So what Apple does not want is for some other company to establish a de facto standard software platform on top of Cocoa Touch. Not Adobe’s Flash. Not .NET (through MonoTouch). If that were to happen, there’s no lock-in advantage.
And that makes Apple evil. At least, it does in the sense that Google uses the term in "don't be evil" - I believe pg translated "evil" as something along the lines of "trying to compete by means other than making the best product and marketing it honestly".
Not to mention stupid - has a cross platform framework ever become a de facto standard?
And the point about the quality of apps generated is complete bullshit and he should be ashamed of saying it. The quality of Unity3D and other frameworks is probably above the average for the App Store. In fact the whole point of these frameworks is making generating higher quality programs easier.
What really pisses me off with Gruber's post is in defending the indefensible he's making it harder for Apple to realise that this is a mistake and correct it.
Apple should really just have said what they really want - you can't put anything in the App Store if its available for another platform. The problem being they don't want to exclude the big players, so they just make it hard and unpleasant for the little developers, yet again.
Edit: I mean cross platform application frameworks. Of course there are cross platform things have become de facto standards.
Posix isn't a bad example, but I still think it incredibly unlikely that frameworks at the application/gui level are going to become standards in place of Apple's APIs.
Instituting a blanket ban on all frameworks (regardless of crossplatform status - which 3.3.1 doesn't mention) and restricting languages for fear of being displaced is ludicrous. Even if Apple's fear was legitimate there are plenty of other measures they could take if this problem actually occurs.
Whatever Apple's intentions this wording is a mistake and they need to revisit it. Good frameworks that make the App Store better are going to be pushed out by this.
Though it didn't become 'standard', the cross-platform aspect of Java's AWT/Swing APIs definitely gave it an early boost in uptake. I would also agree with the inevitable disagreement, that Java truly found its niche server-side (cross-platform support probably helped there too).
That's exactly what Apple is trying to avoid- AWT/Swing UIs never felt native, because they had to work everywhere. They couldn't use any native OS features.
As a developer, I'd LOVE to write-once, compile everywhere, and be done, but as a user, I know that creates terribly inferior product.
That's a pretty big stretch. Its a standard because it allows people to do things in web browsers that they can't do otherwise. Any cross platform framework can only offer a subset of features to the developer through native toolkits. And any non-cross platform framework will always be at the hardware developers mercy. Apple is completely mistaken to be threatened by frameworks.
How is Flash a big stretch? As a cross-platform framework or as a de facto standard? Basically Flash was quickly becoming de facto way to access features that browsers couldn't access, it was a serious threat to every platform vendor, making OS commodity. HTML5 is catching up with Flash, but ain't yet there + there is inconsistency problem due to multiple browser implementations.
Its a stretch to say its a framework, or at least it is in the context in which I meant framework. But I didn't make that clear and it seems to be too late now. For the record I think crossplatform application frameworks are unlikely to ever become de facto standards because they generally use a subset of features of the platform and non-native widgets. In fact that's Gruber's problem with them in the article - but he ignores that that should make them nothing for Apple to fear.
I totally agree that cross-platform app frameworks never become de facto standards, because adding an extra layer of abstraction between native UI widget APIs usually dumbs down the user experience.
However, cross-platform frameworks that don't try to replicate platform's native UI experience, have been and are successful, mainly in games. And Flash can be seen as a one and by far the most succesful contender in that space. After HTML/JS that's it.
And who is Apple competing with? Aren't they in the business of selling consumer computing devices to end-users, including hardware to developers who create stuff for their platform?
i.e. it is rational for them to optimize the number of Apple products get used.
And that makes Apple evil. At least, it does in the sense that Google uses the term in "don't be evil" - I believe pg translated "evil" as something along the lines of "trying to compete by means other than making the best product and marketing it honestly".