iPhone OS4 today

Apple Slaps Developers In The Face http://theflashblog.com/?p=1888

 

And the pot just called the kettle black. You strategically ducked the rest of my post I see. Business is war, everyone knows that. Purposely harming individuals is far worse. Microsoft wants to stomp every other company out of existence, but Apple wants to date-rape every human on earth.

 

Maybe Apple is thinking of away to just banning Flash and not the rest (Unity and so on), this would take time so in that way it can only be good, its easy to say NO.

 

It's easy for you to criticize a company's decisions. You don't have a billion dollar product, millions of employees' jobs, and thousands of lawyers and shareholders to deal with on a day to day basis. Until you've sat in that chair and seen it from that point of view, you don't have all the facts. So let's just leave all this "MS/Apple/Gates/Jobs is evil incarnate" bullshit out of this thread, mkay? It's adds nothing to the conversation but fodder for trolls.

 

That sounds promising. If it is true then I wish someone from UT would post it into this forum!

 

You've got a real talent for this kind of language.

 

Unity as always been compliant with Apple and was pro Apple before Windows - they will always find a solution, thats just the company they are

I believe a solution will be found

 

@Mattimus, your Aztec Scroll game looks great. Not to attempt to re-design it or anything, but it'd be cool if the wheel took up more of the screen. Let us know when it's released, I'd like to check it out.

 

Take a look at this explanation
http://www.appleinsider.com/article...ps_in_iphone_4_0_related_to_multitasking.html

It suggests that apple is doing it in order to make multitasking work. Not to block flash, Unity, or others. If this is true this would make the most sense to me. All the evil postulating might be premature. Unfortunately it may effectively block the use of Unity and others. I would suggest trying to run multitasking on the new beta 4.0 with Unity games and see if they multitask. If they do we might be ok. If not Unity will probably have to do what they need to to make it work

 

That sounds like a reasonably good theory (among others) but I take it with salt. Real concrete info COULD have been released by Apple in a timely matter, but as with most of their developer crimes, communication is half the problem.

In any case, I see in the comments there that someone linked to TUAW, which has posted a vague (but generally positive) comment from David H.:

http://www.tuaw.com/2010/04/08/iphone-os-4-0-dev-agreement-blocks-using-flash-or-unity-as-ides/

I take that to mean “no news is good news.” But there’s another kind of good news, known as “good news,” and I’d like to try some of that as well

 

No its not software does not have the same level of lock in. You can use Linux if you want etc.

Apple wants to lock you to their hardware + software.

 

And you've got a knack for adding nothing to a conversation aside for sad attempts at witty insults. Your dad must be proud.

 

Because I was agreeing. :roll: If you want to go down that road, I could post stuff like Microsoft kills babies with burning Xboxes and makes the family pay for the legal bills. I mean, grow up...the notion that MS is any better than Apple is laughable. That is all. Anyway it's off-topic...moving to Android is all well and good, but then you have to start questioning how evil Google is....

--Eric

 

I have 4.0 installed in my phone and I am sorry to say that this is not multitasking as everybody thinks. The apps are actually purged from memory and only a small listener/event I don't know how to call it stays in memory. They have created a fast state change that is now integrated in the OS so developers don't need to save the app when it gets closed, the OS does it for you. However, the game does NOT keep running in the background. If you have access to the apple iPhone developers site just go and read the documentation about the 7 types of listeners that you can leave in memory (audio, location, local alerts...)

Unfortunately so far there are no apps that use this new 4.0 multitasking APIs and the ones they demoed yesterday are not the same that you can get from the store (Pandora, Skype and TomTom). I have tested them and they still shut down when you close them.

So we will still need to wait to see what happens with this. However from all the Flash hatred explanations that I have read so far I still think the multitasking issues with games are a far better reason for this new policy from Apple.

just my 2 cents.

 

Apple has always viewed computers as a closed environment. Could you imagine if that was IBM's strategy? The reason we are not all using Mac clones is because of Apple past strategic blunders.
You can be evil but useful. Alternatively, you can be evil and dumb aka Apple I am looking at you.

Apple will never stop viewing itself as a computer company = hardware + software.

 

Can we have a blinking-rapidly emoticon??

Blimey, getting a bit warm in here.

