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iPhone OS4 today

Discussion in 'iOS and tvOS' started by maxfax2009, Apr 8, 2010.

  1. Eric5h5

    Eric5h5

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    Nobody ever said they did. What's claimed is 98% of the mobile app market, which seems at least somewhat likely.

    --Eric
     
  2. tinmanassets

    tinmanassets

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    I am not too worried.

    At some point Higgy will give us an update, and if it is not what I want to hear, I can get all worked up then. But until that time, there is no reason to waste energy worrying.

    I am going to spend my energy on adding the newest graphic update to our Unity/iPhone game. If it turns out we can no longer release on iPhone, then hello DimeRocker! :)

    My gut feeling is that it will all work out fine for Unity devs and not so good for flash devs. But I have no real data to back that up :)

    Cheers!
    -Ben
     
  3. Troy-Dawson

    Troy-Dawson

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    Actually, I would assume that these libraries are compiled by xcode. (oops, I see that these DLLs are intermediate files)

    The issue as clearly stated in the new license agreement is that Apple does not want us to code iPhone apps in C# or a non WebKit JavaScript like ActionScript.

    Now, I'm praying that there will be a loophole opened for Unity since it is a 3D environment that is not presenting a UIKit-style UE per se but games, and the C# we write is *game* logic not app logic, if that makes sense.

    We're games, not apps!
     
  4. zibba

    zibba

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    Yes exactly, hence the new clause - Adobe's third party AS3 to ARM compiler. However, Adobe has far more clout than small game developers, so Unity might just get under the radar. What I don't understand: Adobe with Photoshop MADE the Mac, and now Jobs hates them.
     
  5. Eric5h5

    Eric5h5

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    I would hope/guess that this is about bypassing the XCode compiling step, which is what CS5 is doing. And is what Unity specifically does not do at all. So if that's the case, everything is OK. If it's not the case....

    --Eric
     
  6. MadMax

    MadMax

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    Jobs is a tool. He is going to lose what he has left of the professional market.
     
  7. ipad

    ipad

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    Oh...Kill flash!!
     
  8. StarManta

    StarManta

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    Well, On this I'm with Apple. Adobe has failed to make Flash the slightest bit efficient on the Mac for years and years. Even on a modern Mac, a hi-def Youtube video can bring the CPU to its knees. Little 600x400 2D Flash games struggle to get above 15fps. God help you if the page you're looking at has a video AND multiple Flash ads. You literally get better performance with emulation than with Flash on a Mac. And, most Safari crashes? Flash.

    Adobe's had years to get this fixed, and haven't so much as sent a single engineer to Infinity Loop to figure out why their plugin is so damn slow. That's what made Apple lose its S*** and ban them from the iPhone.
     
  9. zibba

    zibba

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    Eric, I hope so. I have everything crossed that it's just a bypassing Xcode issue.
     
  10. iBrent

    iBrent

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    @Ben, you certainly don't look worried! :D

    I didn't realize we had so many lawyers on this forum. :p

    Whatever happens, just bend over and take like a man. (to my happy place, to my happy place).
     
  11. MadMax

    MadMax

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    I hope Adobe stops releasing Photoshop on the Mac it is not as if they have any real competition. It would not hurt them in the long run.
     
  12. Dreamora

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    The problem is that this step was already illegal and would from the legal point of view lead to a straight termination of the dev contract.
    Not for Adobe but for every single dev that uses it in a project and requests approval.
     
  13. galent

    galent

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    Yeah, I figured... rethought that post right after I sent it. I still don't know why these guys are messing around with bytecode? they know what platform they're building to... it's like the MS approach to .Net, if you know where your deploying, why in the name of all things unholy (yes Jobs, that includes you ;) ), do they use a separate VM install?!? I get Unity, I get Mono (cause it's for more than one platform), I get Java, but... Ahh.. I'm just venting again....

    More Nuts anyone? :D

    I think i'll watch a movie... see how that turns out (it's got to be better than this right?) ... let's see... TItanic or I am Legend....

