This is probably obvious to many people now, but back when I wrote this I did not realize the truth. The reason Apple wants Flash off the iPad is because Apple wants the touch powered mobile advertising marked all for themselves. Apple wants to own interactive advertising on the iPhone, iPod and iPad.
Mike Chambers of Adobe does sound a bit like a spin doctor when he talks about Adobe Flash Professional CS5 support for the iPhone OS platform. Sure, Flash is open in the same way a closed door is open if you use a very large sledgehammer. And the DRM part of Flash is probably just as sensitive as the DRM part of Adobe PDF. So when Adobe talks about open sourcing their "99 percent of web browsers" platform it is basically that, just talk. AIR and Flex are open because the primary dependency is Flash itself. And really, if Flash is that open to begin with then why is Flash video support in JavaFX shipping as a download-only Web Start extension and why is Videolan almost entirely made up of non-American developers ? As noble as Adobe may sound, the reality is that the American patent system is ****** **.
Continue reading "What ? Adobe Flash for iPhone OS is an open platform ?" »
By being hell bent on "finishing" JavaFX instead of augmenting Swing Sun has more or less destroyed their credibility as a desktop platform company. The reality is that Swing plus a scene graph, accelerated layers and a new media framework is more valuable than the entire JavaFX ecosystem. Adobe, Microsoft, Apple, Opera, Mozilla and Google all believe that XML is the future of layout and yet Sun believes a non-standard syntax based on Lisp and JSON is the way to go. And the fact that C#, Actionscript, Dalvik and Javascript are all Java clones seems to indicate that Java is just fine as a user interface language. Adobe even exports twine animation code as XML and vectors as SVG. I sit here working in Adobe Creative Suite and wonder what Sun is thinking.
Continue reading "Sun is missing out on a huge opportunity" »
Adobe wants AIR to feel more like Microsoft Java on Unix. Yeah, I know.. alpha SDK blah blah. Still lame though; when four out of five demos do this.
