Adobe respond to Apple

John Warnock and Chuck Geschke the co founders of Adobe have respond to Steve Jobs move with regard to the use of Adobe Flash on Apple devices in the form of the  open letter above. John and Chuck make very good points regarding open markets, which is of course an easy pitch against Apple and its controlling nature. There are many in the IT community who are pleased that HTML5 has come along to give Adobe and its downloadable Flash and FlashPlayer a run for its money. I must say that my only experience of HTML5 is using the beta test on Youtube and it is pretty unsatisfactory with youtube videos play very slowly and with distinct lines across the playback video. I would be interested to see native HTML5 at its best. I am aware that James FK and Will Finch at IB have been playing with the use of HTML5 videos which play on smartphones, the result so far was it worked on iPhone but failed on an Android device. I do hope that we are not going through another VHS v Betamax for the 21st Century!!

Adobe response to Apple's contract changes

The Wall Street Journal’s Alan Murray had an exclusive interview with Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen Thursday afternoon, and Digits live-blogged the event. Highlights are below:

Interestingly in the IB Cardiff office our tech guru's are currently working on embedding video which will play cross platform and more crucially on the iPhone using HTML5 see intro to HTML5 below:

Introduction to HTML 5 from Brad Neuberg on Vimeo.

Adobe Flash - Android 1 - iPhone 0

It appears that after a recent more draconian clause in the Apple iPhone developer program license which stated :

'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).'

The clause basically informs iPhone and iPad developers that they cannot use a code creator such as Adobe Creative Suite 5. Which at the very time that Adobe were working on shipping Flash CS5 for which would work on iPhones allowing them at last to play back flash.

This appears to have finally driven Adobe away from Apple as Mike Chambers stated on his blog on 20th April

'Personally, I am going to shift all of my mobile focus from iPhone to Android based devices (I am particularly interested in the Android based tablets coming out this year) and not focus on the iPhone stuff as much anymore. This includes both Flash based, and Objective-C based iPhone development.'

'We are at the beginning of a significant change in the industry, and I believe that ultimately open platforms will win out over the type of closed, locked down platform that Apple is trying to create. I am excited about Flash Player 10.1 and Adobe AIR 2.0 and all of the opportunities that they will make available to Flash developers across multiple platforms (desktop, Android, Palm, Windows Phone 7, RIM, etc…).'

Why oh why do Apple continue with their attitude of wanting to control the world and everything that runs on their devices.... Apples are the best in the world how much better could they be with some OpenSourcing???

Read Mike's blog and the BBC technology report