Over the last number of weeks, there has been a war of words between Adobe and Apple about the availability of the Flash player on Apple’s products such as the iPhone and iPad.

I have to say I think Apple’s behavior in this has been appalling. The only reason that Apple are doing this is for money. If they allowed the flash player on these devices, developers could make applications available to users without the need to provide them through the app-store and thus deny apple their cut.

According to Steve Jobs, Adobe Flash is a closed proprietary, whereas Apple is all about the open-source with Webkit. That’s great, but Webkit has nothing to do with this debate.

The Adobe Flash platform is a lot more open than Apple’s mobile platform. Let’s compare them.

To develop an iPhone application I can use xcode, Apple’s development environment, that’s it nothing else. To create a swf file that runs in the flash player I can use haxe, flash develop or fdt. There are loads more and none of these come from Adobe.

Once you have created my application, it doesn’t get any better. To make an iphone application available to the public, a developer has to pay a fee of $99. This fee allows developers to submit their application for the appstore. First, however, it has to be reviewed by Apple. This review process has resulted in a lot of denials and not just apps made by small independent developers. Google have had at least 2 apps denied, Google Voice and Google Latitude when they submitted them to the app store. On the other hand, once you have created an application on the flash platform you can share it however you wish.

Steve Jobs states performance as one of the reasons why xcode is the only dev environment allowed. This makes the assumption that if developers use something other than xcode, the apps will not perform as well. In that case, why not let these apps be developed on different platforms and add performance to the review process. That way, apps that are badly written on xcode are caught as well.

From a technology point of view, it doesn’t really make any sense. There are loads of developers out there who create great apps. Why is Apple forcing them to use their tools?

But lets look at it from Apple’s point of view. Why should they let the Flash on their products? There is absolutely no reason why they should. It just means that users will have less choice. They can only install apps from the app store. They are creating a closed system and history has shown that when a closed system challenges a open system, the open system always wins.

I love Apple’s products, I’m using a MacBook to write this post, but at the moment if someone offered me the choice between an iPhone or a Google Nexus One Android phone, I’d have to go with the Nexus One.

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Using a versioning system is important when working on any project. Subversion allows you keep track of any changes that you make along the way. It also allows you to revert to previous versions if you make any mistakes. Finally, it can give you an offsite back up of your code. For example this blog is hosted on dreamhost. As well as hosting sites, they provide a few other things like hosting subversion repositories.

Tonight I created the repository that I’ll be using on dreamhost.  The next thing I did was to create the base project that I will be using as a starting point. This is basically the one that comes with app engine patch. The next step was to import all the files into the repository.

Once this is done, it is safe to delete the local files. The next step is to perform a ‘checkout’. This pulls all your files from the repository. Once that’s done, it’s easy to keep the code up-to-date.

So there it is, the single step. Now just a thousand miles to go!

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The reasons for using these technologies are many-fold. I really want to learn Django and today I found app-engine-patch which allows better integration between Django and Google App Engine.

Anyway, back to my project. I think that the way people consume news is going to change in the future. I think that people like @marklittlenews have recognized this. I don’t think for a second that 6 0ne or newspapers are going away any time soon.

I do however think that the way we, the public, view the news is changing. The crash-landing on the Hudson in 2009 is a good example. It was all over twitter before it was on the news. Photos included. With a video camera included in nearly every phone. For example, my phone (the HTC Hero) has a video camera built in. I can even post videos directly to youtube. I can even stream videos live using a service like Qik. Photos are the same. Soon any news event will be broadcast on the web as soon as it happens.

Features will also be online. The excellent site Pictory is an example of the direction that I think features will go in.

So what does this mean for Journalists? Even with news events being captured as they happen, the background information, the meat of the story, will still be important. Usually, this comes from a built up network of contacts that comes from years covering stories.

And  so, the project I am planning to build is a platform that brings the on the spot user generated news together with the experience and skill of journalists.

It’s an ambitious project, but what is the point of aiming low? There is a good chance that nothing will come of this, but hopefully I will learn something along the way.

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It’s not really known as an enterprise platform, so why have they partnered with salesforce.com and their force.com platform? Well, for a while, Adobe have been pushing flash in a more enterprisey direction.

With sites and the force.com platform, salesforce.com has been moving in the opposite direction, allowing companies to create public facing websites on the Force.com platform. You could say that they have met in the middle.

Adobe Flash Builder for Force.com seems to be a combination of Eclipse, the Force.com eclipse plugin, the Flash(/Flex) Builder plugin and a souped up version of the Flex/Air Actionscript library.

Anyway, a salesforce.com backend with a flash UI is very exciting.

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