Apple

In a surprise announcement, Adobe Systems said Monday that Flash programmers now can bring their applications to Apple's iPhone, a domain of high interest that's been off limits for the programming technology.

Because of Apple restrictions, though, Flash isn't coming in the form in which most people experience it, a Web browser plug-in. Instead, programmers will be able to change Flash applications into native iPhone applications using Adobe's Flash Professional CS5 developer tool, currently in beta testing, then offer their programs as an Apple App Store download.

"This is a great first step in the right direction," said Heidi Voltmer, Adobe's product marketing manager for Flash.

The approach spotlights the tension between Apple, which controls the iPhone tightly in an effort to ensure a good user experience, and others, which want a place on the premier mobile device on the marketplace today.

Chroma Circuit is a Flash game now available as a native iPhone app.

(Credit: Screenshot by Stephen Shankland/CNET)

Adobe's back-door approach still is a significant move for the company, though, which wants to ensure that Flash is a major foundation for Internet-based applications. Programmers familiar with Flash could find the Adobe method an easier way to bring their applications to the iPhone world if they're not experts in coding for the phone and its close cousin, the iPod Touch.

Apple didn't immediately comment for this story.

Some Flash Professional CS5 beta testers are taking advantage of the technique, including BlueskyNorth, Breakdesign, FlashGameLicense.com, Muchosmedia, PushButton Labs, and Bowler Hat Games.

"With the ability to create applications for iPhone in the Flash Professional CS5 beta, I don't need to learn a new programming language or the plethora of development tools that inevitably come with it," said Josh Tynjala, founder of Bowler Hat Games, in a statement. "Instead, I'm able to spend more time exploring ways to make my games like Chroma Circuit more fun on mobile devices like the iPhone and increase my business revenue."

Adobe's ultimate goal remains the same: to get Flash on the iPhone integrated with its Safari browser. "My view is there is only one Web," said Chief Technology Officer Kevin Lynch in an interview. Adobe demonstrated the Flash applications at its Max developer conference in Los Angeles Monday, where Lynch gave the keynote address.

Flash Player 10.1, due in beta form later this year and final form in the first half of 2010, is spreading to just about all the other smartphones out there: Google Android, BlackBerry, Windows Mobile, Palm WebOS, and Nokia Symbian.

Why not the iPhone, too? "The Apple iPhone SDK (software developer kit) license terms do not allow runtime interpreted code, so Adobe is not able to deliver Flash Player in Safari on the iPhone without support from Apple," Adobe said in a statement.

Voltmer didn't comment on the state of present discussions with Apple to build Flash Player directly into the iPhone. But she did say people visit Adobe's Web site looking for it.

It's not immediately clear how easily Flash applications translate to the iPhone, and most folks won't get a chance to try it until the beta is released publicly later this year. There are some limitations, Voltmer said.

For one thing, the Flash software must be written in ActionScript 3, not the earlier ActionScript 2. For another, they can't use video because of Apple restrictions, she said.

There also could be practical limits on memory, processing power, and graphics. Last year's PC running Flash Player has a lot more computing capability than a modern iPhone 3GS.

The iPhone and iPod Touch have some features that are well-suited to mobile gaming, though, and programmers will be able to use them. That includes the multitouch interface and accelerometer that detects device orientation, said Adrian Ludwig, a Flash team member at Adobe.

Updated at 1:48 p.m. PDT with further comment from Adobe and no comment from Apple.

Adobe developer tools let Flash programmers turn their applications into native iPhone software. This is a Flash game called Chroma Circuit.

(Credit: Screenshot by Stephen Shankland/CNET)

Apple began shipping Snow Leopard on Friday, but the true importance of the Mac OS X update likely will emerge well afterward.

That's because Mac OS X 10.6 begins a longer-term Apple attempt to get ahead by cracking a problem facing the entire computer industry: squeezing useful work out of modern processors. Instead of stuffing Snow Leopard with immediately obvious new features, Apple is trying to adjust to the new reality in which processors can do many jobs simultaneously rather than one job fast.

"We're trying to set a foundation for the future," said Wiley Hodges, director of Mac OS X marketing.

Apple shed some light on its project, called Grand Central Dispatch, at its Worldwide Developer Conference in June, but most real detail was shared only in with programmers sworn to secrecy. Now the company has begun talking more publicly about it and other deeper projects to take advantage of graphics chips and Intel's 64-bit processors.

The moves align Apple better with changes in computing. For years, chipmakers such as Intel and Advanced Micro Devices had steadily increased the clock rate of their processors, and programmers got accustomed to a performance boost with each new generation. But earlier this decade, problems derailed the gigahertz train.

This story was corrected. See below for details.

SAN FRANCISCO--Apple wants Mac OS X to do a better job dealing with the new directions that Moore's Law has taken computer chips.

At its Apple Worldwide Developer Conference here, Bertrand Serlet, senior vice president of software engineering, shed light on technology called Grand Central Dispatch that's designed to make Mac OS X 10.6, called Snow Leopard, take better advantage of multicore processors and graphics processors.

Power play at Apple's WWDC 2009.

(Credit: James Martin/CNET)

Computer chips for years improved in performance through faster clock speeds, but processor engineers ran into problems with chips consuming inordinate amounts of power and producing inordinate amounts of heat. In addition, the faster clock speeds sometimes meant chips just idled faster because memory access speeds couldn't keep up.

