, but picked up the iPhone sdk very quickly.
Of course, this is not the point, the fact is that there is now an extra way to produce apps for the iPhone, which is a good thing.
Of course, someone dissected the app, and it is a horrible binary. But that can be improved.
Wrong audience (Score:2)
Are we seeing same app store? (Score:2)
I got a iPod touch for free and let me tell you, Objective C and Cocoa requirement doesn't stop people from releasing crap anyway.
I was wondering why there are so many iPhone app review sites, catalogs while I didn't have the device. Now I understand, it is worse than J2ME in signal to crap ratio, that is why you need some people to hunt down good stuff for you.
I don't see why Apple would... (Score:2)
techinically have a problem with this. As far as I understand the reason apple does n't allow virtual machines is because it allows a "back door" allowing you to potentially bypass the App store by loading new programs into the VM and there is no possibility of that with this as there is no VM. The only other issue is that these were not directly developed with the Apple SDK in ObjectiveC.
As a move by Adobe I think is actually a very, very good idea and would be even better if they created options for Sym
Article completely misses point. (Score:4, Insightful)
"A tough sell." Really? Lets see. Write the same app for 4 different phones, then one for general web, or write it once with flash via a great toolset.
Not noted above is Adobe's announcement that flash 10.1 will be out in a few short months. The speed improvements and memory management are astonishing. Also most if not all smart phone OS will be using it except iphone. They demo'd watching movie trailers, playing games and video conferencing directly from android and existing web sites. Being able to save down to iphone app is great, and lowers barrier to entry (who wants to do objective C?) but the larger topic is how iphone was leader of pack and is about to get outpaced by Android (as per many reports predict). Hell even RIM is getting on the flash bandwagon.
The holy grail is for us to not have to worry about what the damn phone is. Instead we can write great apps and they can be used anywhere the screensize makes sense. Computers (in browser and desktop app), phones, set top boxes for TV's, netbooks, appliances, etc. This is what Flash is about to let us do. Theoretically anyway.
And no HTML5 can't do everything Flash can do YET. Least not write once and run on many OS, platforms and browsers. HTML5 will be great when it is a viable option no doubt, but it isn't. Not yet and not in the next few years due to fighting amongst the browser decision makers.
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One must add that people calling themselves a "pro" or "advanced" developer must install Adobe Air to their OS (all supported) and run some non trivial application such as the stuff Adobe advertises. No worries, it is easily uninstalled later.
While trialing those apps, they should imagine what if the same application can ship for anything, down to TV set top boxes with couple of tweaks and the time people asking for a lite version of their game, app on their smart devices.
It is just some small download I ta
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Call me when this becomes reality. I heard the same swooning over Android over it's mediocre release. And the Zune for years.
analysis of a Flash app (Score:2, Informative)
Adobe is claiming that a few apps already on the store were built this way. Here's a guy that disassembled one of these apps and did a writeup:
http://devwhy.blogspot.com/2009/10/flash-on-iphone.html
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Adobe can bite back real bad (Score:1, Funny)
Recently, Mono was ported to Apple iPhone claiming to carry Apple requirements. That is "almost" .NET for iPhone, a framework which has nothing to do with Cocoa and if you ask me, it is the perfect trojan of MS for iPhone.
http://www.mono-project.com/Mono:Iphone [mono-project.com]
If Apple says "but this is workaround", they will simply show dozens of .NET apps ported via Mono. Also Novell has a little to harm Apple on Pro Desktop but Adobe can do real evil things without Apple able to do anything against it. They can say "We h
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Re:Adobe can bite back real bad (Score:4, Funny)
Yeah agreed. If I were going to make a markov chain from slashdot articles about iphones, flash, and mono, I'm pretty sure the output would be quite like the GPs post.
It'd probably get modded up too because it'd hit all the key words to trigger the brainless mods who just scan for phrases that they like.
Performance of flash (Score:1)
Any decient game engine should be using the GPU by default, but it seems that Flash for iPhone has some sort of problem with that:
http://labs.adobe.com/wiki/index.php/Applications_for_iPhone#Can_applications_take_advantage_of_hardware_acceleration.3F [adobe.com]
"Can applications take advantage of hardware acceleration?
Yes. In some cases, the rendering of Flash content will be hardware accelerated.
We will publish more information on this when we release the public beta. "
"In some cases"?
There shouldn't even be any discu
Still wondering (Score:2)
Why does Adobe have to stay "relevant" in the iPhone market?
Apple should worry more (Score:2)
last-ditch effort on Adobe's part to remain relevant in the quickly evolving smartphone market.
The real question is how long Apple will remain relevant in the quickly evolving smartphone market, given how its "smarts" are limited by Apple's controls.
Re: (Score:2)
Sadly, they are achieving ever greater relevance.
While consumer demand can sometimes drive great things (consumer demand for porn brought us the cheap vcr)it can also be a very reckless driver.
Apple fanbois will always exist, just as will the carbon copy "alternative" crowd.
The larger danger is Apple becoming the defacto smart phone standard, while dragging it abusive business practices along.
I don't really blame Apple - just like MS they're just a squirrel trying to get their nut.
I blame the other smart ph
Re: (Score:2)
I don't see Apple becoming the de-facto smartphone standard; I think they're going to remain stuck in the single digits worldwide. Not only is the iPhone hugely expensive, it has too many limitations: no keyboard, proprietary protocols and lack of interoperability, limited software offerings, no interchangeable batteries, non-standard connectors, etc.
