Webmonkey » Apple

Rails App Details Apple’s New ‘Passbook’ Web Service

Scott Gilbertson — Thu, 13 Sep 2012 15:02:58 +0000

Apple’s new Passbook app. Image: Apple.

Apple’s recent iPhone announcement contained one tidbit of interest for web developers — Passbook.

Passbook is a new app coming in iOS 6 that collects your boarding passes, movie tickets, retail coupons, loyalty cards, and more and stores them all in one place. Checking in for a flight? Just pull up Passbook and you’re done. Ditto for redeeming coupons, getting movie tickets and so on.

What makes Passbook interesting for web developers is that on the back end there’s a REST-style API for sending updates. The API allows developers to register web services which can then automatically update content on the “pass,” as Passbook entries are known. For example, you could update a coupon or add more credit to a pass based on a transaction on your website.

Passbook communication happens through Apple’s new PassKit web service. The PassKit API offers endpoints to get the latest version of a pass, control push notifications for a pass and query for passes registered for a device.

As with all things Apple, you’ll need a developer account to build anything, but if you’d like to get some idea of how the web service end of Passbook works, check out Mattt Thompson’s passbook_rails_example. Thompson has put together a basic Rails app that shows how to work with Passbook, including how to register devices, get the latest version of a pass, get serial numbers for passes on a device and unregister a device.

For more details, head on over to GitHub.

Is Apple Using Patents to Hurt Open Standards?

Peter Bright (Ars Technica) — Mon, 12 Dec 2011 15:18:31 +0000

Opera developer Haavard Moen has accused Apple of repeatedly using patents to undermine the development of web standards and block their finalization.

World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), the industry group that governs and oversees the development of web standards, requires that every specification it approves be implementable on a royalty-free basis, barring extraordinary circumstances that justify an exception to this rule. The specifications can contain patented technology, as long as royalty-free patent licenses are available.

Members of W3C—a group that includes representatives from Apple, Microsoft, Google, Mozilla, and Opera—are required to disclose any patents that they hold that are relevant to each specification. Depending on how far the specification is through the standardization process, they have between 60 and 150 days to make this disclosure.

If royalty-free licensing is available, the specification can proceed as normal. Participation in the development of a particular specification obliges W3C members to offer royalty-free licensing for technology used in that specification. Nonparticipants can also voluntarily offer a royalty free license, but they are not obliged to.

If, however, there is no commitment to offer royalty-free licensing for the patents in question, a Patent Advisory Group (PAG) is formed. The PAG will then assess whether the patent is truly applicable to the specification, and if so, how best to address the issue. The PAG might then seek prior art to invalidate the patent, or it might recommend that the specification be modified, to work around the patent. It might even advise abandonment of the specification. Only in exceptional circumstances will it decide that the specification should stand, in spite of the lack of royalty freedom.

Without an appropriate patent grant, browser vendors—whether open source or proprietary—cannot implement the specification without opening themselves up to a lawsuit. Such specifications would be, at best, an extremely risky proposition for anyone seeking to develop a browser, and none of the major browser vendors would even consider implementing a specification with known unlicensed patents.

Haavard identifies three separate occasions, twice in 2009, and again in 2011, where Apple has disclosed patents and not offered royalty-free licensing. In the first 2009 patent claim, Apple said that it had a patent covering W3C’s “widget” specification. A PAG was formed, and determined that Apple’s patent was not relevant. In the second 2009 claim, Apple claimed to have two patents covering W3C’s widget security specification. A PAG was again formed. It decided that one patent was not relevant, and the other didn’t apply. With both 2009 claims, Apple waited until the last minute to disclose its patents.

Touch Events

This time, Cupertino is claiming to have three patents, and an application for a fourth, that cover some of W3C’s touch event specification. This time the disclosure was made with about a month left to go. Again, the lack of royalty-free licensing means that a PAG is likely to be formed.

This in turn will delay the development of the specification and cost W3C members further time and money. The PAG process is not quick; the widget security PAG did not deliver its verdict until October of this year.

Haavard’s conclusion is that there is a pattern of behavior here; that Apple is trying to disrupt the standards process with its patent claims. He references the touch specification in particular—this is plainly an area where Apple has lots of expertise and interest in the technology, but the company opted out of working on the specification. If Apple had worked on the specification, it would have had to disclose sooner and offer licensing, and Haavard believes that avoiding this commitment is why Apple refused to work on the specification.

