The following article was originally posted on April 9, 2010 at 5:27pm ET. By overwhelming request, and in honor of the Adobe’s killing of mobile Flash, we repost it here:
“By now you have surely heard about the new iPhone 4.0 SDK language that appears to make creating applications in any non-Apple-approved languages a violation of terms,” Lee Brimelow, Adobe Flash Platform Evangelist, blogs for The Flash Blog.
“Obviously Adobe is looking into this wording carefully so I will not comment any further until there is an official conclusion,” Brimelow writes.
MacDailyNews Take: Brimelow then inexplicably proceeds to comment further. This marks just the first of his many lies. Of course, in order to evangelize Adobe’s Flash, you have to be a liar.
Brimelow continues, “What they are saying is that they won’t allow applications onto their marketplace solely because of what language was originally used to create them. This is a frightening move that has no rational defense other than wanting tyrannical control over developers and more importantly, wanting to use developers as pawns in their crusade against Adobe.”
MacDailyNews Take: Whiners whine and liars lie and sometimes they’re one and same. We already explained this quite clearly earlier today: “Flash is a proprietary, resource-hogging, browser-crashing abomination and we don’t want ported software on our iPhones, iPads, iPods or Macs; software designed for the lowest common denominator is inferior to software designed to take advantage of individual platforms’ strengths.”
As John Gruber writes over on Daring Fireball, “My opinion is that iPhone users will be well-served by this rule. The App Store is not lacking for quantity of titles. Consider, for one example, Amazon’s Kindle clients for iPhone OS and Mac OS X. The iPhone OS Kindle app is excellent, a worthy rival in terms of experience to Apple’s own iBooks. The Mac Kindle app is a turd that doesn’t look, feel, or behave like a real Mac app. The iPhone OS Kindle app is a native iPhone app, written in Cocoa Touch. The Mac Kindle app was produced using the cross-platform Qt toolkit.” Full article here.
Adobe should understand programming for lowest common denominator implicitly because they long ago turned their backs on the very platform that made their company in order to design their apps for Windows, the lowest common denominator. That is why Mac users suffer with inferior Adobe software today. Adobe should have focused more on Apple’s Mac instead of foolishly waiting for the platform to die and then, when it didn’t drop dead as they hoped, treating Mac users as second-class citizens while pimping inferior Windows PCs.
In addition, “The primary reason for the change, say sources familiar with Apple’s plans, is to support sophisticated new multitasking APIs in iPhone 4.0. The system will now be evaluating apps as they run in order to implement smart multitasking. It can’t do this if apps are running within a runtime or are cross compiled with a foreign structure that doesn’t behave identically to a native C/C++/Obj-C app,” Daniel Eran Dilger reports for AppleInsider. Full article here.
Brimelow continues, “The fact that Apple would make such a hostile and despicable move like this clearly shows the difference between our two companies. All we want is to provide creative professionals an avenue to deploy their work to as many devices as possible.”
MacDailyNews Take: So, Adobe doesn’t want to own the proprietary toolset to generate profits by controlling the Web’s multimedia platform. The charitable angels at Adobe just want to provide creative professionals with blah, blah, blah. Well then, Adobe should drop Flash into the dumpster where it belongs, and embrace the creation of cross-platform tools that enable people to deploy open standards, such as HTML5, that actually will work on as many devices as possible, including 85+ million iPhones, iPod touches, and iPads.
Brimelow continues, “Many of Adobe’s supporters have mentioned that we should discontinue the Creative Suite products on OS X as a form of retaliation. Again, this is something that Adobe would never consider in a million years. We are not looking to abuse our loyal users and make them pawns for the sake of trying to hurt another company. What is clear is that Apple most definitely would do that sort of thing as is evidenced by their recent behavior.”
MacDailyNews Take: Adobe won’t do that because they’d go under. Real creative professionals use Macs. Adobe can’t live off Windows sufferers trying to use pirated copies of Photoshop or mangling amateur video with Adobe’s craptastic Premiere.
