Thursday 13 May 2010

More on Adobe & Apple...

On April 12th, rumours started circulating (eg IT World's article) that Adobe was considering legal action against Apple for opting to disallow cross-compiled applications. (My brief summary of that can be viewed [http://bluhalo.com/blog/view/292/cs5-apple-vs-adobe).

One might wonder on exactly what grounds such a lawsuit would be based. Indeed, it’s quite possible that Adobe’s lawyers wondered the same thing (assuming there was truth to the rumour in the first place) given that nothing has since emerged on this subject.

In fact all went quiet until Adobe announced (read the BBC article here) that they were going to cease development on the iPhone packager, with the company instead focusing on Android. In a move that came as a surprise to some (read the Register's Apple on Flash) Apple head honcho Steve Jobs subsequently released a document detailing his views on the subject (which can be read here). He lists a number of points ranging from the proprietary nature of flash, security, battery life and the speed with which the third party software would be updated as justification for his views. The result of this was a 2 percent drop in Adobe shares.

You could be forgiven for expecting a retaliatory response from Adobe; instead they announced (more at The Register) that they were working to implement new API calls available on Snow Leopard to hardware accelerate video in Flash. Given that fairly simple tests indicated that the lack of hardware acceleration was the only reason the video performance of flash fell below that of the HTML setup touted by Steve Jobs, this has the potential to reduce the belief that flash is a performance hog (for video anyway).

Hooray, Apple and Adobe are friends again. What could possibly go wrong now, right? Well, Apple is developing their own Flash alternative for providing Rich Internet Applications. The easily spelt Gianduia was first introduced last June, but is likely going to resurface at this year’s World of WebObjects Developer Conference. Gianduia was written in Javascript and has actually already been used by Apple Retail (read more here from Apple Insider).

It is still not plain sailing for Apple however. It has now emerged that the US Department of Justice and Federal Trade Commission are “locked in negotiations over which of the watchdogs will begin an antitrust inquiry into Apple’s new policy of requiring only Apple’s programming tools.” (read more at the NY Post)

This reiterates that Adobe were not the only ones unhappy with Apple’s decision. Indeed, the same article states some are now choosing to finance apps compatible with all of Apple’s competitors, rather than just the iProducts. Although Apple tend to be quite dogmatic in following their roadmap, I can’t help but wonder exactly how much public pressure it would take for them to change their minds…

Nick Nawrattel
Lead Multimedia Developer

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