Jeff Rock

Saddle Up

Steve Jobs:

We know from painful experience that letting a third party layer of software come between the platform and the developer ultimately results in sub-standard apps and hinders the enhancement and progress of the platform. If developers grow dependent on third party development libraries and tools, they can only take advantage of platform enhancements if and when the third party chooses to adopt the new features. We cannot be at the mercy of a third party deciding if and when they will make our enhancements available to our developers.

This becomes even worse if the third party is supplying a cross platform development tool. The third party may not adopt enhancements from one platform unless they are available on all of their supported platforms. Hence developers only have access to the lowest common denominator set of features. Again, we cannot accept an outcome where developers are blocked from using our innovations and enhancements because they are not available on our competitor’s platforms.

Back in October I posted something to the same effect (albeit less eloquent). I was skewered for it. No big deal, I’m used to abuse. I’m an iPhone developer (ba-da-ching!).

But I am curious to hear what Flash folk have to say after reading Thoughts on Flash. It lays out the exact reasons why Flash will never exist in iPhone OS quite plainly. 90% of the statement is based on logical conclusions and the final 10% on business decisions. Sure, there’s a stick in the eye here and there but nothing nearly as childish as Brimelow, Adobe’s “Platform Evangelist” has been spewing.

This is an effective line in the sand. If you want to be a part of the biggest computing paradigm shift in 30 years, get your shit together and move from legacy tools. Your comfort with a toolset will not (and should not) govern forward momentum. This has happened before and it will happen again.

It’s time to move on.

On Authoring iPhone Apps via Flash CS5

Ok, maybe I should expound beyond sweet christbabyjesus no. I have a feeling that post could turn into one of those posts that needs more explanation.

Bottom line: you can’t compile Actionscript 3 into an iPhone app. Adobe has written some type of selective AS3 to ObjC translator. Reasons that you don’t want to use that:

• Bugs. It’s tough enough bug testing Objective-C natively, let alone through some black-box made by Adobe. I hope you’re into non-descriptive error boxes.
• Memory management. Do you really want to trust a third party to retain and release objects for you? This is not something best left to someone else.
• SDK changes. Apple moves at the rate of Apple. Keeping up with their SDK changes is vital and waiting for Adobe (or anyone other than you) to address these changes is not smart.
• HIG-busting. I’ve read through the FAQ and it doesn’t look like you get access to UIKit. So you can’t use any of Apple’s excellent interface controls. So you get whatever convoluted mess of a UI the developer wants to cobble together in Flash. I’ll let you think about that for a moment.
• Ability. You don’t even get the whole SDK. Just what Adobe feels like supporting. If you get knee deep in a project and realize that you need access to an Apple API that you can’t get to, you’ll be out of luck.

All those things add up to a non-reliable entity becoming your single point of failure. And lest we forget, Adobe can barely write Objective-C apps themselves. We’re still waiting for an update to CS4 that makes it not crash when you move the mouse too fast. You really want to trust them to manage your memory, translate your code and keep up with Apple’s SDK?

Let me know how that works out for you.