When you read the blogosphere, with the introduction of iPhone OS 4 and it’s new T&C (which blocks cross compiled iPhone apps), it looks like we’re in for a next stage in the war between Apple and Adobe’s Flash. No doubt the particular clause in question is against Adobe. But why?
I went to the Adobe Refresh Roadshow event in February, where they showed off Flash CS5 and its capability to create iPhone apps. It was all very rudimentary. You couldn’t actually create an app that feels like a real iPhone app as there were no UI elements available, no common iPhone interaction,… unless you created those yourself.And as they said, it was all very early days.
What struck me immediately was the fact they did not mention XCode at all. The demo was given on OSX, so XCode could have been installed, and it could have used it to compile the iPhone app. But Adobe Creative Suite sells both on Mac and Windows, and I’m pretty sure they want to sell it on both platforms. It would be the nr 1 reason to upgrade.
So after the event, I asked one of the presenters over Twitter if there was a need for XCode and if it would also work on Windows:
I leave it to you to draw your conclusions on what Adobe is doing (or how it is doing it). I think this could be easily solved if Adobe takes out the iPhone compilation out of it’s main product, and sell it as an extension for the Mac version, which then would require XCode and would compile a Flash created XCode project, like Titanium creates and compiles an XCode project.
Shouldn’t Apple and Adobe get together and talk this out over a coffee (too)?
