04.22.10
Apple’s Latest Mischiefs, Ignores Mono’s Pleas
Summary: Apple is rumoured to be interested in ARM; censorship of applications is publicly defended by Steve Jobs; MonoTouch is still crossed out by Apple
YESTERDAY we wrote about Adobe turning to Linux at Apple's expense. Apple was doing this to itself and if rumours are true, this vain company may eventually injure Linux by taking control of ARM (where Linux is very abundant).
Apple has used ARM chips. There are rumours that Apple wishes to buy ARM.
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ARM is as close as you can get to “openness” in hardware and Apple is about as close as you can get to “closed” in hardware. It is possible for change to happen but Jobs has not shown any inclination. It would be ironic if Apple killed off the only real competition to Wintel and then suffered as a result. So far, Apple has moved under the radar of anti-competition laws but such a purchase might put them above the radar. They would certainly have more than 50% of the gadget-CPU market.
The above rumour seems unlikely to be true for many reasons. We discussed them in the IRC channel and this merits a long post that would encompass hardware rather than software, so we won’t go there.
Apple’s Jobs has been quoted as saying that “folks who want porn can buy an Android phone”. This can be interpreted in all sorts of ways, including the insinuation that Android/Linux is impure or perverse.
Despite yesterday’s iPhone debacle, Jobs was still in a chatty-enough mood to respond to a concerned customer’s e-mail questioning Apple’s role as “moral police” of its App Store. The customer, Matthew Browing, was referring to the App Store’s initial rejection of an app containing Mark Fiore’s Pulitzer-winning editorial cartoon, as well as the company’s recent porn ban.
Apple’s censorship is a subject that we covered around the beginning of the week and it is unfortunate that Norway’s prime minister chooses design over substance. He got himself an hypePad and as one blogger puts it:
This is a bad example of governments using closed source or proprietary technologies over which they do not have any control.
Apple, despite creating some good-looking and innovative products like the iPhone, creates vendor-locked, closed source technologies. Apple has full control very every app running on the iPad. In a situation like this, how secure would it be for the leader of a country to use such a device to run his office, which may have a lot of back-doors?
Addressing the issue of control, SJVN tells Adobe to “Dump Apple, go Linux”:
There are at least a dozen Linux-powered iPad clones on their way to market, and most of the early ones appear to be using Android. In addition, there are already popular Android-powered smartphones like Motorola’s Droid. There’s money to be made in tablets and smartphones that has nothing to with either iPads or iPhones.
True, Google seems to have its own video plans on Android and both the Chrome OS and browser involving HTML 5 and the VP8 video codec. At the same time, Google has shown that it’s willing to integrate Adobe Flash Player into Chrome. Why not work even more closely with Google and Linux?
Think about it. Apple is no friend to Adobe these days. As always, Microsoft has its own agenda, and they’d much rather see Silverlight instead of Flash become the Internet and mobile video codec. Linux vendors and programmers, while they have no love for proprietary formats or programs will work with them, and are more likely to be friendly to Adobe than either Apple or Microsoft.
“Adobe says Bye to Apple, goes for Android,” says another Web site.
With Apple’s banning Adobe Flash based content on all of its mobile devices, Adobe announced that it has now officially given up on Apple. Their Flash Creative Suite 5 will still be available but Mike Chambers, the chief product manager for Developer’s relation for Adobe’s Flash program, confirmed no future work to be done on it for Apple platform in his blog post.
According to the latest update from the Mono team, MonoTouch receives no approval from Apple [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7].
While, we have heard little direct feedback from Apple regarding recently reported changes to the iPhone Developer Program Agreement, we have heard consistent feedback that Apple is concerned about inefficient apps created using abstraction layers that hide native APIs.
The key part is that which says: “we have heard little direct feedback from Apple regarding recently reported changes to the iPhone Developer Program Agreement” (meaning that Apple still intends to block MonoTouch, as per the new terms). Unfortunately, this could end up driving Mono into Android [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9]. █
Needs Sunlight said,
April 22, 2010 at 1:18 pm
If this had happened many years ago, I would have ask if we finally get our copy of Adobe Photoshop for Linux. But now, there’s no need. GIMP mops the floor with it as far as ease of use and, for my needs, function. I hope Adobe can make some money while doing something good. Heck if they drop Flash, that will be good in itself.
Dr. Roy Schestowitz Reply:
April 22nd, 2010 at 3:47 pm
They could modify it and liberate it to better align with Ogg, SVG, etc. ActionScript can probably be harmonised too (JS).
I find it interesting that Mono is rejected by Linux/GNU, then by Apple, and the only remaining fans are Microsoft proponents who sell Windows and VS.