Why Steve Jobs can't stand Adobe | Hacker News Reader

Why Steve Jobs can't stand Adobe

hardmac.com

40 pointsanderzole54 comments

I would love Apple to create a Photoshop competitor. As powerful as Photoshop is, there is a ton of room for simplification. You know there is a problem when software provides five different ways to perform a task, yet users have to have 5 years experience, or Google, to remember how to implement it.

Being able to do things using different approaches is one of the best features of Photoshop. It makes the application incredibly powerful.

Yes, but does Photoshop need 9 different ugly sliders, for example?

http://mrgan.tumblr.com/post/235455865/the-many-sliders-of-p...

You could turn that argument upside-down and say that it's quite incredible they'd go so far as to create 9 custom sliders depending on the sub-part of the application you're looking at. You can't really argue that all those fit the 'standard' mac slider concept.

I think some of them could be rolled together but without knowing more about the context in which each and every one of those sliders gets used it is hard to be even sure about that.

Complex user interfaces:

http://www.sternstudio.com/HollandsGlorie.jpg

Tend to have a lot of buttons & sliders...

Yes, but there is similarity between the sliders in that picture you show here. When you make 9 different sliders, it distracts from the settings being modified, and directs attention towards the UI itself. This is probably one of the oldest no-nos in traditional design.

In the original example, the Color Balance and Layer Blending tools clearly should have been drawn from the same mold. Ditto for Brightness, Pencil Width, Blur Width, Layer Style: Scale.

The is limited to the Mac version only. Windows version has essentially 2 types of sliders that are used very consistently. Also saying that there are 9 different sliders is deceiving. The layer blending and threshold sliders for example are the exact same thing.

You don't need Apple to implement this, there is already a software product for the Mac that is slowly evolving into a full-featured photo editor: http://www.pixelmator.com/

I agree. We moved our entire design base to it and they love it. It's not bloatware and is priced sensibly

A closed source product built upon exploited open source code.

Can Pixelmator to do unto others?

If you're inclined to downvote this sentiment, at least have the testicles to comment why.

1 - You are being inflammatory and immature. You are welcome to raise your own opinions without questioning the testicular fortitude of everyone on this site.

2 - Pixelmator is reliant on ImageMagick, which is governed by the ImageMagick license. This license in no way prohibits commercial use of the library, and requires only attribution. By all accounts Pixelmator has respected this license.

3 - Not only has Pixelmator respected the letter of the license agreement, but it even widely advertises its use of open source components. How this is a bad thing for open source in general, only you seem to know.

4 - To pre-empt any Stallman-esque tirades about the evils of commercial exploitation of open source software... remember that no developers are in any way forced to allow others to commercial exploit their open source work. ImageMagick has done this out of their own accord, and it would be presumptuous to assume that people following their license are exploiting them in a way they did not intend. Furthermore, from what I can tell Pixelmator has added extremely substantial functionality to ImageMagick (a top-end GUI app instead of a command-line app, really?), and is deserving of whatever commercial success they may derive from this work.

cool off man! those people are just a couple of devs trying to make it.

Oh, you think these comments are supposed to be generated using your testicles! That's your problem right there. See, most of us use our eyes, brains and fingers. Commenting with your testicles sounds awkward and painful. I'm sorry you've had to go through that.

How about the fact that Flash (besides having performance issues) would more or less end the reason of having an app store and apple's one large source of revenue?

Do you think if iphone had flash, developers would go through the trouble of app betting process by apple? Every streaming music service, video service and flash games and applications would make Appstore irrelevant.

That, in my opinion, is the single biggest reason why we will _never_ see flash support in iphone of ipad no matter how fast and secure flash becomes in the near future.

Not that I care about flash in mobile device. But, using performance as the main reason for not supporting flash is silly. It can be one of the several reasons, but definitely not the main reason.

