I learn from Cali Lewis via her twitter feed that Adobe are talking about developing a version of Flash for the iPhone.
Paul Betlem, Sr. Director of Engineering at Adobe Systems confirmed that Adobe is working on Flash for iPhone. He was speaking at the Flash On the Beach Conference and said, “My team is working on Flash on the iPhone, but it’s a closed platform.”
Am I the only person to find it deeply ironic that Adobe should complain that the iPhone is a closed platform when their own web platform ‘Flash’ is closed, and they have no intention of opening it up.
Welcome to our world of pain Adobe.
7 Comments
I don’t quite get this; you can deploy and run whatever you like on Flash. The platform is open. The implementation is closed to a degree. But they do publish specs and source code to some things.
Most of this ire is centered around the flash plugin’s lack of 64bit I imagine. And maybe their missing PPC/ARM builds. I agree that it sucks, but wouldn’t it be far more productive to test, patch and promote Gnash?
I think you may be over interpreting my amusement. Of course I’m drawing a parallel between the fact that Flash is not open – in that Adobe implemented it in a closed source way – and that the iPhone is also a somewhat closed development platform.
Personally I use SWFDEC, not Gnash because in my experience it works. I don’t believe that taking 5 minutes out on my blog is adversely affecting my ability to test free software alternatives to Flash though.
Actually, the flash specs are freely available through the Open Screen Project (atleast according to wikipedia, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adobe_Flash#Specifications )
The spec may be, the implementation isn’t.
Drinking the PR koolaid? The specs are totally far from being sufficient to write an independent implementation.
The year – 2009. The platform – Linux 64bit. The problem – _still_ no 64bit flash. Or acrobat reader.
So Adobe technologies are on my blacklist.
Say what you want, but Acrobat.com works with Flash 10, and I dumped Google Docs very quickly after going over it’s capabilities. It just so much more high-quality and well thought out.
Adobe AIR beta for Linux is rocking also, it has some great applications. And just to think – the developers has to do zero – and I repepat, zero, not even recompiling to have his app be cross-platform. That is amazing.
I’m on 64bit by the way.