    Galen

    :twisted:
     
  14. Morgan

    Morgan

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    Three reasons for hope:

    1. Apple has reversed course on stupid decisions in the past. (And the decision in question MIGHT just be a matter of poor wording.) Misguided blunders are not Apple’s usual mode of operation... except when it comes to their dev program. It’s hardly rare in that area.

    2. If anyone can fine a loophole, UT can! I feel bad for everyone’s aggravation at this time (including my own) but especially UT themselves.

    3. I wrote Apple an email. They HAVE to listen :) It was spell-checked and everything!
     
  15. Discord

    Discord

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    I severely doubt it would bankrupt UT. Unity has other platforms it can publish too. Like Mac, PC, Wii, and now Xbox and Ps3 support is on the way. It would obviously take a hit, but I doubt it would be a lethal blow. Especially because Unity 3.0 is going to be awesome.
     
  16. sigsom

    sigsom

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    You should watch the movie Life Stinks.
     
  17. Gaspedal

    Gaspedal

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    perhaps we all can then make unsigned-games for jailbraked iPhones and we can use paypal for payment with keygenerators. :)

    no, I would definitely boykott Apple when this should be true.

    I love Microsoft !!!
     
  18. Dreamora

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    We should create a standard usable well worded mail that anyone can just copy and paste.

    That would make it clear to apple that there is more than just a few wanna bees but a large front opposing to that wording.

    Also the mail should be put up on the monotouch boards if possible as they are in the same boat as we and collaboration among "dot netties" can't hurt in this case
     
  19. tau

    tau

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    @dremora
    Well, you can code all those APIs by hand and use Unity as 3D game engine that does nothing but accesses OpenGL API, the only concern is Sound API as it very specific to Apple API...


    Brew MP is the future - as soon as Unity is ported there, I'll throw my iPhone in my toilet and crap on top of it, then take a picture and post it on my blog to send Apple teh Message
     
  20. galent

    galent

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    Naw, I'm a rebel, and an optimist ... I'm going with x-men ;)

    See ya all in the morning.

    Cheers,

    Galen
     
  21. MadMax

    MadMax

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    I do not think Apple believes it can make stupid decisions. This seems like a strategic move. After years of hardship, the forces of Apple and it legions of Mac heads are on the attack.
     
  22. HanulTech

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    From a legal standpoint (definitely in the US and almost certainly in Europe), the old "it's their platform so they can do what the heck they want", actually doesn't hold all that much water. As Microsoft learned with Windows and IE, as AT&T learned with the national telecommunications system, as Union Pacific learned at the turn of the last century with their railroad system, and as Google will probably soon learn, the courts take a very dim view of anti-trust/ oligopolistic behavior. Given Apple's size and the emergent share in mobile devices, nothing is going to happen without out a lot of scrutiny. (And, of course, Apple knows this.)

    There is probably some basis for blocking Flash *if* Apple can demonstrate legitimate security concerns, but Unity? Technically, I don't see the basis for any such argument. And from a PR and legal standpoint, nothing but downside.

    A more likely scenario, IMHO, would be for Apple to just acquire Unity and then actually be in a position to provide a state of the art IDE and SDK for mobile application development.

    (And yes game development is just a hobby, and I do know what I'm talking about.)
     
  23. InfiniteAmmo

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    As someone else mentioned above, I don't think these terms will affect Unity at all... since it goes through XCode to do its thing.
     
  24. jbud

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    if apple keeps this up they are going to alienate alot of developers. I think we will see more exits from the platform like this one:
    http://techcrunch.com/2009/11/11/jo...ssively-popular-iphone-app-quits-the-project/

    If the solution is to have unity3d as a static lib and then writing all our game unmanaged code (objective-c / c++ / c).. I could live with that. Garbage collection on the mono framework can be a big overhead, so having the option to write unmanaged code might not be such a bad thing.. (i know you can do native plugins but this doesnt allow you to write your gameobjects in unmanaged code).

    note the emphasis on "option". As it would be sad to lose the option of writing iphone apps in c#/Javascript as this opens up game development on the iphone to a broader range of developers.
     
  25. tingham

    tingham

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    Has anyone done reporting to find out how many games built for the App Store using Unity have been Featured or run in top 10s?
     
