Direct quote from Mike Chambers: "Because this is Flash, it is rather trivial to port games created with Flash that target the iPhone to target other operating systems, such as Android."<p>Which pretty much sums up the entire reason for 3.3.1. Did they serious expect that, going in with this offering, they'd get no pushback from Apple? It's been abundantly clear from day one that the iPhone store is a closed platform, subject to the business ideals of Apple (i.e. make Apple more money). Any sane iPhone developer knew this going in, and really doesn't care (or they'd never have started).<p>I suspect the correct way to view the iPhone store is not "A horribly closed environment compared to e.g. Windows/the Web", but "A largely open market compared to the PS3/Wii etc". Closed platforms have existed for eons without the world ending, and they'll continue to exist in the future. The real novelty with the iPhone is it sits in the middle - neither open nor closed. People are freaking out trying to shoehorn it into one camp or the other, when it's just not possible.
This post is pretty heavy on rant and mudslinging against a variety of unrelated platforms.<p>The author forgets that GCC / the GNU toolchain alone is not sufficient to package, sign, and distribute a .ipa - instead, the developer is bound to Xcode, signing certificates, and the whims of the App Store approval process.<p>By declaring ActionScript, C#, and Java (all of which have open compilers and virtual machines) "vendor lock-in", the author glosses over the fact that the iPhone OS toolchain is not an open one, in fact, arguably more restricted than all of the above. Make no mistake - I'm not arguing that any of the above are "open" platforms, or that open platforms necessarily make for a better product ecosystem. But I would like to offer a correction to the article's imbalance.<p>Anyway, I wasn't getting my hopes up. The dream of "write once, deploy anywhere" software is generally one that disappoints.
I just searched the article in question for the term "open" and couldn't find the quote that states that Flash itself is an open platform.<p>What Mike Chambers tries to say, is that he believes open platforms (android, etc.) will succeed over the closed ones.<p>Also he might mean that Flash and Air are tools that are open to other platforms: "The primary goal of Flash has always been to enable cross browser, platform and device development.".<p>Personally, i haven't looked at Flash for several years, but developing for Air sounds intriguing, targeting Desktop OS' (Windows, Mac OS X, Linux) and most mobile operating systems at once. I will at least take a look at Adobe Air.<p>Edit: The article says that all major companies Apple, Google, MS, Adobe try to lock in customers. One thing i find positive about Adobe nowadays is, that it seems to be the only Company to bring different platforms together. Except for HTML/JS, i don't know how i would write apps/games for the variety of platforms.
xmlvm.org comes to my mind, too. A shame that even this project won't be allowed on the iPhone (i guess).
Adobe's market cap is around $18 billion. Apple's is around $235 billion with $40 billion in cash on hand. There must be a few good reasons, but I'd really like to know why Apple hasn't bought Adobe yet.
Pretty good article, terrible color scheme.<p>I'm glad for this (to which I'm currently addicted):
<a href="http://lab.arc90.com/experiments/readability/" rel="nofollow">http://lab.arc90.com/experiments/readability/</a>