Here's a joke I googled:

Three Apple engineers and three Microsoft engineers are traveling by train to a conference. At the station, the three Microsoft engineers each buy tickets and watch as the three Apple engineers buy only a single ticket. "How are three people going to travel on only one ticket?" asks a Microsoft engineer. "Watch and you'll see," answers the Apple engineer.
They all board the train. The Microsoft engineers take their respective seats but all three Apple engineers cram into a rest room and close the door behind them. Shortly after the train has departed, the conductor comes around collecting tickets. He knocks on the rest room door and says, "Ticket, please." The door opens just a crack and a single arm emerges with a ticket in hand. The conductor takes it and moves on. The Microsoft engineers saw this and agreed it was quite a clever idea. So after the conference, the Microsoft engineers decide to copy the Apple engineers (as they always do) on the return trip and save some money.

When they get to the station, they buy a single ticket for the return trip. To their astonishment, the Apple engineers don't buy a ticket at all. "How are you going to travel without a ticket?" asks one perplexed Microsoft engineer. "Watch and you'll see," answers an Apple engineer. When they board the train the three Microsoft engineers cram into a rest room and the three Apple engineers cram into another one nearby. The train departs. Shortly afterward, one of the Apple engineers leaves his rest room and walks over to the rest room where the Microsoft employees are hiding. He knocks on the door and says, "Ticket, please..."

 

"Multitasking" is only supported on 3gs and 3rd gen touch manufactured in late 2009.

I would be very surprised if the EULA change is to support this (surely can be figured out without per project C/C++/Obj-C code.. or disallowing any languages other than these).

 

German News here / die deutschsprachige Newsmeldung hier:
http://www.unity-community.de/news/100-unity-ceo-aeussert-sich-zum-iphone-os-40

 

Forums are all of a sudden much quicker!

 

Yeah, that's because the panic has stirred a lot of users into compulsively checking if there's any news yet. Many of us have a lot riding on the outcome of this.

"Most users ever online was 985 on Fri Apr 09, 2010 6:40 pm"

The previous record before that was somewhere around 720 users, and that was from last night

 

Sure you could, because it's public. Apple covers their problems up with threats. Also, your case sounds like it was more neglect on the part of the parents, while iPods and iPhones are exploding without warning during expected use.

Dude, all I originally said was, "Microsoft isn't the bad guy anymore," and, "Steve Jobs is a bigger c*** than Bill ever was," because someone said Bill Gates is Satan. You're the Apple lemming who started this whole thing by saying they are somehow less evil than Microsoft. You state these things, like you do any other points (especially engine comparo's), as if they were proven fact. You need to take your own advice.

 

That would seem to indicate the servers should be reacting more slowly.

It has been at a crawl for the last day or so, but within the past few minutes it is lightning fast, even with the load

 

yeah, IBM might still be making new PCs today.

You can be evil but useful. Alternatively, you can be evil and dumb aka Apple I am looking at you.

We can all agree that Apple banning C#/Lua is evil. It's not dumb to defend one's existing market share though.

I've been a Mac owner since 1989 and this is, as it stands now, the crappiest thing Apple has done TMK.

Microsoft in the late 90s got into trouble trying to purge Netscape and Sun from the desktop PC space -- they could do this by leveraging their monopoly share of desktop PC OSs, as Judge Penfield Jackson's ruling stated.

There may or may not be a similarity with Apple's share of the mobile app market, which is well into the 90% area. But for the device itself, AFAIK Apple is free to establish any license terms it wants for its developer program and AppStore, even if they are anticompetitive.

The EU will most certainly be looking at this anti-competitive angle very closely.

 

Well you could see many potential dangers. Apple want applications to be on the Iphone and simultaneously not available on other platforms. This exclusivity adds value to the iPhone (at least in their minds). The idea being that if you can get all the same applications on android (et al) that you can get on the iPhone, then the iPhone is a less compelling purchase. Tools like flash and Unity (and also Java) that allow you to target your applications to multiple platforms are a threat to that exclusivity.

Even beyond the exclusivity issue, writing games/apps for a closed system like the iPhone or iPad can be a real risk, particularly if you are being innovative. For example, imagine for a moment that you have written a brilliant racing game that has adverts from real world companies on billboards at the side of the racetrack. You give the game away for free because the adverts provide your revenue. Based on the success of your game, you hire two other developers and borrow £100,000 to fund further game development. Then suddenly IPhone OS 5.0 is released and contains a clause stating that applications advertising other companies goods must use the Apple iAdd system. This would immediately cut your income by 40% since with iAd Apple take 40% of the add revenue. It may even be the case that technologically you can't use iAd in your games and that might totally wreck your company.

You just don't know what bombshells Apple will drop on you when the next version of their OS comes out.

