Re:New iPhone Agreement Bans Flash-to-iPhone Compiler & Others
by tumult on Thursday April 08, 2010 @05:30PM
(#1251043)
No, they're clearly doing this to lock people down and prevent strong innovation on their platform. They want tons of toy apps, but nothing threatening. They don't want people abstracting over their platform. They are deliberately restricting developer freedom. If they wanted to avoid crap apps, they would just reject crap apps. They don't care about that. They want to prevent developers from innovating on top of them, so they cripple the tools that developers may use, hobbling us so that we may only produce small cute toys which they can use to promote their platform.
Re:New iPhone Agreement Bans Flash-to-iPhone Compiler & Others
by ptomato on Thursday April 08, 2010 @05:42PM
(#1251092)
Really? Bullshit. You honestly believe that stuff made in Obj-C can only be a toy whereas something written in ActionScript will bring the "strong innovation"? Yes, they're certainly restricting developer freedom (which, again, I don't like any more then anyone else), for the same reason they have been in the past: because they don't want their users to have a shitty experience.
I mean, how the hell do you define a "cute toy" vs. an actually innovative app? What's something that is more innovative on Android, say, or a Pre that isn't there on an iPhone? (Google Voice being the obvious exception, but again with the everything-Apple-does-is-about-UX thing.)
Re:New iPhone Agreement Bans Flash-to-iPhone Compiler & Others
by rayval on Thursday April 08, 2010 @06:35PM
(#1251238)
Tumult's point is not about writing a single script-based solution but rather about developing an enabling technology for a whole raft of solutions. A platform-on-platform.
Re:New iPhone Agreement Bans Flash-to-iPhone Compiler & Others
by joubert on Thursday April 08, 2010 @07:38PM
(#1251417)
Like what? You can't use Objective-C to do something like that?
Re:New iPhone Agreement Bans Flash-to-iPhone Compiler & Others
by tumult on Thursday April 08, 2010 @08:21PM
(#1251498)
I could do it with assembly. But it would be stupid, and wasteful. Objective-C is not the tool for every job. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing_tarpit
Re:New iPhone Agreement Bans Flash-to-iPhone Compiler & Others
by joubert on Thursday April 08, 2010 @11:51PM
(#1251811)
Do you have empirical evidence to prove which language(s) are better than C, C++, Objective-C, and JavaScript in creating applications on the iPhone's runtime and UI model?
Re:New iPhone Agreement Bans Flash-to-iPhone Compiler & Others
by MutantSushi on Friday April 09, 2010 @01:39AM
(#1251985)
Empirical evidence? Ask the guys Apple is funding to do MacRuby.
Re:New iPhone Agreement Bans Flash-to-iPhone Compiler & Others
by ptomato on Thursday April 08, 2010 @06:43PM
(#1251259)
Even granted that, the reason Apple doesn't want that is still because of the UX. Apps with the same codebase for Android/iPhone will automatically suck as far as the UI is concerned. Things like the lack of multitouch gestures on android, different screen sizes, &c. Certainly has never worked well on desktop platforms... see: Java UI toolkits, QT (which looks fairly native but tends to feel very wrong), Adobe Air, &c.
Re:New iPhone Agreement Bans Flash-to-iPhone Compiler & Others
by tumult on Thursday April 08, 2010 @06:50PM
(#1251282)
Who cares what you think they want? Read the developer agreement. What's it say? Anything that isn't C, C++, or Objective-C is banned.
Re:New iPhone Agreement Bans Flash-to-iPhone Compiler & Others
by ptomato on Thursday April 08, 2010 @06:54PM
(#1251290)
Yup. And your point is? For the third time now, my point isn't that this is a good thing, and I'm certainly not a fan of the decision. My point is that Apple isn't doing this because they hate developers, or want to tweak Adobe's nose (well, maybe a little), but because all they care about is their product's user experience.
Re:New iPhone Agreement Bans Flash-to-iPhone Compiler & Others
by tumult on Thursday April 08, 2010 @07:17PM
(#1251368)
Why does it matter what language I used to develop an application, if it produces a binary that runs acceptably on the platform and otherwise follows all of the rules? I can write a more stable application in SML, Haskell or even untyped Scheme than most of the clowns I see making app store junk in Objective-C.
Re:New iPhone Agreement Bans Flash-to-iPhone Compiler & Others
by rortian on Thursday April 08, 2010 @09:11PM
(#1251551)
Apple does not allow third party apps to use multitouch so that is a known issue.
>Apps with the same codebase for Android/iPhone will automatically suck as far as the UI is concerned
Hardly. There is the graphics api called opengl that works on both iPhone and Android (and your ps3 and computer).
Re:New iPhone Agreement Bans Flash-to-iPhone Compiler & Others
by GHFigs on Thursday April 08, 2010 @06:54PM
(#1251291)
so they cripple the tools that developers may use
By only allowing the tools they use? It seems like if what you said was true they would do exactly the opposite.
Apple's doing this for the exact same reason they do EVERYTHING else controversial that they do on iPhone OS: because the primary (only?) thing they care about is the end user experience being as good as possible. In this case, Flash (which I'm sure this is entirely aimed at) doesn't provide as good of a user experience as the native UI controls, so they're nixing it while they can without as much bad publicity as they'd have if they waited until after CS5 was released.