Creatives should remind Apple they exist
Posted on 11th April 2010 in Apple, Flash | 3 Comments »
Throughout Mac’s history, Adobe-based creatives have formed a considerable bunch of Apple’s clientele. Most of them can also be referred to as macheads who have been loyal customers and brought along new crowd. Now, in the light of recent news in regard to iDevice and the new Developer Agreement, Adobe community has been locked out of these devices. Action is required.
Apple does not only block Flash Platform, but Flash developers and artists that have used Adobe platform to deliver interactive content for more than a decade and were planning to do so with the upcoming iPhone Packager of Creative Suite 5.
The most feasible argument protecting Apple’s move has been in regard to cross platform compatibility layers and that the developers should not appear in the constraints of a development environment that is delivered by a 3rd party, in the circumstances Adobe Flash CS5. Apple claims to protect the quality of App Store so that only the native set of developer tools by Apple itself should be used for iDevice publishing. While this strategy should guarantee the best UX, one may still argue its openness and innovation perspectives.
As Adobe’s Platform Evangelist Lee Brimelow most emotionally put it, it’s like slapping developers in the face. In the sense of taking away the freedom of choice, it most certainly is. Lee was surely developer-minded while expressing his disappointment, but Apple has gone offensive not only towards developers, but the whole Adobe Community. “You’re not good enough for this platform” is what can be derived from this strategy. Creatives work across Adobe Platform and it makes the ultimate professional workflow for many. Publishing for all platforms from within your workflow is ideally what is required.
Creative types don’t care about technical lingo, cross-compiling or the compatibility layers. Adobe offers them a splendid platform to work across and Apple has great hardware. Collaboration between the two should be essential. Current state of things is irrational as the process of blocking something could never be rational. Since Adobe claims, they’re willing to collaborate and we’ve seen Flash Player 10.1 running flawlessly on Android phones, Apple should be reminded of the creatives who have trusted them for years. So:
Make yourself heard
- Join the I’m with Adobe group on Facebook.
- Sign the iLocked.me petition.
- Add polls to your blog, e.g. What do you think about Apple’s solution for offering Flash? with 79% of over 17 000 votes at this point for Flash already.
- Spread the word!
UPDATE 10.09.2010: Apple has lifted restrictions on its third-party developer guidelines. As a result Adobe has announced continuing iPhone Packager development, a feature in Flash Professional CS5 authoring tool. See Statement by Apple on App Store Review Guidelines and Great News for Developers by Adobe.
- New iPhone Developer Agreement Bans the Use of Adobe’s Flash-to-iPhone Compiler on Daring Fireball by John Gruber
- Steve Jobs’ response on Section 3.3.1
- Apple Slaps Developers In The Face by Lee Brimelow, Adobe Platform Evangelist
3 Responses
The creative macheads, are the ones who made apples success possible, because they evangalized apples products and services. You do not want to know how many people I have “converted” to the mac. I never would have thought, that apple would become, what it seems to be today …
Well theres your problem:
‘Creative types don’t care about technical lingo, cross-compiling or the compatibility layers.’
And It’s because they don’t care they are not aware of how damaging a 2nd class citizen like Flash could be to a mobile platform if it promotes lazy coding or ports opposed to the hard work that goes into making First CLass native applications. And First class is what is needed to facilitate things like multitasking without increasing power consumption.
For every Flash developer that isn’t on the iPhone it makes room for native programs and the people who code those, and that is a good thing. Even if it means people have to go out and actually learn another language or invest more effort and energy into something.
Alex, there are loads of great apps built in Java or ActionScript 3 today.
2 great quotes from last week to address the concerns you point to:
Crappy developers will make crappy apps regardless of how many layers there are.
and
Oh: I have already invented a transcoder from Actionscript 3.0 to Objective-C. It’s called India.
Given the above and many other arguments, I don’t think this decision to lock down has anything to do with technicalities but a business strategy. Steve Jobs himself has acknowledged it.
The point I was trying to get across was of a different kind: if today’s tools make it possible to produce applications from various platforms (not just Flash CS5) and Adobe creatives have been working on Apple platform for ages, Apple’s refusal to no longer extensively collaborate with Adobe leaves all these creatives in the dark. This is not how you treat a loyal customer.