Re: (Score:2)
I don't see Apple becoming the de-facto smartphone standard; I think they're going to remain stuck in the single digits worldwide.
Hummm.... 14% of the worldwide market share and 23% in the US [businessinsider.com] is not single digits....
Perhaps you are thinking about the overall cellphone market share? In that case it is certainly in the single digits.
Apple is already "letting them get away with it" (Score:2)
There are already compiled-from-Flash iPhone OS apps available in the app store. Apple has a deserved reputation for being hyper-controlling in many areas around the iPhone, but this isn't one of them. They don't care about the history of your code, as long as the final compiled version meets the iPhone requirements. Flash isn't the only language that's been ported, either -- there are tools that will turn your Java and .Net code into iPhone apps as well.
Of course, the ported apps tend to suck, because th
They will allow it (Score:1)
if Apple lets Adobe get away with it, no small feat given how protective Apple has been about its app market.
There are already application made in Flash in the app store(list [adobe.com])
How about some efficiency here instead? (Score:2)
Let's face it, Macromedia's (Director, Flash, etc.) products have always been clunky and inefficient. Even on the desktop platforms, it takes a lot of processor power. The Flash plug-in can be pretty flaky, I think it's the cause of most of the browser crashes I experience. Usually scroll boxes implemented in flash don't recognize the mouse scroll wheel.
Web aps (Score:2)
What about embedded Flash n HTML? (Score:2)
I can't see how this would solve much. Sure, you could easily port Flash Apps to the iphone, but I don't think this addresses Flash that's embedded in web pages. For example, I've built several websites that have embedded flash. There's no way I'm going to go to all of the trouble to make an iPhone-compatible website which presumably would involve compiling flash for the iphone and editing the HTML.
Even still, it seems improbable that there'd be a mechanism to execute iphone apps imbedded in web pages.
Misunderstanding of terms (Score:3, Informative)
There's a major misinterpretation of the situation regarding interpreted languages on the iPhone. Apple has absolutely no qualms about interpreted languages used on the device. In fact, a huge number of games are built around lua-based game libraries. It's a no-brainer! All you have to do is ensure a user can't add and execute arbitrary scripts by way of downloading them later.
The issue here is getting the right balance to make it through the review process. See, your game could allow for added levels for free down the road, a totally acceptable (and relatively common) occurrence. It's entirely okay if those levels are composed by your scripting language. What isn't okay is if the game will execute arbitrary scripting, to essentially distribute a target platform as an app. That's about where the line is drawn. This could be seen with the final result of the commodore 64 emulator app. They couldn't enable basic but they can allow for delivery of additional games, which are obviously interpreted. A developer might choose to use an encryption scheme or signing scheme to ensure they only execute gamescripts that should be, for example.
This relates to flash because there's nothing stopping adobe from porting the flash engine and making it possible to export individual iPhone apps that include it and execute some flash game that is packaged in with the app so long as that game can't randomly pull in more flash to execute. Of course, if you could compile the entire flash application to native code that would be more ideal in the general case assuming you have no consistency of execution problems. But that's not always the best idea. Take java, for example. Its design causes a complete native compilation effort to result in worse performance and lower reliability because the runtime optimization of the JVM is more effective than static code optimizations.
Anyway, I guess my point is that the limitations about virtual machines and script languages aren't quite what is popularly regurgitated. The issues with the iPhone and these technologies is one of post-app-install delivery of arbitrary code execution. It's not a problem with the use of VM/Script itself.
Re: (Score:2)
Take java, for example. Its design causes a complete native compilation effort to result in worse performance and lower reliability because the runtime optimization of the JVM is more effective than static code optimizations.
Can you give any examples of specific Java features that cause worse performance in AOT compilation compared to JIT?
Note: please don't explain how HotSpot works, I know that already. But all optimizations it applies, like escape analysis, are equally applicable to virtually any other statically typed imperative language out there, so claiming that Java the language is somehow designed for JIT, and would work slower with AOT, is, IMO, rather disingenuous.
iPhone is old (Score:2)
You know, the iPhone is old stuff. The new phones with Android and especially Maemo will soon surpass it in usability and features. The Maemo browser is something terrific: Mozilla-based, and just as functional as a desktop browser. check out this impressive demo [youtube.com]. BTW, I'm not in any way affiliated with Nokia. I'm just very enthousiastic about the Nokia N900. Finally something that blows the iPhone away!
If Apple lets Adobe get away with it? (Score:2)
There are already apps available for purchase or download from the App Store that hae been made with this technology:
The applications are: Digg Pics, South Park Avatar Creator [apple.com], Chroma Circuit [apple.com], Just Letters [apple.com], Trading Stuff [apple.com], Red Hood [apple.com], Fickleblox [apple.com], and That Roach Game [apple.com].
This is not going to be world-changing (Score:2)
Some devs will develop apps in Flash and compile them for the iPhone, and other developers who care about efficiency, speed and elegance will code native apps. There are a lot of crap apps on the App Store and this possibly lowers the bar to getting a quick app up there. Now that the goldrush seems to be over, an explosion in crap apps will probably not be noticed amongst the noise that's already there.
I'm sure we'll see some good apps made with this technology that possibly wouldn't have made it to market
AJAX, LAMP, JSON, etc (Score:2)
Made up words for things that aren't standards. At least Flash and AS3 have published specs. And for anyone who thinks writing Javascript is better than using Flash Builder 4.. you should really try it.
FWIW: Don't work for Adobe, have no stake in their products success. I just like Flex Builder/Flash Builder.. It's the least painful web development environment yet except for RTMP/et all.