Poorly Rendered

I have been watching the ongoing spat between Adobe and Apple about how Flash is “not allowed” on the iPhone and iPad OS.

Apple control the iPhone and iPad OS very carefully, to ensure that the user experience is as good as it can be. This means that they try not to allow dubious apps in the App Store (although there were all those fart apps – did people really pay money for those?), and it means that they are now telling developers that they cannot use third-party libraries that sit between the app and the OS.

I mentioned this second issue in my previous post about iPhone OS v4, and how in my view it makes perfect sense for Apple to do this, because relying on a third-party library to be bug-free and to use all the latest OS features (as well as to be updated in a timely fashion when new OS features are released) is dangerous for Apple.

Flash in particular is a contentious point, because on the MacOS, it performs horribly. Even when using the 10.1 beta versions, it is horribly slow – you get mouse cursor lag on a Core 2 Duo CPU with ample RAM. So in my opinion, Apple are right to say to Adobe that Flash should not be allowed on their OS until it works. Basically.

Well, after all the posturing, and the immature ads Adobe has taken out saying how much they love Apple “but …”, I had another thought: it’s time Adobe showed the world how good their Flash Player is on the iPhone!

Adobe should release a Flash Player that can be installed on a jailbroken iPhone or iPad.

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This week, Apple had one of their famous announcements. As usual it was on at an unfriendly time of day for me, since I live in the UTC+0700 timezone (meaning it started at midnight on the Thursday/Friday) – but I still stayed awake to watch it. I am a registered iPhone developer and I myself have an iPhone 3G, so I am interested in Apple’s announcements generally, and in particular I am interested in the iPhone OS announcements.

So we have all seen the stuff that was publicly announced, and that is all I am using as source material for this post – as well as some of the online ‘gossip’ sites. I am not breaking any NDAs or talking about anything that is specifically marked as “Apple Confidential” on the iPhone Developers section of the Apple Developers site.

After the event, I have been listening to people complaining about a few items. Specifically, the biggest complaints have been:

1. The new section in the developers’ agreement about only allowing code written in C/C++/ObjectiveC and Javascript to be interpreted by Safari in a web application.
2. The new version of iPhone OS will only support iPhone 3G and 3GS in “summer” and the iPad in “fall”.
3. The headline feature (multitasking) only works on the iPhone 3GS.

I will address these in order.

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