I think the app store would still be a big thing because it would still be the easiest distribution channel. Even if there was good flash support, there would still be the issue of developers trying to extract revenue from there apps. The app stores give people easy access and instills a quick impulse buy mentality which would be hard for someone developing for the iphone independent of the app store to achieve.

Performance for some graphics intensive apps I'd imagine would never be as good just because no matter how efficient flash becomes it would still be an extra layer things are being ran on.

App store would still be a relevant thing _now_ if apple were to allow flash. Simply because users have been accustomed to the concept of app store. An iphone without an app store wouldn't make sense.

But, if iphone had flash the first time it was released, I honestly believe it would make app store irrelevant or at the very least it would make some serious dent in to app store revenue.

Apple's three large sources of revenue are selling Macs, selling iPods, and selling iPhones. Everything else--from music to TV shows to movies to iPhone apps--is a complementary product rather than a major revenue driver for Apple.

There was an interesting blog post about Apple shifting to make the app store more of a razor blade model, especially with the iPad coming soon.

http://www.marketspacetrading.com/the-latest/video-apples-st...

"Even in these economically challenging times, we are incredibly pleased to report our best quarterly revenue and earnings in Apple history -- surpassing $10 billion in quarterly revenue for the first time ever."

"The company said strong music and video sales drove a record quarter for its iTunes Store. ITunes brought in its highest sales ever on Christmas Day and Christmas week." (Jan 2009)

http://www.variety.com/article/VR1117998905.html?categoryId=...

"iTunes and App Store are still running a bit over break-even." — Peter Oppenheimer (Apple CFO)

(via http://www.techcrunch.com/2010/01/25/apple-q1-2010-results/ )

For a company whose main product lines throw off massive amounts of cash "a bit over break-even" is SEC-speak for "loss leader." If they ran for too long as money-losers then Apple would be more vulnerable to predatory pricing attacks based on the closed nature of both products, as long as they barely make money then Apple has better protection.

Flash on the iPhone wouldn't end the App Store. Flash developers would still release in the App Store because it is easier to make money in the App Store than over the mobile web.

I don't get this argument. If Flash would draw developers away from Cocoa Touch and the App Store, why wouldn't HTML5? Apple's pushing HTML5.

Further, if your server is set up to deliver streaming music or video in a standard format, you can already use HTML5 to deliver that instead of the App Store. It's easier, since you don't have to go through the approval process. The App Store just carries a better chance of visibility and a much easier way of monetizing.

Because, unfortunately, HTML5 != Flash. There's more to Flash than proprietary versions of <canvas> and <video>.

On second thought, that is a valid question: Why exactly is Apple pushing HTML5? I can't really think of any reason in which it benefits Apple.

Apple already invested a lot into Webkit. So it probably makes sense for them to push HTML5.

It benefits Apple greatly to have their core technology as one of the driving forces of the open web.

And now they've pretty much won the mobile browser war (WebKit is in Android, iPhone OS and coming to RIM's OS), the "war" seems to be over.

I agree to a great extent ... but I don't think we're living in that world. I just don't see Adobe getting its software development act together; for the vast majority of companies this sort of thing just gets worse and worse ... interestingly, Microsoft has shown ability to reverse that with Vista -> Windows 7.

So if I were Apple/Jobs I won't even consider changing the policy until they showed some basic competence and dedication to getting things right for a long enough time.

Flash is doomed. I'm more interested in what would happen if Apple did write a Photoshop competitor.

Hmmm, another detailed and specific list of Apple's discontents with Adobe which pretty much doesn't intersect with this on submitted yesterday: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1102512

First sentence:

For some absolutely shocking reason some people wonder why the Apple iPad comes without Java and Flash support.

Fair to say it's basically a biased rant.

Yeah, definitely a rant (there's nothing to be happy about in this situation, unless you think Flash is evil per se (e.g. its not well known cookie system)), but it seems to be backed up with hard facts.

Still, for the longest time the main target demography of Mac users were designers who were primarily using Photoshop. Maybe Apple should present their Photoshop replacement asap.