Apple’s is acting within its rights. W3C obliges members to disclose patent claims, and Apple is duly disclosing them. However, it’s easy to be sympathetic to Haavard’s argument. The two prior PAGs that resulted from Apple’s refusal to offer royalty-free patent licenses delayed and inconvenienced W3C, but ultimately on both occasions the groups decided that Apple’s patent claims were irrelevant. If Apple was hoping to keep some technology to itself, it did not succeed.

Moreover, W3C doesn’t require patent-holders to give up their competitive advantage. It’s acceptable to W3C for the royalty-free patent licenses to only cover implementations of the W3C specifications; if Apple wants to permit the royalty-free use of its touch patents in HTML5 browsers, but nowhere else, this would be an option. Such terms would allow browsers to implement the standard but still keep the technology off-limits to, for example, Android. But Apple did not offer such terms before, and so it seems unlikely that it will offer such terms this time.

Further, the only likely result of this is that Apple’s patents simply get worked around. W3C’s aversion to royalties means that it’s unlikely that it would accept any non-free license (should Apple even offer one), and the importance of touch input to phones and tablets means that W3C is unlikely to abandon the specification altogether. There’s no win possible for Apple—just wasted time and money for those seeking to make the web a more effective, more open platform.

Indeed, the result might even constitute a loss for Apple; the prior art that PAGs can uncover could jeopardize the patents themselves. The PAG subjects the patents to a certain amount of scrutiny—scrutiny that could be avoided through provision of a suitable license.

Apple has thus far not responded to our request for comment.

Apple’s work on WebKit and with W3C has undoubtedly helped the web community. But actions such as this show the company’s approach to standards and intellectual property is, at best, inconsistent, and and worst downright unhelpful: if open standards and Apple’s IP interests conflict, it’s the IP interests that win out. This may be good for Apple, but it’s bad for the open web.

This article originally appeared on Ars Technica, Wired’s sister site for in-depth technology news.

Mac App Store Gems for Web Developers

Scott Gilbertson — Thu, 06 Jan 2011 18:10:59 +0000

The Mac App Store has launched with over 1,000 OS X applications. Our sister site Gadget Lab has more details on what that means for Apple fans.

One thousand apps for the launch is impressive, but what’s in it for web developers? Here’s a quick roundup of a few apps that Mac-loving web developers might want to check out (URLs point to the Mac App Store so you’ll need OS X 10.6.6 for the links to work).

iSlice (free) — This slick little app opens PhotoShop documents and slices them up. ISlice retains all the layer info in the Photoshop file so it’s easy to hide background layers and focus on what you need to extract. If you already own Photoshop there’s no point to this one, but if you frequently need to slice comps and don’t want to pay Photoshop’s hefty price tag, iSlice fits the bill.
OAuth for Mac ($3) — OAuth is pain if all you want to do is pull a bit of data out of say, the Twitter API. OAuth for Mac handles the OAuth calls for you and quickly generates a token. I haven’t had a chance to test it yet, but it looks like it would be handy for testing and developing quick scripts.
Colorbender ($2) — A nice looking color-scheme generator with hex and RGB values. There are tons of free color-scheme generators on the web, but if you’d like a Mac-native version, Colorbender looks like it would fit the bill.
mColorMeter ($3) — Ever wanted to know what color your favorite website is using in its menubar? With mColorMeter you can just hover over any pixel on your screen and the app will tell you the value in RGB, Hex and Munsell colors.
Base ($17) — Base is nice-looking graphical interface for working with SQLite databases. It’s not cheap, but $17 seems a small price to pay if it means never having to work the sqlite3 command line again.
Gitbox ($40) — Hardly a day goes by without someone claiming there are no good Git GUIs. We haven’t tried Gitbox so we’re not endorsing it, especially at $40, but it does offer a very nice-looking graphical UI for Git. And the app comes bundled with the official Git binaries so there’s nothing extra to install — just download the app and start using Git. Great for the command-line-phobic, but seasoned Git users will likely turn up their noses at the price. (See this thread on Hacker News for some more thoughts on Gitbox.)
Honorable Mentions — There are quite a few apps in the new store that have been around forever. We love the all-in-one development tool Coda ($100), Text Wrangler (free), BBEdit (~~$125~~ currently on sale for $99) and Pixelmator ($30).

