Send to Printer

gadgets

Apple Caves on Dev Tools

September 9, 2010 19:37:00.135

I'm not sure why this happened now - pressure from Android, the continuing levels of bad PR, threatened legal action - but Apple has caved in on development tools for IOS:

All development tools - including Adobe Flash CS5 - are now allowed, as long as they do not download any code. Apple claims this will give developers the flexibility they need, while at the same time preserving the security of the iOS.

In the wider development space, this means Flash - Adobe can dust off whatever work they had for IOS, and ship it (whether it works any better than this remains an open question, of course). It's also good news for Smalltalkers. The work John McIntosh has done to get a Squeak port to IOS is alive again, and Scratch might have a chance at approval - although the ban on downloading executable code might still be a problem there.

Technorati Tags: , , ,

posted by James Robertson

Comments

Re: Apple Caves on Dev Tools

[Peter William Lount] September 9, 2010 19:58:01.224

That is certainly one accurate way to put it.

Maybe they'll also cave about allowing a squeak vm with the user choosing which image to load... at least we're going to find out soon about that.

Re: Apple Caves on Dev Tools

[Tom Sattler] September 10, 2010 9:31:15.325

Adobe's PR says that 97% of all computers in the world run Flash. I doubt that statistic, since servers are certainly computers, and nobody puts a Flash player on a server, but on desktops, Flash is certainly ubiquitous. There is too much content that runs in Flash, that iPad users want to access, for Apple to ban it permanently. This decision had to happen, just on that basis. Apple doesn't honk off its customers. And banning Flash just honks them off.

Re: Apple Caves on Dev Tools

[james Robertson] September 10, 2010 9:36:56.665

Well, the problem is that Flash in the browser is still dead - you can read about that here:

[link 1]

The summary:

"We do want to point out that Apple's restriction on Flash content running in the browser on iOS devices remains in place," Adobe said.

[1 http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9184538/After_Apple_about_face_Adobe_resurrects_Flash_tool]

 Share Tweet This