The 9th Crusade: Apple vs. Adobe

There’s no news to anybody that Apple put Adobe’s Flash on the blacklist for some time now.

And with every Apple update, rumors were that Flash would get back in the picture. But in the end Adobe got left out… again. We’re happy we didn’t hold our breath, because with the change in iPhone’s OS 4.0. SDK (Software Development Kit) License agreement, Steve Jobs sure showed that he means it. And when “giants” like them go to war, you can always expect some collateral damage.

Here is the infamous paragraph in the license agreement that managed to banish Flash from iDevices for good:

“3.3.1 — Applications may only use Documented APIs in the manner prescribed by Apple and must not use or call any private APIs. Applications must be originally written in Objective-C, C, C++, or JavaScript as executed by the iPhone OS WebKit engine, and only code written in C, C++, and Objective-C may compile and directly link against the Documented APIs (e.g., Applications that link to Documented APIs through an intermediary translation or compatibility layer or tool are prohibited).”

Until this moment everybody hoped that things will turn around and this update surely doesn’t make web designers sleep better at night. After all, at the moment, Flash is the most important tool in displaying animations and interactive media content on the web for both users and developers. By creating this article, Apple not just blocked all Adobe developers from creating any application for iDevices but also blocked the access for developers working with Java, .NET, Python or Pearl, taking the risk of loosing over 300,000 Flash platform developers.

What is really surprising is that most of the top 100 applications in the App Store are written with a third party framework. Is Apple ready to give them up too as he did with Flash?

And as for users, when we see the little blue logo on our most expected (and expensive, we might add) iPad/iPhone, while we happily navigate the web, we sure know this is not what we signed up for.

To set things straight, Steve Jobs wrote an open letter, explaining all the reasons why Flash is not good enough for Apple’ s updated iDevices. He accused Flash of being old-tech and resources-consuming, determining a poor video quality on small mobile devices, underlining that they wouldn’t want to turn their precious iPhone’s 10 hour claimed battery life into fairy tales… We can’t help but wonder: accusing Flash of not being an open standard isn’t mostly ironic considering that the iPhone is one of the most closed platform there is?

Most surprisingly, as a response, Adobe launched a very peaceful message, claiming thou, that Apple limited the web experience on their iDevices, being at risk of loosing all Apple lovers that still cannot imagine the internet without Flash.

And in their letter about open market Adobe accused Apple for trying to control the World Wide Web by dictating what tools developers may or may not use, affecting this way applications developers and people who work in photography, graphic design, fine art, video and film…in one word, restricting all web creativity and innovation, by tying down developers to their platform.

It might be a great loss for Adobe, but with the release of Adobe Creative Suite 5, very soon every smartphone and iPhone-wannabe will run Flash. And from what we know, Blackberry still rules the smartphone’s kingdom.

As for Jobs’ team, they already offered an alternative to Flash: HTML 5. HTML 5 will be able to support videos and other media files inside the browser, not through a plug-in.  Considering that most Flash websites need to be rewritten to support touch-based devices, why not do it with modern technologies, eliminating third parties and offering developers the best? But do we really have to rebuild everything to make all our applications iPhone-friendly?

But HTML 5 it is still a draft. We don’t know yet everything about its performances, but we sure know that the expectations are high. And until the final release, you might want to know what are the major improvements on HTML 5 compared to HTML 4. Well, first of all, HTML 5 can embed video  inside the HTML page without requesting any plug-in. This pretty much solve the video streaming issue, and  for Youtube addicts this is definitely a good news. All the other new features (canvas, application caches, document editing, drag and drop, and many others) are due to offer web designers an advanced support in creating applications that can run smoothly on any small mobile devices. And if you’re curious about it, take a look for a sneak peak.

Anyway, everything you need to know about the HTML 5 improves can be found at the W3C Working Draft.

So in the end, we all wonder who will be the winner? Or everybody loose? It seems like users might have the last word in this matter. Who’s side are you on?