The biggest downside to Apple’s new App Store for Mac is that there are no trial versions of the software. For that, you’ll have to head to the developers’ site and (assuming there’s a trial version available) download a good ol’ .dmg file.

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Apple Updates Safari, Turns on Extensions

Michael Calore — Wed, 28 Jul 2010 19:12:05 +0000

The new Safari browser with the Twitter toolbar extension installed

Apple released an update to its Safari web browser Wednesday.

Safari 5.0.1 is available from Apple as a free download for Windows and for Mac OS X (Leopard or better). Mac users can also find it in Software Update.

This is an incremental upgrade, but it comes with one big new feature: Safari now has a real platform for third-party extensions, a feature that Firefox and Chrome have had for some time.

Safari 5 arrived in early June, and in addition to dozens of other enhancements (including the much-discussed Reader feature) it included a new architecture for creating lightweight browser extensions that enhance and personalize web pages and web services. Wednesday’s update now lets you install and run those extensions. Apple has also launched a new Extensions Gallery where you can browse the available extensions and download them.

All the major browsers — Safari included — have had a variety of plug-ins, add-ons and toolbars available for years. But Safari’s new extension architecture is much closer to the format recently adopted by Google Chrome and Firefox. This new breed of extensions can be written using HTML, JavaScript, CSS and other web standards. It makes for a much gentler learning curve for potential developers, and for an experienced web programmer, the effort required to create and distribute a standards-based extension is almost trivial. For users, these extensions are easier to maintain and less likely to slow down the browser.

Mozilla calls its lightweight extension project Jetpack, and it’s being incorporated into the newest Firefox releases. The next version of Google’s browser will let users sync their extensions across multiple installations of the browser.

Go to extensions.apple.com to see the gallery of extensions being promoted by Apple. Also, keep in mind that anyone can create and distribute a Safari extension, so distribution isn’t controlled like the App Store. For safety’s sake, Safari extensions are sandboxed inside the browser and signed with a digital certificate so you know you’re getting updates from the same person who created the original.

Apple is promoting a few big-name creations in the gallery. There’s an official Twitter extension, which integrates a simple toolbar Twitter client into your browser, one from MLB that displays scores and headlines, and an eBay manager sidebar for keeping a close eye on your auctions. There’s one on the way from Instapaper.

Of course, the irreverent extensions are more interesting. There’s Defacer, which hides “Like” buttons and other Facebook cruft you find around the web. Shut Up hides comments by default on blogs. A Cleaner YouTube removes visual distractions from video pages, promising to turn YouTube into “a clean and tranquil place” as if that’s even remotely possible.

There are around 100 extensions to choose from right now, and since the new extensions framework in Safari is so simple to develop for, we expect the list to keep growing quickly.

There is one other notable safety enhancement to Safari 5.0.1 — the form auto-fill vulnerability has been patched. This fixes a vulnerability that hackers could exploit to grab personal information from a user by forcing the browser to auto-fill a hidden web form with locally stored data. So, even if you may not care for extensions, you should upgrade Safari for this reason alone.

See Also:

Compelling Reasons To Upgrade to Safari 5 Right Now

Michael Calore — Tue, 08 Jun 2010 00:08:53 +0000

Update: Apple has fixed the rendering issue shown here, but this is what it looked like at launch. Pretty funny…

Apple’s Safari 5 info page in Safari 4:

Apple’s Safari 5 info page in Firefox:

Apple’s Safari 5 info page in Chrome:

Apple (Almost) Releases Safari 5

Michael Calore — Mon, 07 Jun 2010 23:26:50 +0000

A press release with details about Safari 5 was leaked on the web Monday afternoon, then promptly removed.

Many were expecting Apple to release a new version of its Safari web browser during the Worldwide Developer’s Conference (WWDC) taking place this week. But the Monday morning keynote was all about the new iPhone. Safari wasn’t discussed.

Then, at about 3:30pm Pacific time, a press release went out over the PRNewsWire service. It was live for a short time — under 10 minutes — before it vanished. The link now returns an error. Apple has yet to update the Safari pages of its website or make any additional announcements. We’re guessing the news item was released mistakenly or prematurely.