Or perhaps the relationship is more complex than that. Despite his antics, Steve Ballmer was right about developers. Apple might be irritated by Adobe over some issues, but I don't think they would want to cut Photoshop's lunch like that.

looks like MSFT would benefit from conflicts between apple/adobe, apple/google etc.

Once again, every single issue listed in this article would disappear if Adobe freed Flash. I don't know how they can't see the necessity of this. They should do it soon, before serious HTML5 adoption gets underway, if they want Flash to last.

Supposedly, the swf specification is already available to anyone who wants to implement it, without restriction:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adobe_Flash#Open_standard_alter...

Wil Shipley (the Delicious Monster guy, formerly of the Omni Group) tweeted that they wrote their own Flash player for Rhapsody, and it wasn't hard:

http://twitter.com/wilshipley/status/8404153085

I doubt it was full featured, given how huge is the spec and how many technologies it embeds especially nowadays (video streaming, p2p etc).

And doesn't the video streaming include payments to e.g. the H.264 rights holders? Freeing the whole thing still wouldn't give others the right to distribute it with those codecs.

Right, but that doesn't really help. See http://www.linux.com/archive/feature/134378 . Adobe's release of the spec followed by their removal of license restrictions from it was a PR move; if not, Gnash and swfdec would be a lot farther than they are. They are still incompatible with a large percentage of recent (like, last five years recent) Flash content.

For Flash to really be open, Adobe has to open all of its associated technologies and they have to provide a decent reference implementation. The most obvious path to this is opening the Flash Player blob.

How would freeing Flash do anything to fix the problems with Creative Suite?

Ugh, I forgot about that one, and didn't see it when I went back over to verify my statement.

It won't fix the stagnant user interface issue, but it might fix problems with the slowness since new versions of CS use Flash even for UI widgets, so if can you can set it up such that CS uses a faster Flash Player, then you can get better performance.

They will free it, once it's too late and no one cares. Kind of like Java.

In what world does nobody care about Java?

Nobody cares for Java in the same sense that Microsoft is dead.

Nobody apparently include the growing mass of Scala and Clojure developers.

Just as reasonable to think this would be solved if Apple opened up the iPhone platform to Flash.

Well, the difference is that iPhone OS is only meant to run a few specific Apple devices. Flash is so integral now that to stay alive it must be able to run on anything that loads web pages.

As such, it makes much more sense to open up Flash. Even if Apple opened iPhone OS, that would only solve the problem for Apple's devices (assuming Adobe acted upon the openness, though I don't see any reason why they would or why they don't have enough info to create it now), and everyone else's beefs with Flash would still exist.

The part about Adobe being slow to fix bugs had me laughing, I've seen apple take years to fix obvious annoying bugs that had developers banging their heads against their desks.

Apple is so annoying to work with with their insane secrecy and arrogance, if I was Adobe I'd pull Photoshop for OSX and talk Microsoft into pulling their Windows licenses for Parallels.

if I was Adobe I'd pull Photoshop for OSX

This is, perhaps, one of the reasons why you're not Adobe.

It's not a completely outrageous point. There is a not-insignificant group of Apple customers who are using their Macs for design purposes with Photoshop being their primary tool.

If Photoshop ceased to be available on the Mac (or performed below standard) then which is more likely?

They find some other tool? Or switch to an Operating System which lets them run their tool of choice?

For casual photo editing, you would probably try a different tool. For professionals who live in Photoshop, they'll probably just switch to Windows.

If Photoshop ceased to exist for the Mac, that's a huge opportunity for a 3rd party developer or Apple themselves to fill the gap. While most Mac OS users can now simply boot into Windows, I'm sure they wouldn't all be happy about it.

You buy your hardware because it runs your software, not the other way around.

Professional designers will switch to whatever platform Photoshop runs in. For many of them, the reason they run mac in the first place is because it has better support for their design tools.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com