 

Ok, things are going quite crazy in this thread...
First thing I'll say is that I am in the same situation as many of you are, have a big project going on for iPad, other "smaller one's", all unity based (well, mostly), plus have just recently purchased all the pro licenses I could get from unity, so this surely hurts me to, and a lot, BUT, I've read people whishing Jobs death in this thread!(some pages back) Really??

Plus about apple policies :
- IT IS THEIR BUSINESS
- IT IS THEIR PRODUCT (iphone, iPod, iPad, iWhatever )
- IT IS THEIR STORE
- WE ARE MAKING MONEY ON THEIR COSTUMERS

If apple, especially in the mobile market (iPhone and iPod), has had such a tremendous success in the recent years it's because their focus is all on the end user and the best experience for him possible, if we can make money on the appstore it is thanks to this.
Surely apple benefits too from having such a wide developers community building software for their products, but fact his that at the moment, there are almost too many, and a big amount of them mainly uses apple tools entirely, so I guess that as Apple sees it (which will be bad ONLY if end users get a worse experience than before) a few thousands apps are a small number to sacrifice if they think experience for users in the store will improve.

Being honest, you can easily verify that most of the really buggy apps are made thanks to some kind of middleware by very inexperienced developers (as I am, and probably have contributed to this), if apple wants to bring the AppStore to the next level by cutting the stream of super inexperienced developers that already hits the store now and could increase to scary levels with the release of CS5, they surely can.

Also it possible that the frozen state of application shown in OS4 it is reachable only for certain code, structure or whatever.
Or that they might be able to check app performances, leaks etc... better while approving the app if it is made in a certain way.

There could be many reasons, but probably if Apple really is going this way they have thought of it and since the want to sell more devices possible, this reason is probably well thought towards giving users something better than before.

I obviously in NO WAY like this thing from apple as all of you, but what I'm saying is that we cannot judge (especially in such a hateful way) a company decision, especially since they have always been quite clear that they want to keep control over content that is published on the AppStore, and while it might be not well viewed by part of the dev side, it surely has been apreciated by end users as it became the main AppStore available with billions of downloads.


Well, it's more than enough....I'm nervous, sort of mad, and tense too as all of you, just that I really can't blame Apple, It's me (possibly unity ) that has to adapt to what new OS / market or hardware there is, not the opposite. After all we all went the "easy way", and apple never told anything to us about their support for unity way of publishing applications to iPhone.

 

I don't buy it.

For one, the new agreement specifically prohibits "compatibility layers." They don't want code that works on iPhone to also work on Android. This is about killing Android, not multitasking. Aside from the fact that most of these compile down to native code eventually, and so wouldn't be distinguishable (from a multitasking perspective) from code "originally written" in another language.

For another, the new rules go into effect April 22nd, IIRC. Well before 4.0 is ready.

And for a third...it's been reported that Apple specifically has it in for Unity3d.

 

Microsoft did their level best to destroy the utility of the browser as an application platform competitor to Windows API. They strong-armed their Windows licensees to exclude Netscape from their licensee's customer installs.

This basically retarded the entire web development world for 5-6 years until the rebirth of Firefox, the development of Safari, and the appearance of Chrome routed around the damage.

Microsoft also did some very dirty dealings against Sun's Java platform. The attempt to embed Windows-only functionality, to prevent Java from becoming an alternative application platform for developers.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8To-6VIJZRE

 

Maybe this is not about an attack on middle-ware like Unity, it may be a way of pushing out indies. Wasnt it a few months back there were rumors that the app store was favoring big time developers apps, over indies apps?

Maybe this is just a way for them reign in the competition and decreased revenue for the big guys.

With indies out of the way the major players can begin setting their own prices, that would be more profitable than competing with indies price points (thus more percentages from profits going towards Apple).

Sounds crazy I know, but business is business.

There are more Mac and PC users worldwide than iPhone or iPad, so I highly doubt it would have devastating hit on the Unity side.

 

Are Unity offering refunds to people who buy the the iPhone development software after this announcement? I'm interested in taking the plunge but this announcement has put me right off.

Btw those saying it doesn't affect Unity are perhaps letting their inner fanboy do the talking. The EULA says:

So no matter what Unity do they cannot change the fact that the apps weren't originally written in those languages. If the EULA stay the same Unity iPhone is dead unless they remove the C# and JS abilities, no two ways about it sadly.

 

Slam an Obj-C generation module on the back of mono and be done with it. Problem solved.

 

By reported you mean some random person commenting on a blog post says Apple has it in for Unity?

 

Its not down to Unity, they didn't know until yesterday about "iPhone beta 4 SDK".