  26. maxfax2009

    maxfax2009

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  27. bibbinator

    bibbinator

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    This doesn't really make a difference. Compiling in Xcode doesn't mean anything. Even if Adobe emitted an Xcode project and it compiled with Xcode, it would still use Tamarin (Flash VM) and that's what Apple apparently is against (all VMs even Lua, Mono, etc.).

    It's Flash's VM that causes it to be unstable, leak memory and perform badly on Mac. Tamarin has JIT compilers for Windows and Linux, but isn't enabled on Mac which is why Flash runs slower.

    So the reason people here are worried is simply that any VM of any kind seems to be not welcome.

    Further, there isn't much need for speculation of most posters. You can simply look through your Unity Xcode project and see what they're doing for most of it. The problem is we don't know what the mono bytecodes files are doing so that's where the speculation comes in.

    If the bytecodes generated create some sort of state machine or VM, then we should worry. If the bytecodes are truly native ARM code calling native Apple frameworks and there isn't any virtual platform present, then we're fine.
     
  28. Dreamora

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    That and with Adobe having the CS5 media event in not more than 4 days they used this TOS thing with the clear intend to fire back with all their cannons at Adobe.

    The heat it will create over the weekend could hurt Adobes reputation in a way it was never hurt before and that all for their god complex although any somewhere capable programmers is able to tell that the flash player as it stands was fine 2003 or so but by now is not more than a very bad joke build upon even worse standards and totally lacking Q&A work
     
  29. maxfax2009

    maxfax2009

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    Adobe is dead me thinks - or will cost them lots.
     
  30. sigsom

    sigsom

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    Adobe will be fine and in the end Apple will lose this war of flash with them. The fact is that pretty much most of the web still uses flash to display content and I'm not so sure that HTML5 will be able to stop that.
     
  31. Morgan

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    In my experience, very little of the web relies on Flash, but YMMV as they say. Flash video is common, but the big video sites are moving away from requiring it (many already have). Flash games are common, but many Flash games are already re-made for iPhone (Fantastic Contraption, Bloons TD, etc.) and there’s no shortage of OTHER games on iPhone anyway. As for Flash used simply for nav bars... thank goodness I don’t see much of that anymore.

    Flash is not dead—I still love to develop for it for PC/Mac, and I’m working on a Flash web-game right now. But Flash not big in the mobile space and I don’t see that changing. Even if Apple didn’t object, the battery life and performance problems are still real. And complex Flash content (games especially) need a mouse and keyboard, with rollovers and the like. A touchscreen just doesn’t do a good job of that. (Not with current Flash sites—although future Flash sites can be designed differently. Still, a game/app designed to work the same with a mouse as with a touchscreen will often be subpar: taking real advantage of the strengths of neither one.)

    Anyway... I don’t see why Apple should have such a beef with Adobe. Flash plugin? Yes, I can see why that’s a bad idea. But Flash as yet another tool to feed the app store? You’d think Apple wouldn’t care. (In fact, allowing Flash into the app store takes some heat off of calls for Flash in the browser.)

    But right or wrong, this sure does look like an anti-Adobe move in part. And I HOPE that’s what it is, because that leaves them open to fitting Unity in!
     
  32. middayc

    middayc

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    I don't know if you are in denial? 3.3.1 says this:

    Unity has JavaScript but they specifically mention "as executed by the iPhoen OS WebKit".

    Anyway, this is very extreme move even for apple. It's possible they won't execute it in full or change it.

    --

    iPhone has 98%? 98% of what??
     
  33. Discord

    Discord

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    I'm sure that would do wonders for all the other platforms that Unity supports.
     
  34. Randy-Edmonds

    Randy-Edmonds

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    This whole thing is literally making me feel sick to my stomach. I hope this gets cleared up soon.
     
  35. Morgan

    Morgan

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    DaringFireball has a follow-up:
    http://daringfireball.net/2010/04/why_apple_changed_section_331

    He makes a good case for why Apple doesn’t want any “uber platform” to take over and gain power indirectly over Apple’s future OS and SDK innovation.

    But I hope Apple sees that gaming and Unity (an area John Gruber doesn’t seem to understand) are not that kind of threat.

