Word on the street:
- Apple’s new wording on the iPhone SDK disallows cross compiling iPhone apps, like the Adobe Flash CS5 IDE was doing.
- Other cross compiler solution vendors like Appcelerator, Â Unity and Phone Gap are not sure what this means for them. Appcelerator’s blog goes down because of dev traffic.
- Flash community pretty vocal about this:
- Peter Elst: Apple vs Developers: This time its personal
- Kevin Suttle: Apple Reaffirms Control Issues with iPhone 4
- Adobe Platform evangelist Lee Brimelow: Apple Slaps Developers in the Face
- Hey a new twitter hashtag is born
- The larger developer community calls the BS on Hacker News and Reddit
- Adobe will still release CS5 on 12th April as planned
- Reasons continue to pile up on why the Apple eco system has started to feel so stifling:
- Book apps cannot use Screen Brightness APIs, so iBooks looks like such a better app.
- AppStore rejects app because developer implements (from the ground up) a UI feature thats too close to forbidden iPad gesture (seriously? A forbidden gesture?)
- You cannot use third party analytics or geo-targeted ad systems
The Daring Fireball post talks about how Adobe is screwed now. I dont know about the financial implications, but if nothing else, the CS5 cross compiler has definitely proven how the exclusion of certain runtimes has nothing to do with performance but is a pure power play.
In other news, I am now looking for the cheapest way to get a Nexus 1. Could Adobe and Google please set up something for us refugees from the big A dictatorship?
Code Zen 
Here’s a way all Flash developers can get a Nexus 1 cheap… we can all boycott iTunes for the next few months and save that money for a new phone. Bad for Apple… good for us.
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I place all of the blame at the feet of Adobe. How the could sell the packager as an integral feature of cs5 without any guarantee or agreement with apple is beyond me. They took a huge gamble in trying to force flash onto the iPhone platform, and lost miserably.
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@Abraham Yeah, it was a gamble. The worst case scenario they imagined were apps getting rejected from the app store. Apple pretty much blatantly came out with the “we are evil” message, which is pretty bold. I think there is no denying the fact now. I think success has gone to their head, which I feel is the first sign before things start going bad.
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Yeah, Abraham, life is a gamble. Still Apple is going to be a great problem for developers, dameging third party tools, forcing a standard which is not even standard yet, and so on.
I hate apple since 20 years now (I got some experience in the field) I guess now someone else will realize why.
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I’m actually quite torn on the issue of cross compilation. One one hand you have to really admire Jobs’ dedication toward platform purity but on the other hand it’s rather disconcerting that Apple has made the decision for developers on the potential of cross compilation.
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