The MS versus Apple is a never ending war of words and is off topic.

 

If true, I can partly understand why they would feel this way. After all, Unity (among others) are heavily marketing the "develop once, deploy widely with one click"-mindset, which might be seen as watering down app store content.

What I still don't understand is why they would exclude Unity and Unreal Engine from the platform. Surely rapid development of high quality titles is in Apple's best interest as well? As Mikomobile wrote, forced or encouraged exclusitivity would be much more efficient and would encompass even those who are in strict compliance of the new rules.

I have no set opinion as too much is unclear, but the above seems to argue that this is a quality assurance / flash-blocking measure gone slightly wrong.

 

Wrong, the code has to be originally written in the languages specified in the EULA.

 

Well the enigne is C/C++

its the scripts that's the problem (well C#).

 

OK, so this thread is huge, does anyone have a final say on it?

It sounds like they're banning anything using a cross-platform development tool. So that means not just Flash, but Unity and everyone else, including Mono of course.

http://daringfireball.net/2010/04/iphone_agreement_bans_flash_compiler

Gotta say this also make it pretty hard to compile iPhone applications even if you don't use anything but XCode, given that GCC is a cross platform development tool...

 

http://www.macrumors.com/2010/04/09...xclusion-of-flash-to-iphone-export-continues/

"as AppleInsider notes that it may have more to do with the multitasking features being deployed in iPhone OS 4.
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," wrote one reader under the name Ktappe."

 

Why WebKit engine?

That just means Safari and API calls that use WebKit, what does this have to do with iPhone OS 4.0.

Or am I missing somethinig.

The UI stuff is called UIKit.

 

And you think that was made up? I have reason to believe otherwise (my own Apple contacts), but believe what you want.

It doesn't invalidate my other two points, regardless.

It sucks majorly, but the new Apple ruling clearly prohibits Unity3d and similar toolkits from being used. You simply can't get around the "compatibility layer" part of the new rules, no matter how you slice it.

Whether this will change in the future, or whether Apple will enforce it against Unity3d, is anyone's guess. And Apple certainly hasn't been willing to clear this up so far.

 

C# and Javascript because you are only allowed to execute JS code if its via webkit for the WebApps.

 

I don't care one way or the other if it was made up.

Saying 'Its been reported' carries an implication that the link provided shows the report; not a comment on a blog that says 'i know someone who knows someone'

 

BUT

But thats JUST Safari Webkit - they dont want the new iAd made in flash.

iPhone SDK is called UIKit, MapKit and so WebKit just covers Safari (Web Kit).

RIGHT?

 

Sound like BS. Jobs just thinks this will insure "a quality user experience". Or else he has crappy developers.

 

BUT

But thats JUST Safari Webkit - they dont want the new iAd made in flash.

iPhone SDK is called UIKit, MapKit and so WebKit just covers Safari (Web Kit).

RIGHT?

 

$220B actually

 

@Troy Dawson, I fully agree that solely from a business perspective Microsoft was very predatory and downright shady. But they don't "...make Apple look like puppies," when you consider how badly Apple are on an individual level.

With all this speculation going on I know one thing for an absolute fact: I am not going to be using ObjC.

 

Ya they sure crush RadioShack their close competitor is only 2.83B :roll:

 

regardless of the decision that apple made I want to know If Unity Team has a plan for what their next step will be if apple decides not to support unity development. Will we be looking at a static unity library that we will have to include and code our games in Obj-C, C, or C++, are they going to change the IDE for iPhone to use Obj-C, C, or C++, are they going to stop supporting Unity Iphone, or are they going to transfer existing licenses over to a different platform license of unity.

In the end the wording is quite clear that the apps have to be "originally written in Obj-C, C or C++" what this means for us is that even though the engines is okay our scripts are written in javascript, c# or Boo and then is compiled into ARM Assembly. So Unity is on the wrong side of the rule. Instead of Bashing at apple for protecting their interest (because it is like bashing a father for protecting his child) we should focus on our next move. Thankfully Unity Team is very responsive and supportive of their community. I'm sure they are brainstorming now the different possible outcomes and how to take advantage of the situation. My advice is to stay focused on your projects, if all else fails you can at least convert your input over to keyboard and mouse and try to salvage what is left using the standalone or web player.

 

Sorry but it doesn't sound like BS to me. I have been reading about the new multitasking APIs in the developers site documentation and unless you develop the whole application on Obj-C you pretty much are not going to be able to make your app multitasking friendly.

This argument is making more and more sense, a game will not be able to be multitasked unless you can tell the OS from your code how to do it...