    He says:

    IPHONE DEVELOPERS: No change. If you’re a developer and you’ve been following Apple’s advice, you will never even notice this rule. You’re already using Xcode, Objective-C, and WebKit. If you’re an iPhone developer and you are not following Apple’s advice, you’re going to get screwed eventually. If you are constitutionally opposed to developing for a platform where you’re expected to follow the advice of the platform vendor, the iPhone OS is not the platform for you. It never was. It never will be.

    But using Unity was not violating some Apple guideline. Apple was fine with it until now. And Unity+Xcode offers something Xcode really, truly does not by itself.

    Unity does seem to be caught in a crossfire between other parties.

    P.S. Not to stray off-topic too much, but here’s the future I’d love to see for Adobe and Flash: the Flash IDE is re-done so that it becomes an awesome platform for building standard HTML5 content! HTML5 lacks rapid-development tools as sophisticated as Flash (which is one reason Flash isn’t going away any time soon). Adobe could make a bundle of money meeting that need!
     
  36. Troy-Dawson

    Troy-Dawson

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    Part of my response that I mailed to Gruber:

    I agree with everything you wrote except where it got to "IPHONE DEVELOPERS: No Change".

    The Skeeball iPhone app was written in Unity 3D. Unity is a mind-blowingly amazing game development platform that pumps out a support functionality that would take an experienced Apple OpenGL developer like me (I've got the t-shirt) months of work to duplicate.

    The problem of course is that Unity is also a push-button app development for the Microsoft's XNA platform and god-knows what else.

    This is excellent for developers, good for Apple users (who get more games), good for Microsoft (who also get these games), but exclusively bad for Apple.

    Objective-C is a poor, poor substitute for Unity 3D's game IDE.

    Apple's 98% or whatever of the mobile app download market brings up antitrust issues here.

    My only hope as a Unity licensee is Apple's language referring to "Applications". I'm not writing an application, I'm writing a game!
     
  37. Dreamora

    Dreamora

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    Unhappily yes.
    I guess unlike unity, mono and a few other middle ware technologies, Adobes IPA build (all the work that lead to that would have been completely illegal in all places of the world aside the USA where reverse engineering is not an act of business class espionage and suable) does not seem to be even remotely as easy to identify so they seem to go ahead and just use call redirection detection to see what runs through an intermediate framework.
    As they can legally not just say that flash is not allowed (though realistically the could just terminate every single dev contract of devs sending in flash apps for approval, hurting adobe worlds worse than they do it that way though now the PR reputation hit for Adobe is really really bad due to Apples epic timing releasing this 4 days before Adobes CS5 event), they now have to hit us all.

    But lets see the good thing: NO FURTHER SEGA MEGADRIVE GAMES :D

    If adobe had ever used its brain instead of sitting on its monopol position and not do anything about the flash problems it has had for a long time performance wise in general but an order of a magnitude worse on OSX, then all this would not exist at all:

    1. Flash apps would run fast
    2. Adobe CS5 would either have a flash player thats hardware accelerated like Scaleforms or alternatively offer at least a partial HTML5 / WebGL based implementation

    Problem is Adobe decided that controlling the monopol and making flash an open thing are enough to keep the control, even worse they came up with the stupid idea to fight one of the major mobile players and its CEO personally although all know about Jobs quirks in that relation and he has no problem to pull the whole company in his personal fights of the "correct view of the world"
     
  38. Tempest

    Tempest

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    http://blog.anscamobile.com/2010/04/do-apples-new-rules-affect-you/

    ^^ From Corona (iPhone Apps using Lua)

    Corona, like Unity, allows you to write an iPhone app in a language other than C/C++/Obj-C/JavaScript, however, when you press "Build" you are given an XCode project.

    This appears to be the big issue. You are using XCode itself to build the project that gets installed on the app. So you're fine.

    This isn't 100% for sure, of course, but it's from a company in the same shoes as Unity, and it's a positive sign.
     
  39. Morgan

    Morgan

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    Thanks. I do like that interpretation—and I think it’s highly plausible that this is nothing more than an issue of wording that isn’t as clear as we’d like (because Apple wasn’t even thinking about our situation). But until I hear clarification from Apple, I can’t be too reassured.