Update @ 4:30pm: The release is now available on the Apple website, though the Safari pages still haven’t been updated.

It was live long enough for us to grab a copy, and you can read the full release below. Here are some details.

There’s an extensions framework now. By description alone, Safari Extensions appears to be similar to the lightweight extensions frameworks used by Google Chrome and Mozilla’s Jetpack for Firefox — extensions are written in HTML/JavaScript, installed on the fly, and sandboxed.

There’s also Reader, a built-in app that strips ads, images and other clutter out of the way, presenting news articles and longer reads in a simplified, scrolling, text-only window “without distraction.” Instapaper and Readability, it appears as though Apple is drinking your milkshake.

According to the release, the updated browser will include expanded support for the HTML5 stack, including geolocation, sectioning elements, drag and drop, form validation, Ajax history and WebSocket. There’s also “full screen playback and closed captions for HTML5 video” — though we should note that Apple currently only supports native playback of h.264 video and not WebM, which all other major browsers are backing. No further details there.

Safari 5 uses the new Nitro JavaScript engine, which Apple says is 30 percent faster than Safari 4′s engine. You also get the ability to choose Bing as your search provider (just like in the iPhone 4 demo).

Full release follows:

Apple today released Safari 5, the latest version of the world’s fastest and most innovative web browser, featuring the new Safari Reader for reading articles on the web without distraction, a 30 percent performance increase over Safari 4,* and the ability to choose Google, Yahoo! or Bing as the search service powering Safari’s search field. Available for both Mac and Windows, Safari 5 includes improved developer tools and supports more than a dozen new HTML5 technologies that allow web developers to create rich, dynamic websites. With Safari 5, developers can now create secure Safari Extensions to customize and enhance the browsing experience.

“Safari continues to lead the pack in performance, innovation and standards support,” said Philip Schiller, Apple’s senior vice president of Worldwide Product Marketing. “Safari now runs on over 200 million devices worldwide and its open source WebKit engine runs on over 500 million devices.”

Safari Reader makes it easy to read single and multipage articles on the web by presenting them in a new, scrollable view without any additional content or clutter. When Safari 5 detects an article, users can click on the Reader icon in the Smart Address Field to display the entire article for clear, uninterrupted reading with options to enlarge, print or send via email.

Powered by the Nitro JavaScript engine, Safari 5 on the Mac runs JavaScript 30 percent faster than Safari 4, three percent faster than Chrome 5.0, and over twice as fast as Firefox 3.6.* Safari 5 loads new webpages faster using Domain Name System (DNS) prefetching, and improves the caching of previously viewed pages to return to them more quickly.

Safari 5 adds more than a dozen powerful HTML5 features that allow web developers to create media-rich experiences, including full screen playback and closed captions for HTML5 video. Other new HTML5 features in Safari 5 include HTML5 Geolocation, HTML5 sectioning elements, HTML5 draggable attribute, HTML5 forms validation, HTML5 Ruby, HTML5 AJAX History, EventSource and WebSocket.

The new, free Safari Developer Program allows developers to customize and enhance Safari 5 with extensions based on standard web technologies like HTML5, CSS3 and JavaScript. The Extension Builder, new in Safari 5, simplifies the development, installation and packaging of extensions. For enhanced security and stability, Safari Extensions are sandboxed, signed with a digital certificate from Apple and run solely in the browser.

Pricing & Availability

Safari 5 is available for both Mac OS X and Windows as a free download at www.apple.com/safari. Safari 5 for Mac OS X requires Mac OS X Leopard 10.5.8 or Mac OS X Snow Leopard 10.6.2 or later. Safari 5 for Windows requires Windows XP SP2, Windows Vista or Windows 7, a minimum 256MB of memory and a system with at least a 500 MHz Intel Pentium processor. Full system requirements and more information on Safari 5 can be found at www.apple.com/safari. The Safari Developer Program is free to join at developer.apple.com/programs/safari.

*Performance will vary based on system configuration, network connection and other factors. All testing conducted by Apple in May 2010 on an iMac 3.06 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo system running Mac OS X 10.6.3, with 4GB of RAM. JavaScript benchmark based on the SunSpider 0.9.1 JavaScript Performance test.

