If everyone is writing to a toolkit, then the toolkit provider will only “feature up” the toolkit when it is cross-platform convenient to do so, not when Apple (or anyone else) implements a groundbreaking platform-specific feature.

Now, some apps, like games, might be sufficiently non-standard in their interface that they don’t lose much by defining their own UI. But Steve has never been one to let the weakest case drive policy.

Bullshit for games at least, ask ANY serious game dev about what he thinks about this and how it WILL hurt the AppStore ( oh and check how many of the top10 games in the appstore use scripting of some kind , tap tap revenge? The simpsons… ?

Damn

Photoshop Elements for Mac vs. Photoshop Elements for Windows.

Will we *ever* see a 64 bit version of Photoshop for OS X?

Will we *ever* see Adobe take Flash performance seriously on OS X?

Go ahead and cry crocodile tears for Adobe, here, if that flips your wig. But to pretend that ANY of this has to do with “openness” is silly.

Of course Apple has a business interest in getting folks to use its own APIs and tools, because they want devs to use their ecosystem. Of course they do.

Lest folks keep thinking Adobe is doing ANY of this out of the goodness of its own heart, they’re not. Adobe’s problem with this isn’t about lock-in. It’s about Apple not allowing Adobe to lock you into developing on Flash, instead of Xcode.

Ranting about monopoly FUD is irrelevant. That Apple is successful doesn’t mean they’re forcing anybody else out of the smartphone platform. That Apple is successful, or has a growing share of that market doesn’t mean they’re able to keep anybody from entering the smartphone market.

Have you even bothered to look at the market in question, here?

If devs want to tell themselves that Apple is a mean, mean, meanypants and they choose not to develop for iPhone OS, that’s perfectly fine. Go write Android apps, or Flash apps, or whatever floats your boat. Feel free.

But whining about antitrust says far more about the typical irrational anti-Apple bias than it says anything useful about what’s actually going on.

There’s no such thing as too arrogant to fail, and there is such a thing as law against this exact behavior.

You’re missing one rather large, salient point (assuming this is actually from Steve): NeXT has been down this road, already, with OpenStep. They tried to build a rapid-application development toolchain and had an IDE that forms the basis of today’s Xcode.

The idea was to write an OpenStep app exactly once, and run it as-is on NT, Solaris, NextStep and anywhere else OpenStep would eventually be ported.

OpenStep everywhere – one API family to rule them all.

This worked out for precisely no one, and led directly to NeXT turning to WebObjects in order to become a modestly profitable software company, instead of a footnote, a failed hardware manufacturer, etc.

I’d say take Steve’s answer at face value: cross platform toolkits don’t really leverage what’s good, and interesting about developing for a specific platform, and devs are at the mercy of waiting for the intermediate toolchain to keep in sync with the underlying OS/API set. Steve’s been down this road before, not with sort-of-kind-of examples from Apple’s history during his years in exile, but with an actual attempt to do essentially exactly what Adobe is attempting to do, when he was doing NeXT.