The first blow to be taken in public, in the current war between
Apple and Adobe was landed by Apple last month when they introduced
new rules for developers creating apps for iPhone and iPad which
prevent developers from creating apps with the new version of Flash.
Flash CS5 was two weeks away from launch, and the ability to create
iPhone apps was a headline feature, but the new rules meant that the
only apps on the store to built with Flash are the one hundred or so
apps created by Adobe’s beta testers. Some of these are fabulous and
well worth the money, especially It’s a Clock – see www.itsaclock.flamjam.com
for more details.
Then last week Steve Jobs published an open letter attacking Adobe,
a letter that is still promoted heavily on the home page of www.apple.com
. The full letter is available at www.apple.com/hotnews/thoughts-on-flash/
Everyone was shocked at such a public attack, and Adobe CEO Shantanu
Narayen even did video interview with Alan Murray on the WSJ blog,
available here – www.tinyurl.com/flashceointerview
So what’s all this about? It basically comes down to two companies
with very different agendas.
Apple, as a forward thinking technology company has striven compel
users of their products to upgrade frequently. For example, 3 years
ago they changed the type of processor in their computers so that
today many new software products, including Flash CS5, fail to work
on a Mac that’s more than 3 years old.
By comparison, Windows software tends to be able to run on computers
that are ten years old. But this backwards compatibility comes at a
price. Whereas new Mac software can take advantage of all users
having modern hardware, Windows software generally aims at a lower
common denominator.
Apple want developers to take advantage of their hardware’s newer
features, but when building software that runs on both Mac and
Windows this would mean considerable extra work making two different
versions.
Adobe’s mission is to allow their customers to author content once
and deliver across platforms. Flash is a great example of this.
Despite its numerous flaws, Flash, more than any other web
technology, allows us to design and build one site and deploy it
across platforms and browsers. Even simple HTML websites need extra
code to make them look consistent between browsers and platforms.
The problem with this approach, from Apple’s perspective, is that it
restricts digital content and applications to a feature set common
to all platforms. This means the lack of technical ability of an
ageing Windows computer limits what people can create for Apple
computers.
And this is why Apple banned Flash (and a bunch of other software
products) from creating apps for their mobile devices. If you’re
creating for Apple hardware, Apple want you to use technology that
makes it hard to deploy to other hardware, so that you really focus
on them, and don’t let any other manufacturer’s hardware limit your
feature set.
Although this seems like a big battle to us, as most of us use Apple
hardware daily, the reality is Apple users are a minority. The iPad
is big news, but after discussing these issues with Adobe last week,
they have revealed that their relationships with hardware
manufacturers has allowed them to discover a glut of multi-touch
tablets that are cheaper and more feature rich.
As a side note, Adobe will be providing Starworks with access to
both unreleased software and hardware to give us a head start that
we can pass on to our clients as a tangible competitive advantage.
Regarding the iPhone, there are sixty new Google Android phones
coming out in the second half of this year, something we’d be
foolish to ignore. The user experience on their flagship phone, the
Nexus One (www.google.com/phone) is not even close to that of the
iPhone. It’s comparable to using Windows vs OS X. It is very capable
but sometimes things go wrong when installing apps, and it just
isn’t as intuitive as the iPhone.
But if they can sort the user experience out and make it easier to
get music onto your phone, the better battery life, signal
reception, and open app store may tempt people away from the iPhone.
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