See Also:

Apple’s HTML5 Showcase Less About Web Standards, More About Apple

Scott Gilbertson — Fri, 04 Jun 2010 16:43:32 +0000

Apple posted a showcase of “HTML5 and web standards” on its website Thursday that highlights the level of support for the emerging standard in the company’s Safari and Mobile Safari browsers.

It’s nice to see Apple (or anyone for that matter) talking about HTML5 and mentioning more than just video. The site showcases HTML5 audio and canvas elements, as well as CSS 3 transitions and typography tools. It also has a nice photo gallery that looks and behaves just like former Apple designer Mike Matas’ amazing photo-gallery site.

Unfortunately, the way Apple presents the showcase, you would think Safari is the only web browser that supports these new web standards.

In fact, visit the site with any other browser and you’ll get a message telling you to download Safari. Surely your browser must be inadequate? Actually, your browser is probably capable of handling the showcase just fine, but ultimately the showcase isn’t about web standards: It’s about Apple’s version of web standards.

Apple is detecting the user-agent string (the bit of identifying data your browser passes to a web server when it requests a page) and only allowing Safari users to see the galleries. Other browsers are effectively cut off, regardless of the fact that many can render them just fine.

Worse, Apple’s CSS code uses only WebKit-specific selectors — for example, -webkit-border-radius instead of the actual CSS 3 selector border-radius. WebKit is the open source engine that powers Safari and Google Chrome. Firefox, IE and Opera can’t understand this code as clearly.

So much for web standards. Not only is user-agent sniffing absolutely the wrong way to determine the HTML5 capabilities of the current user, the implicit suggestion is that HTML5 is something only Apple supports.

Microsoft recently published its own HTML5 showcase to hype the coming release of Internet Explorer 9, and its demo pages are viewable (and work) in any non-IE browser with the proper support. Mozilla’s HTML5 demo pages are geared to work with experimental builds of Firefox, but at least other browsers aren’t blocked, and most of the demos actually work in Chrome.

To test Apple’s demos in other browsers, we spoofed the user agent in Firefox and Chromium and found that, while several examples do indeed fail in Firefox, most worked just fine. Naturally, everything works without issue in Chromium, because it uses the same WebKit rendering engine as Safari. Apple is being disingenuous by making its browser seem more compelling than others. That’s not surprising, but we’d be disappointed to see independent developers follow suit. [Update: As several commenters, and John Gruber point out, the version WebKit that Chromium uses doesn't yet support all of CSS 3's 3D transforms, which renders this demo incomplete, though still functional, in Chrome/Chromium.]

So how should you detect whether the current browser can display whatever bit of HTML5 or CSS 3 you’re using? The long-established best practice is to detect for features, not browsers. To find out which features are available in the current browser isn’t hard — there are even several free, open source libraries out there that do just that.

Modernizr is one of our favorites. This handy little JavaScript library can detect which HTML5 features are available. Then, armed with that information, you can then create conditional JavaScript statements to offer HTML5 to those browsers that support it, but still fall back on other content for those that don’t.

There are however, some cases where Modernizr might be overkill. For example, if you just want to embed some HTML5 video, you only need to detect one element. If Modernizr isn’t right for your project, check out Mark Pilgrim’s list of ways to detect HTML5 elements. The list of elements and how to detect them is an appendix to Pilgrim’s book in progress, Dive Into HTML5.

The list isn’t just elements, though it does cover those as well. But it also shows you how to detect API support for things like offline storage or geolocation, as well as SVG, SVG-in-HTML and even which video codec the current browser supports.

One thing Pilgrim doesn’t cover is CSS 3 features (CSS 3 != HTML5). To detect which CSS 3 features are available in the current browser you can use Modernizer or you can roll your own code using a library like jQuery, which includes a support() method to check a wide range of browser features before executing code.

See Also:

On Web Video Support, Safari Now Stands Alone

Michael Calore — Wed, 19 May 2010 21:58:54 +0000

SAN FRANCISCO — When Google announced it would be releasing the VP8 video codec under an open source license, all of the major browser vendors jumped up to support it.

Well, all of them except Apple.