The new direction: multicore processors that put multiple processing engines on the same chip. The problem with the approach, though, is that PC software typically had been written to run with one thread of instructions at a time. Multicore processors work best when software does many things at the same time, which is much harder to program.

Grand Central Dispatch is designed to address that problem for software developers, making it easier to program multithreaded software, use operating system services, and tune program executions.

It also improves how Mac manages those threads, Serlet said. For example, when running Apple's Mail app, today's Leopard OS uses about the number of threads when busy as when idle.

"When it's busy, it uses more threads to take advantage of multicores. When idle, all those threads go away, giving back resources to the system," Serlet said. "When you apply that to every application, you get a big win in performance and responsiveness."

Graphics chip power
The new Mac OS X also is designed to support a programming technology called GPGPU--general-purpose graphics processing unit--which lets a graphics chip run some computing jobs in addition to its ordinary job displaying graphics.

To make its GPGPU technology work, Apple uses OpenCL, a C-like programming technology that has the support of graphics chipmakers Nvidia, AMD's ATI, Intel, and others.

Graphics chips aren't good for every sort of computing task, but they are good for mathematical calculations--including they physics calculations often needed in video games that simulate flowing fabrics, bouncing balls, and other real-world actions.

Mac OS X will be available in September with an upgrade price of $29, a big notch less expensive than the $129 price of earlier upgrades.

Apple also is working to support 64-bit x86 processors, now the prevailing standard. One big advantage of 64-bit processors is support for more than 4GB of memory; Serlet also touted faster mathematical processing such as the doubled speed of fast Fourier transforms.

Apple has been gradually making its operating system fully 64-bit. "Snow Leopard is final stage where all the major system applications are written in 64-bit mode," Serlet said.

Correction 6:13 a.m. PDT Tuesday: This story misidentified the speaker. It was Bertrand Serlet, senior vice president of software engineering.

Stanford University on Monday said its free iPhone Application Programming course has been downloaded more than 1 million times since being uploaded to Apple's iTunes U--a learning-focused area of iTunes--seven weeks ago.

The course is a series of classroom videos taken from the live lectures at Stanford. Apple engineers teach the course to students in an auditorium at Stanford's Quad--the videos are uploaded to iTunes U two days after every class, giving the public free access to the material. The university even makes copies of the slides shown during the class available to the public.

Jason Ediger, Apple's director of iTunes U and Mobile Learning, said this is the fastest any course hit the million download mark on iTunes U. Certainly a testament to the amount of interest from would-be iPhone developers.

Apple currently has over 40,000 apps available for download from the App Store, according to numbers from 148 Apps, an enthusiast Web site that monitors the number of apps on the store.

iPhone Application Programming is a 10-week course and can be downloaded free from iTunes U. Only students enrolled in the classroom course will receive credit, according to the university.

Developers who want to add applications to the iPhone need a contract, and the first ones signed last year are about to expire.

(Credit: CNET)

Apple developers are having a tough time renewing their iPhone development licenses, according to reports.

AppleInsider reported last week that as the one-year contracts signed by iPhone developers begin to expire, developers are starting to wonder if they'll be able to continue their development after the end of March without an option to renew the contracts. The contracts are needed as part of the iPhone Developer Program in order to have iPhone applications listed in the App Store.

Ars Technica's Erica Sadun, a prolific iPhone developer, is having similar problems. She attempted to renew her contract on Friday only to be told that Apple had yet to implement a process for doing so.

One year after Apple first kicked off iPhone development, the astounding growth of the App Store continues: Apple now has more than 25,000 applications listed, adding nearly 10,000 since January. The company has had trouble keeping up with that growth over the year, but usually manages to iron out the kinks and keep its developers happy.

Just about every browser out there now is trying to grab the crown for fastest performance for running JavaScript, the programming language that powers many increasingly sophisticated Web-based applications. The latest development is from the programmers behind Apple's Safari.

Mozilla bragged earlier this month about TraceMonkey, a new JavaScript engine due to ship in Firefox 3.1 near the end of 2008. Next came Google's Chrome, a leading feature of which is the performance of its V8 JavaScript engine. Now the WebKit programmers, whose open-source code is used in Apple's Safari browser and the Konqueror browser of the KDE interface software sometimes used on Linux systems, have a new version of their JavaScript technology.

It's called Squirrelfish Extreme, and the WebKit programmers said Thursday in a blog posting that it's more than twice as fast as the first-generation Squirrelfish announced in June and more than three times faster than the current WebKit 3.1 version. They based their conclusions on one benchmark, SunSpider.

"SquirrelFish Extreme uses more advanced techniques, including fast native code generation, to deliver even more JavaScript performance," the programmers said.

For details of Squirrelfish's techniques--bytecode optimization, a polymorphic inline cache, a context-threaded just-in-time compiler, and a regular expression just-in-time compiler--check the WebKit blog.

Charles Ying also performed SunSpider tests that showed Squirrelfish beating Google's V8 and Mozilla's Tracemonkey on a 2.4GHz iMac.

WebKit's SquirrelFish Extreme is faster than its three-month-old predecessor on the SunSpider JavaScript benchmark.

(Credit: WebKit)