Brimelow continues, “Personally I will not be giving Apple another cent of my money until there is a leadership change over there. I’ve already moved most of my book, music, and video purchases to Amazon and I will continue to look elsewhere. Now, I want to be clear that I am not suggesting you do the same and I’m also not trying to organize some kind of boycott. Me deciding not to give money to Apple is not going to do anything to their bottom line. But this is equivalent to me walking into Macy’s to buy a new wallet and the salesperson spits in my face. Chances are I won’t be buying my wallets at Macy’s anymore, no matter how much I like them.”
MacDailyNews Take: Adobe’s Platform Evangelist relegates himself to second-rate media services and that’s supposed to be some big statement? A big joke is more like it; we’re certainly laughing.
Brimelow continues, “Now let me put aside my role as an official representative of Adobe for a moment as I would look to make it clear what is going through my mind at the moment. Go screw yourself Apple.”
MacDailyNews Take: Pure class and absolutely nothing new: “Go screw yourself” is exactly what Adobe’s been saying to Apple Mac users for the last several years.
One of these two companies is screwed and it’s not Apple.
Now, somebody over there in lazytown had better give widdle baby Lee his bottle, he sounds desperate.
MacDailyNews Note: Ever launch Photoshop? The length of time it takes for that mess of spaghetti code to launch is one reason why we find ourselves using Pixelmator pretty much exclusively nowadays. The [US$29.99] Pixelmator is really nice and it’s built expressly for Mac OS X, not released as an afterthought that fails take advantage of many of Mac OS X’s core strengths.
Note to advertisers: (including those who advertise via third-party ad networks and become, in effect, our advertisers): Your Flash-based ads are no longer reaching the most well-heeled customers online: 50+ million iPhone owners. They’re also not hitting brand new iPad users or 35+ million iPod touch users. If you care about reaching people with discretionary income, you might want to consider dumping your flash-based ads and moving to a more open format that people with money and the will to spend it can actually see.
Help kill Adobe’s Flash:
• Ask CNBC to offer HTML5 video via the customer support web form here.
• Contact Hulu and ask them to offer HTML5 video via email:
• Ask ESPN360 to offer HTML5 video instead Flash via their feedback page here.
• Join YouTube’s HTML5 beta here.
• On Vimeo, click the “Switch to HTML5 player” link below any video.
Related articles:
Beleaguered Adobe pulls plug on Flash; axes 750 jobs; shares drop – November 9, 2011
Adobe ceases development on Flash Player for mobile, refocuses efforts on HTML5 – November 9, 2011
Pushing Pixelmator in favor of Photoshop is like telling someone that his Civic is just as good and confortable as a BMW. Sorry MDN. I do agree with this entier Flash thing on the side of Apple, but Photoshop is Photoshop and you obviously don’t make a living using it or else, you would see how ludicrous your Pixelmator comparison really is. On my Mac Pro, Photoshop starts up really fast, but yet, it was designed for this kind of work.
Brimelow continues, “Now let me put aside my role as an official representative of Adobe for a moment as I would look to make it clear what is going through my mind at the moment. Go screw yourself Apple.”
MacDailyNews Take: Pure class and absolutely nothing new; “Go screw yourself” is exactly what Adobe’s been saying to Apple Mac users for the last 15 years.
If you read nothing else, that’s all you need to read right there. As much as Brimelow pretends he can set aside his official role, he’s still making the statement as a representative of Adobe.
And MDN’s take is bang on the mark – this is final confirmation of the attitude Mac users have been feeling from Adobe for a long time now.
If Adobe had any integrity left, they would fire this guy for the extreme unprofessionalism he’s just displayed while speaking on their behalf.
Wow and wow! He went off, then MDN went off. Wow!
