I want to add my voice to the torrent of disgust at Apple's new wording in section 3.3.1 of the iPhone developer's agreement. For those new to the subject it basically stipulates that software written for the iPhone/iPad has to be "originally" written in Objective-C,C,C++ or the WebKit implementation of JavaScript. A virtual machine of any type is banned, as it always has been, but adding to this already absurd requirement is that if your code goes through a translation layer - a Java to Objective-C cross compiler for instance, or (what this is really about) a flash to Objective-C cross compiler ... even if it works purely at the source code level ... you can't run it on the iPhone any more.

So this is about screwing Adobe (and they know it) but caught in the crossfire are technologies such as the hugely popular Unity game development environment, newbie coding environment such as Game Salad and Scratch (already banned due to VM restriction madness), and affecting our local technology industry the Innaworks AlcheMo J2ME->iPhone porting product. All these companies have invested heavily in producing solutions for iPhone and those investments are now, presumably, worth nothing.

Between this and the seemingly random removal of apps from the app store over the last year the message is clear: Investing in iPhone/iPad product development is risky at best and arguably more at the suicidal end of the scale.

Now, I'm fuming. I've been an Apple developer in one capacity of another for about five or six years now so have a huge personal investment in Apple's technologies including some quite significant chunks of intellectual property. In many ways this could be seen as a good thing from the perspective of an experienced Objective-C developer - driving up demand and all that - yet I ditched the Microsoft platform around 2002 due partially to their appalling behaviour towards developer investment ("Use this! Use this! ... no, sorry, that was crap. Use this! Use this!") and I see worse behaviour coming from Apple now.

Yeah. Worse behaviour than Microsoft. There, I said it.

So, I dunno. I feel really really sorry for everyone who built these translation technologies and furious towards Apple for shitting on them. The company went through a brief stage of creating products based on excellent implementations of open standards but I guess that's all over now and it might soon be time to move on.