The war between Apple and Adobe took an ugly turn yesterday, as Apple"s new iPhone developer agreement explicitly banned any applications that link to Apple"s APIs in the way that Flash Professional CS5"s tools do. One Adobe employee has decided that he"s had enough of Apple and its ways, and has publicly told Apple to go screw itself.
The blog post, written by Lee Brimelow, reflects on just how much the hatred has grown over the last few months, though keep in mind that Brimelow speaks for himself, not the entire company. It"s hard to tell whether Apple blocked the cross compilers due to a simple dislike of Flash, or whether there are bigger, more technical reasons at play; AppleInsider stated that, "The primary reason for the change, say sources familiar with Apple"s plans, is to support sophisticated new multitasking APIs in iPhone 4.0. The system will now be evaluating apps as they run in order to implement smart multitasking. It can"t do this if apps are running within a runtime or are cross compiled with a foreign structure that doesn"t behave identically to a native C/C++/Obj-C app. "[The operating system] can"t swap out resources, it can"t pause some threads while allowing others to run, it can"t selectively notify, etc. Apple needs full access to a properly-compiled app to do the pull off the tricks they are with this new OS,"" as pointed out by one of their readers, Ktappe. This could very well be the case, but perhaps it would be easier for Apple to state this publicly if it were the sole reason; at the moment, it definitely seems as though they"re simply telling Adobe to go away.
A lot of people are very unhappy with Apple"s actions, including Brimelow, of course, who ended his blog post with, "Now let me put aside my role as an official representative of Adobe for a moment as I would look to make it clear what is going through my mind at the moment. Go screw yourself Apple."