Hacker News Reader

Comment by DeusExMachina | Hacker News Reader

Very good analysis of the relationship between the two companies and the goals of each one. But I disagree on this passage:

As a PostScript developer you were welcome to work with Adobe's low-quality font technology, but Adobe refused to allow any developer to access its proprietary high-quality APIs.

Sounds like something Apple would do, doesn't it?

There are a lot of things I, as a developer, don't like in Apple decisions on iPhone development and App Store policies, but to my record I've never seen such a behavior from Apple.

Apple does not deny developers to use high quality technologies for its platforms, apart of the private API, but that's another matter.

So I might miss something, but in my opinion, if you work on an Apple platform you get from Apple all the technologies to work on it.

View on HN

>Apple does not deny developers to use high quality technologies for its platforms, apart of the private API, but that's another matter.

No, I'm pretty sure that's exactly the matter. Only Apple apps can multitask.

It's an understandable design decision, but it's certainly a parallel. (And to be completely fair it's changing, but you're being intellectually dishonest.)

Yes, this is a point I wasn't thinking about. But in iPhone OS 4 multitasking is coming and is similar to the android one.

But I think (my personal opinion, not backed by any data) that this was a decision based on technical matters. From the quoted passage it seems that Adobe was keeping the technology for itself to outpace competition. I don't think this applies to Apple using multitasking while developers can't.

It is similar to Android in the sense, that it works using the same principles.

It is not similar in the sense, that on iPhone you have some specific usage scenarios you can use with multitasking. On Android, it is open-ended, you can multitask for any reason you come up.

No, I'm pretty sure that's exactly the matter. Only Apple apps can multitask.

But that's iPhone apps, they were never intended or claimed to be truly open. Adobe is claiming they "openly published the specification" to PostScript, but they didn't. Compare that to a truly open standard like HTML5. Does Apple have a secret, proprietary API for that?

Of course they published the specification in 80's, it would be difficult to do anything without it, as PostScript is programming language (for a specific niche, but Turing complete).

What they didn't publish at the time was Type1, as they wanted to be the gatekeeper for publishing T1 fonts (see similarity to Apple?). It didn't take long and T1 was reverse engineered, despite the obfuscation.

Anyone have a link to more info on "refusing to allow high quality technologies"? Seems like the author left out Adobe's reasoning.

Not a link, just what I remember. You are welcome to Google it ;).

At the time, PostScript documents could use Type1 and Type3 fonts. Type3 fonts were basically bitmaps, anyone could create one. Type1 fonts were entirely different matter - they were nice outline fonts and there wasn't anything similar. The problem was, that Adobe didn't publish specification how to create such fonts. They wanted everyone wishing to publish a font to go through them (for a fee, of course; I cannot help myself but it reminds me Apple and their App Store).

In the end, it didn't work. Microsoft and Apple joined and created TrueType. The Type1 format was reverse engineered. Later Adobe capitulated and joined MS with Apple to create OpenType, which is open and is superset of both T1 and TT.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com