The WebM Project, a partnership between Google, Mozilla, Opera and dozens of other software and hardware makers, provides web developers a way of embedding video and audio in HTML5 pages without plug-ins, and without resorting to patent-laden technologies.

Watchers of the open web have been waiting for this development for some time. The HTML5 video playback experience varies greatly between browsers, with different browsers supporting different flavors of video, creating a poor user experience and forcing developers to rely heavily on plug-ins like Flash and Silverlight. Google was widely expected to take a step towards solving the video problem on the web with Wednesday’s WebM announcement.

Indeed, within minutes of the project’s launch here at Google I/O, links went up to new versions of Firefox and Opera with built-in support for WebM video. Chrome support will be coming in the next beta, due later this month. Microsoft says that Microsoft Internet Explorer 9, due to arrive as soon as the end of 2010, will support VP8 video playback if a user has installed the free codec on their copy of Windows. Adobe says Flash Player will also support it as soon as possible. Executives from Mozilla, Opera and Adobe were all on stage during Wednesday morning’s keynote to pledge their support.

But nobody from Apple appeared, and as of Wednesday afternoon, the company has made no such announcement about support for WebM video in Safari. When asked to comment on this story, Apple didn’t respond.

Of course, Apple has a great deal of time and money invested in a competing technology, H.264. Its Quicktime ecosystem is built on H.264, and it uses the video format for all of its content served through iTunes. It’s also the native format on iPads, iPhones and iPods.

Most video on the web — approximately two-thirds of it — is served in the H.264 format, but various licensing requirements make some nervous to use it. Apple owns patents around H.264 and benefits from the licensing fees that allow its use (so does Microsoft, and many other companies).

So, will Apple begin supporting a open source video codec that competes for space on the web with H.264?

“Stranger things have happened, but I’d be surprised if that happened soon,” says Christopher “Monty” Montgomery, creator of the Ogg container, an open source video and audio technology integral to the new WebM Project, in an e-mail to Webmonkey.

Apple has sent not-so-subtle threats about possible patent violation complaints being brought against supporters of open video codecs. In an e-mail to a blogger, Jobs warned that MPEG-LA, the licensing group that oversees H.264, was assembling a patent portfolio to “go after” open video codec makers.

“Unfortunately, just because something is open source, it doesn’t mean or guarantee that it doesn’t infringe on others patents,” Jobs wrote.

But Monty isn’t worried about the MPEG-LA suing him or anyone at the WebM Project.

“The recent saber-rattling by Jobs felt more like a message to his own troops than a warning shot to ours,” he says. “MPEG itself has always has an internal contingent that has pushed hard for royalty-free baselines from MPEG, and the missives about video codecs and patents were probably meant for them, not us.”

Google VP of product management Sundar Pichai says the company has done “a thorough legal analysis of VP8″ since acquiring it, and remains confident it can release the technology under an open source license without infringing on any patents.

The Safari browser is based on the same WebKit engine as Google Chrome, and the WebKit engine is open source. But codec support is not a component of the rendering engine, so even though Google’s browser supports VP8 and WebM content, it doesn’t provide an instant fix for Safari.

And of course, iPad and iPhone browsers run Safari, so WebM video won’t work on those devices until Apple adds support.

However, it wouldn’t be tough for Apple to implement WebM support. All of the technologies involved have been released under permissive open source licenses, and it’s already been rolled into three major browsers.

“It’s not a technical challenge,” says Google VP of engineering Linus Upson. “If you look at the other browsers that have already implemented VP8, it’s just been a matter of a few weeks.”

Google’s Upson and Pichai both say they hope all web browsers will support WebM’s efforts eventually.

See Also:

Adobe’s Kevin Lynch: Apple’s Playing a Legal Game, Not a Technology Game

Michael Calore — Wed, 05 May 2010 17:15:25 +0000

Adobe CTO Kevin Lynch. Photo: Adobe

SAN FRANCISCO — Adobe’s CTO wants to make it clear that the public battle between HTML5 and Flash isn’t about technology, it’s about politics.

“The story is not about HTML5 vs. Flash,” Adobe’s Kevin Lynch says. “It’s about freedom of choice in the industry.”

Lynch says developers should be able to use whatever tools they want to create whatever experiences they want on the web.

“There are some who would like to wall off parts of the web and require you to get their approval to create something,” he says.