I use Adobe stuff and will for years to come, but where they lost me as a champion of their products was when they started sticking all those god awful stupid apps. in their products. Things like, Bridge, Updater, and Flash Player, etc. Junk-ware. It was about 10-12 yrs. ago, they moved to a “unified” interface for their apps. Well, time has come again, IMHO, for them to unify their interfaces again. Crap is strewn all over the place from app. to app. As each year passes their software and all the associative items that they string along with it appears to be more and more like M$ model. A model that keeps you “locked” into their “eco-system.”
Apple is clearly, forging ahead here. The iPhone/iPod touch and now the iPad are showing the personal computing system that not only the computing landscape is changing, but indeed the development for those devices too is reforming as well. When Apple moved to buy NeXT and the NeXT Step OS was the greatest day of my life. From that point forward, I’ve never looked at any other computing platform due to the OS’s solid UNIX based underpinnings. The only thing I’ve ever regretted about Apple was Steve Jobs ouster. If that event hadn’t happened, I’d have probably been using and doing the things I’m doing with their products now, five years sooner. With all the technical “duck-in-a-row” this time it’s Apple’s turn to demonstrate (and to dictate to some extent) how computing will evolve forward to meet the user’s needs rather than visa versa. Get “on board” or be left floundering and risk your companies demise as there’s a million “small” developers ready and willing to take your place, Adobe!
@Chas
Photoshop is NOT a consumer product. In fact, Adobe takes it so seriously that it is not only there flagship product, but it has been entirely rewritten in Cocoa to be able to take advantage of Apple latest technologies. Have you seen what Adobe has in store with this latest version? I would guess not, because you would not be blabbering this crap about lack of innovation.
The first word coming to mind to describe this Adobe “evangelist” is petulant.
The second word is pendejo.
As a diehard Mac user, I have no burden to support Adobe. But in all fairness, someone said Photoshop takes forever to load. As an Aperture 3 user, let me say that native Apple application is not a whole lot better. It’s still buggy and crashes. I am aware that there are a number of Mac users who are apparently quite satisfied with Adobe products.
On another note, it’s amusing. As I type this comment, there is an Adobe Lightroom ad prominently displayed to the right… funny
What a dopey loudmouthed punk making excuses for a dopey company. They should change the company name to Adopy. You have been screwing your customers with crappy, bloated, and buggy products at exorbitant prices long enough. It’s time Apple puts you and your suite of products out of misery.
My final copy of the bloated, crash-prone Photoshop was bought about 3 years ago. Pixelmator does just fine for my needs now. Flash has crashed and hogged my machines – starting with early PCs – for years. Why is there such arrogance at Adobe – and Intuit, as well? Instead of updating, cleaning up, and advancing their products, they are mired in the past. While we now have the wonderful Mac platform that does not place obstacles between us and our work, these guys have made that clean interface impossible with their monopolies. Step aside guys and let us get some work done.
Adobe Platform Evangelist: ‘Screw Apple. We did!’
Wow, how professional!
I’m a heavy user of the cs apps, and I find myself trying to use them less and less, they get slower every day.
For instance when opening a 50k PDF and waiting over 20 seconds for acrobat to activate and show me the PDF, I’ve already dragged it to apples preview application, read the PDF and closed it.
When acrobat finally wheezes it’s way into opening it I’m already doing something else.
Photoshop is the same. If I just need to quickly view the image, I’ll use quicklook.
Adobe would do well to remember how quickly mac users dropped quark when they started neglecting us.
The same can happen to you adobe.
with sh**t cross platform open file dialog boxes why oh why in 2010 does Adobe use this path /Network/Volumes/Xraid/usershortname/Library/Caches/TemporaryItems/Proj….c ooops path too long everything fsckd up… WHAT is wrong with /tmp huh … is it so hard?
end rant
Am I becoming old and mistakenly believe Adobe once said they weren’t writing for Mac OS anymore? If this is true, then it’s nothing but a reversal of fortune. Do I remember correctly?