    P.S. I wrote a pro-Unity note to John Gruber too. He seems to love it when great teams make great software with great usability; I bet he could appreciate Unity even if he’s not into game development.
     
  40. Colin Holgate

    Colin Holgate

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    I don't think that publishing from XCode is good enough to comply with the wording of the agreement. There it clearly says that the app has to be "originally" programmed in Objective-C. Any of these tools where the original programming is done in another language would not have complied with that.

    I hope there's some legal issue here, where Apple have committed some sort of anti-competitive crime. It would be a bit like Microsoft insisting that all browsers that work on Windows must do their rendering using an IE component.
     
  41. spartan

    spartan

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    I hope to see an official response about this issue, because I bought Unity iPhone Basic two days ago :(
     
  42. reemonemo

    reemonemo

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    Unity doesn't deploy to XNA. It deploys Xbox 360 games using C\C++. XNA is C#.
     
  43. Troy-Dawson

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    The legalities are subtle I think. Apple doesn't have a monopoly position (80%) in smartphones, but they do have a monopoly position in the mobile app download market.

    But they could be entirely within their rights to close their developer program and their AppStore to apps that violate their license terms; IIRC MS ran into antitrust problems by requiring third parties to not include Netscape software on their products.

    But since Apple is not limiting the behavior of third-party hardware vendors, we're in new legal ground here. It's Apple's developer program, and Apple's AppStore, they can probably do what they want with it.

    Microsoft argued that it was their Windows desktop that booted, allowing them control over what the user had access to, but the court saw it differently. No doubt this will be subject to more stringent review in Europe.
     
  44. Dreamora

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    The Unity engine originally is obj-c and c/c++ too, so is mono, so by that pure nature, its all legal.

    The one and only point that could burn unity is the intermediate layer ruling.
     
  45. Troy-Dawson

    Troy-Dawson

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    Oops. my brain is perpetually 6-10 months in the future. . .
     
  46. Eric5h5

    Eric5h5

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    The Unity executable, the thing that actually runs on the device, is originally programmed in C++. The question is, what about the data it makes use of (the .dlls that your JS/C# code gets turned into).

    --Eric
     
  47. Mandrake

    Mandrake

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    This is nothing new, Apple springing earth shattering stuff with no warning. Remember when they broke the web player with Snow Leopard? Good times!

    Right after the new 3.3.1, this was in there before and a lot of people continue to ignore it. Shiva, iTorque, etc

     
  48. chrono1081

    chrono1081

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    Same here :( I bought mine two weeks ago.
     
  49. Dreamora

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    Even then it won't.
    The announced xbox support is XDK support, no support for XNA and that will likely not change as the whole engine requires to be rewritten from ground up for XNA. you can't run C++ code (ie the unity engine at all) in XNA so no mobile windows 7 nor xbox "cheapo-store-for-usa primarily" deploy.
     
  50. Morgan

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    The wording seems so broad that it could, potentially, affect FAR more apps than Apple is likely to intend—if only we knew what went on behind the scenes of many apps. Potentially, I can imagine this being interpreted to apply to:

    Unity games
    TGB games
    Flash CS5 games (naturally)
    Untold other engines and tools affecting untold other apps
    OpenFeint, Agon, Plus+ and the like (which for now at least are still vital)
    The Netflix app (presumably using Silverlight and .NET?)
    The upcoming Hulu app (possibly using Flash CS5?)
    The emulators that run games from C64, Intellivision and the like (games that were not originally programmed with Xcode for sure)
    Other old games that were ported using in-house engines we know nothing about (but behind the scenes may work much like Unity in terms of how they connect to Xcode)
    And thus, maybe lots of IdTech games like the Doom and Wolfenstein games
    And some existing mobile titles (some of them actually decent, some not) ported from non-iPhone smartphones
    And what about Unreal Engine?

    In fact, it could be interpreted to mean that games found on other platforms are not welcome to be ported to iPhone unless they are begun anew from scratch (which is one way to do it, but not always the best).

    Clarification is surely needed! And I see that Tom Higgins has tweeted the obvious: that UT is looking into the matter.

    All we can do now is wait (and chew our hind legs, as I like to do when nervous).