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➶ Adobe MAX Announcements
Tonnes of big news from Adobe today. Here’s a few things which I’ve been particularly interested in:
- Adobe Creative Cloud announced.
- 5 New Adobe Touch Apps (to add to my longtime-favourite Ideas. Proto, which ‘enables the development of interactive wireframes and prototypes for websites and mobile apps on a tablet using gestures and a touch-based interface.’ certainly sounds interesting. There’s also Photoshop Touch, though the 5 new apps are only on Android for the time being.
- They’ve bought TypeKit and the folks behind PhoneGap.
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➶ Elliot Jay Stocks on Adobe's Digital Publishing mistake
Elliot makes some great points about the expense involved with Adobe’s Digital Publishing ‘solution’. As has been noted by Chris Phin:
Tablet publishing is a gold rush. Adobe can name its price.
That’s awesome for Adobe, but honestly the Adobe solution is mediocre. At best. Not only is it near-on impossible to actually share content from these magazines, but the Adobe ‘Reader’ app that powers most iPad magazines is a complete shit-sandwich.
- Each issue is 500MB plus in a monolithic download.
- The Adobe app is completely unaware that iOS now offers multitasking, and not only fails to download in the background but also doesn’t install in the background.
- As soon as you start downloading an issue, the ‘View’ button for any of the existing issues that you’ve purchased are greyed out, meaning that you’re forced to sit at the app homescreen for 5+ minutes. Staring at a god-damn progress bar. Hoping that the app will work if you leave the iPad unattended and it goes to sleep.
Fucking good job, Adobe.
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The Internet is an open range where anyone can compete in any way they like. But Adobe didn’t make the Internet. In fact, they tried to wall off a section of it. Apple, on the other hand, made its own walled garden with a scenic view of the Internet.
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➶ Adobe®: We Love Choice
The $600 Flash authoring tool is the only way to produce Flash applications.
The free Mac OS X Developer tools (that require an $800+ Mac computer) are the only way to produce iPhone and iPad applications.
Both systems are as closed as each other.
Adobe claims Flash is open.
Apple makes no such claims. If you want to make iPhone or iPad apps you use Mac OS and Xcode, take it or leave it.
If you choose to leave it the alternative is HTML. A truly open platform for which authoring is as simple as editing text. There’s many HTML rendering engine implementations, the best few are totally open source with Apple being the major contributor to the best one, WebKit.
Adobe: not open, claim to be.
Apple: not open, don’t claim to be, contribute heavily to that which is truly open.
Spot on, via Gruber
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We thought [smartbooks] would be launched by now, but they’re not. I think one reason is to do with software maturity. We’ve seen things like Adobe [Flash] slip — we’d originally scheduled for something like 2009.
Smartbooks have been delayed by Flash issues, says ARM — ARM takes a pot-shot at Adobe. -
Perhaps Adobe should focus more on creating great HTML5 tools for the future, and less on criticizing Apple for leaving the past behind.
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Weird that Steve posted Thoughts on Flash at Apple.com instead of his normal blog, daringfireball.net.
Dustin Curtis, via Twitter -
Wow, really Adobe Flash Player installer? - Chris Messina documents the latest fail from Adobe, requiring the Finder to be quit (?!) before you can install Flash.
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Hmmm. So giving Apple control over the iPhone is bad, but giving Adobe control over rich content on the web is fine. Hmmm.
tomstandage, via Twitter -
It makes all the difference in the world that Apple is pushing H.264 rather than, say, QuickTime as the way forward for embedded web video.
© Nik Fletcher 2007-2011 ~ Contact
