Posts tagged news
Steve Jobs addresses this Flash "war"
First off, I think it’s great that Jobs finally put together a document explaining why Flash isn’t on the iPhone (or any mobile device, now that I think about it), rather than letting Adobe and Apple fanboys have at it in the blog comment trenches.
He makes some good points
- Flash is made for mouse & keyboard, not touch-based UIs.
- Flash is terrible at playing modern video.
- Flash is closed. Very closed.
- Flash is has terrible security.
That being said, I did have a problem with this part:
We know from painful experience that letting a third party layer of software come between the platform and the developer ultimately results in sub-standard apps and hinders the enhancement and progress of the platform. If developers grow dependent on third party development libraries and tools, they can only take advantage of platform enhancements if and when the third party chooses to adopt the new features. We cannot be at the mercy of a third party deciding if and when they will make our enhancements available to our developers.
To this part, I have to say “so what?”. Let the consumers vote these SDKs out of business. Ultimately, sub-standard apps will go away.
Here’s an example:
Say a Flash/ActionScript developer picks up Flash CS5 and bangs out an app for the iPhone. If the app is bad, it won’t sell well and he’ll either learn to adopt to the official Apple iPhone SDK and built the app natively, taking advantage of all of the Apple open APIs or will make his app better in Flash.
At the end of the day, lame apps will always be lame apps.
Bad apps are bred from bad developers, not bad tools. I cannot stress this enough.
In conclusion, as a longtime web developer and web app enthusiast, I definitely get why Apple wants to assist in phasing Flash out of the web experience. It’s just not a good platform like it used to be in the early 2000s. Most of the things I’ve used Flash for, have all been replaced by jQuery plugins that perform better, without a proprietary plugin.
I also totally understand why Apple wants developers to stick to C++, C, Objective-C and the Apple SDK, but Apple needs to understand that it’s not the tools that make mediocre software, it’s mediocre development that makes mediocre software.