Lynch spoke Wednesday morning at the Web 2.0 Expo taking place here at Moscone West. The twice-per-year developer conference focuses on all things web, and though the audience is primarily made up of developers, the talks often turn to current events in the tech world.

Adobe has certainly been in the news quite a bit lately, with its Flash platform and Flash Player being derided by Apple CEO Steve Jobs, who has disallowed Flash on the iPad and the company’s other mobile devices, and has banned apps created in Flash from being sold in the company’s App Store by changing the wording of the developer’s agreement for its latest iPhone OS.

Lynch didn’t refer to Apple by name until prompted by Web 2.0 Expo program chair Brady Forrest, who was interviewing Lynch on stage.

“Are you referring to Apple and the iPhone,” Forrest asked.

Lynch shot back: “Are you reading between the lines?”

“Apple’s playing this strategy where they want to create a walled garden around what people use,” Lynch continued.

He turned to an analogy he’s used in the past: the development of railroads in the United States in the 1800s.

“Part of the competitive dynamic at that time was that people were using different gauge rails for each section of the route,” he says. If you wanted to move your freight on somebody else’s section of railroad, you had to unload everything and put it into different cars. The same cars couldn’t run on different sections of the rail.

“That wasn’t good for industry. The ‘gauge of rails’ today is writing code for particular operating systems.”

One of Jobs’ big arguments against Flash is that apps written for the iPhone and iPad using Adobe’s Flash development tools don’t work properly on Apple’s mobile platform. His company has gone as far as banning them, citing this shortcoming as the reason.

Lynch says it’s a myth that cross-platform code can’t retain the intricacies of a specific platform.

“You don’t lose expressiveness or fidelity by cross-compiling applications,” he says. “It’s disingenuous to say that cross-compiled code won’t be able to take full advantage of any particular device.”

“The technology issue Apple has with us is not that our tech doesn’t work, it’s that it does work. We don’t want to play a technology game when Apple is playing a legal game. We’re not going to play that game, we’re going to concentrate on everyone else.”

To that point, Lynch talked a little bit about the Open Screen Project, the Adobe-led initiative to get Flash software integrated into tablets and other mobile devices from various companies to take advantage of hardware acceleration and specific hardware features, like touchscreens, cameras and GPS sensors. Adobe has a booth at the expo where attendees can play with prototypes of different tablets running Flash.

Lynch also had some nice things to say about HTML5 and its many capabilities.

“HTML5 is the best thing that’s happened in browsers for a long time,” he says. “Innovation happening in the browser again.”

Lynch, who worked on the initial launch of Dreamweaver at Macromedia in the mid-’90s, took us back to what things were like back then.

“DHTML was supposed to take off and it didn’t. We went through a period of stagnation in HTML, which made room for Flash to grow.”

“We will keep making tools for people to create experiences in HTML5,” he says, referring to Dreamweaver and other products in Adobe’s Creative Suite.

As for Flash’s future: “We will continue to work on Flash, filling in holes as fast as we can and developing it at a much faster pace than we have previously,” he says.

Amid the current turmoil, Adobe released a new version of the Flash development app last month and is actively developing its next Flash Player.

UPDATE: Here’s a video of the entire 15-minute interview:

See Also:

Flash Faces Down Threats on Adobe’s Big Day

Michael Calore — Tue, 13 Apr 2010 00:14:35 +0000

Adobe announced details of its Creative Suite of applications Monday amid a stormy debate over its relevancy and the vitality of Flash, one of its most important products. But even though the air around it has grown chilly and the skies above have darkened with menace, Adobe went ahead and held its big parade anyway.

[See our reviews of the new Photoshop, Dreamweaver and Flash]

The fact is, even though it looks like the cards are stacked against the Flash platform, there’s very little threat that it will be supplanted by another technology any time soon.

Key to Flash’s success is the explosion of web video. More than 90 percent of web-enabled computers around the world have Flash Player installed, and all of those people can go to sites like Hulu or Comedy Central or YouTube right now and watch the full spectrum of clips, from viral candy to Hollywood hits. Microsoft’s Silverlight technology, which can also stream videos at a level of quality roughly on par with Flash, doesn’t have the same penetration (it’s ~~closer to 30 to 40 percent~~ Update: the post I previously linked to was outdated, and according to Microsoft’s April numbers, it’s actually closer to 60 percent), and there are far fewer sites using Silverlight as their sole video platform.