The hypocrisy coming from him is pretty profound. How do you think most Mac users have felt over the years as they watched Adobe screw Apple by delivering their products late, full of bugs, and with terrible performance? Didn’t seem to bother them.
You reap what you sow!
Without Apple’s adoption of Adobe’s Postscript printer language, Adobe would have been a stillborn company. Adobe paid Apple back by charging ridiculous licensing fees, bashing the Mac as often as it could, and then converting to all Windows development, making Mac users live with terrible ports.
Well Adobe, you’re reaping what you sowed. Good riddance.
So far, no one has more succinctly put it then John Gruber at Daring Fireball:
http://daringfireball.net/2010/04/why_apple_changed_section_331
Absolutely spot on.
‘moreman’:
When my iMac crashes 9 times out of 10 it is an Apple app that when down.
Sorry, but Ps is the industry standard. Pixelmator is great but not a serious competitor. Yet.
if there was ever a place to study fanboyism, this was it. I mean, holy shite.
It’s a bit cowardly on Brimelow’s part not to allow comments, and to close himself off from any counter-argument. He’s decided he knows all the answers already and isn’t ready to hear anything else.
That’s foolish behavior, and will not serve him well.
I think there are likely valid reasons Apple has done what it’s done. But, there’s something else here I’d like to point to Brimelow:
It’s a bit rich for anyone from Adobe to complain about Apple cutting off any particular avenue for something like Flash. Can you say Adobe FrameMaker? Windows ONLY. Can you say 64-bit? Windows ONLY (at least until CS5, I suppose). Adobe has not shown much interest in optimizing their apps for Apple’s hardware. So, Apple is wisely making sure that their platform is not to be held up by any 3rd party, including Adobe.
So, I’ll respond to Brimelow in his own fashion: Tough Shit.
“Apple should let customers decide whether they want to use Flash tho, I absolutely hate it when somebody tries to control what software I can use”
then why in the world are you using Apple products? You shouldn’t even be using Microsoft. You should be using Linux if your value system. Apple’s whole world is about trading off some freedom in return for simplicity. If you’re the kind that prefers to trade off simplicity for total freedom, then get a LiMo phone.
I read the MDN Takes all the time. But these ones are the best so far. Cut through so much thick smoke. Anyway, Sony with their PS3 picks and chooses developers all the time – it’s their box. Everyone hates it when someone exercises a perogitive they don’t like and here that is merely what Apple has done. They’ll say they hate Apple for all kinds of exagerated reasons but the real (and most exagerated) reason is that Apple just thinks about itself. Problem with that tiresome argument is that it’s actually perfectly normal to take care of yourself first. Even parents know they need to pay attention to themselves if they want to be fit and usefull to their children. Apple has probably never been so fit and usefull. It would be a shame for a developer with a good idea and good attitude to waste that over feigned misunderstanding of whose back yard the ‘i’ products are in.
@ Cubert
There’s no need for me to weigh in. Adobe has pretty much dug its own hole here. I spent too much time screaming and yelling and trying to get anyone to listen while I was there.
They like their strategy, so let ’em have it.
So if Adobe wants to provide the best for it’s customers why have they not re-written their products to run native on Intel Macs. How many years now has Apple been an exclusively Intel platform for Macs and still no native support from Adobe.
The real reason that Flash is not allowed to be ported is that it won’t work in the multi-tasking environment that Apple is providing in iPhone 4.0. It is not directed at Adobe Flash specifically, but at any apps that were not written to use the iPhone OS APIs.
Get a clue Adobe and Lee Brimelow. I call B.S. on Brimlow’s blog.
Adobe can’t possibly continue to employ this fool, because if they do they will be seen to endorse his comments. At the moment it’s just Brimelow saying “Go screw yourself Apple”. If he’s still in Adobe’s employ tomorrow, then it’s Adobe saying it.
If that happens, Apple has no choice but to protect itself and its users against Adobe’s aggression.
If you’re silly enough to own Adobe stock, sell it now.