Also, the latest version of Flash Player (version 10.1, which came out earlier this year) addressed many of the performance, security and consistency issues that have been dogging Flash for the last year.

So, for now, Flash remains the de facto standard for video on the web.

While some proponents of the open web would have you believe that a viable replacement for Flash is already here in the form of HTML5 video, that’s not exactly the case. The HTML5 video tag does indeed allow you to embed videos in web pages without Flash. But native HTML5 video has several things holding it back.

Most important, the HTML5 method leaves it up to the browser to actually play the embedded video. And that’s where the biggest problem arises — what video codec should the browser use? Apple, with the iPad, iPhone and its desktop apps, is pushing the H.264 codec. But the H.264 video codec has licensing requirements and is not free in any sense of the word. Moving from the Flash plug-in to the H.264 codec is like moving backward — from Flash to a more expensive Flash.

Mozilla has already said that Firefox will not support H.264. The company is instead backing Ogg Theora.

Google’s Chrome browser does support H.264, but the company also recently acquired On2, makers of a third, competing video codec. As NewTeeVee reported Monday, Google has plans to release On2′s VP8 video codec under an open source license soon. Both Theora and VP8 are promising, but it will be years before either of these technologies reaches the same level of maturity and acceptance as H.264.

Since there’s no agreement among browser makers on a standard for open web video, it means that no matter which option you choose — HTML5 with H.264 or HTML5 with Ogg Theora — the best case scenario is that 20 to 25 percent of the web can see your video without needing a plug-in.

As long as that’s the case, Flash is going to be part of the web. Unless of course you’re surfing with an iPad, an iPhone or an iPod Touch. Apple refuses to support Flash Player on its touchscreen mobiles, blocking owners of those devices from watching most videos online.

Of course, the web is much, much bigger than the iPad. But excitement around the devices is enough to drive some heavyweight companies, including The New York Times, Vimeo and YouTube, to create iPad-friendly versions of their sites that use HTML5 technologies to serve videos and animations, so they won’t be left out. But even those sites are only serving Flash-free pages to iPad and iPhone visitors. Everyone else still gets Flash.

That’s the web-video story. The other side of the campaign against Flash turned particularly nasty last week when Apple rewrote the rules for its iPhone OS, prohibiting its developers from using Adobe’s software to write apps for its touchscreen devices.

Apple’s new rule specifically bans applications built with cross-compilers from being sold in the App Store. Flash CS5 will ship with such a cross-compiler, Adobe’s Packager for iPhone, which lets developers build apps in Adobe’s suite of tools that can be exported with the click of a button and wrapped up as Apple-native code. Depending on how strictly Apple chooses to enforce the new rule, those apps likely won’t run on iPhones and iPads once the devices get their software updates this summer and fall, respectively. (There’s also a note on Adobe’s website Monday noting the use of Packager for iPhone is “Subject to Apple’s current requirements and approval.”)

This move, Brian X. Chen pointed out on Gadget Lab, is a setback for developers who are using non-Apple tools (including Adobe’s) to make iPhone apps.

Adobe CTO Kevin Lynch even ridiculed Apple in a video published by All Things D over the weekend, in which he imagined Apple releasing a future version of its developer agreement requiring programmers to “build applications by typing with one hand and swinging a chicken above your head.”

Even if they’re locked out of the iPad, developers will still be able to use Adobe Flash to build apps for Android- and Windows-based tablets and touchscreens. Several are expected later this year, and some of them, like Google’s tablet and the HP Slate look strong enough to truly compete with the iPad.

Lastly, Adobe is smart enough to realize it can’t take Flash’s current dominance over HTML5 for granted. The company knows HTML5 is going to be a big part of the web’s future, which is why it has built tools into Creative Suite 5 for rendering Flash elements as HTML5-ready Canvas animations, as seen in this video.

We can expect to see more export tools like that coming out of Adobe. Even if the Flash platform erodes away or changes shape as the web evolves — and it certainly will, just very slowly — Adobe will be able to maintain its relevance as a maker of developer tools that let people build apps for (almost) any audience.

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Photo: Brian X. Chen/Wired.com