I'm sorry to hear about Dan, but I personally disagree about this crying about Apple decisions. Nobody complains about Microsoft, Sony or Nintendo restrictions as far as consolle games.
Also if you are a really creative person, you should be creative enough to deal with restrictions. Good developers will pickup the obj-c (I know good AC3 developers who now develop just in obj-c).
It's against Apple's interest lower the entry bar to create their application, because that would mean make life easier of those people who focus on develop low quality apps. That doesn't mean that Flash developers are bad. But the good ones won't have problems learning a new language.
> Nobody complains about Microsoft, Sony or Nintendo restrictions as far as console games.
People complained about Sony just last week killing Linux on the PS3, and have complained about breaking firmware cracks on the PSP forever. There was a minor amount of outrage when Nintendo broke some homebrew stuff with the new DS.
But it's funny you should mention Microsoft. They let anyone publish things in the Indie Games store for the Xbox, and distribute free dev tools. The approval process is run entirely by the community, and solely exists to rate apps (for violence, sexual content, etc), nothing gets rejected (within reason).
And while I may not have spent more money on indie games than disc-based ones (since I bought Dragon Age new) I bought my 360 originally in order to play them. Lowering the barrier has worked out very well for Microsoft.
Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo didn't pull the plug 2 years after their consoles were released and screw over thousands of developers and numerous companies. The timing of Apple's decision plays a major part here.
And it has nothing to do with quality, but the ability to create a code base of high value. ie, a code base that can easily be used to serve more than just the iPhone. And for people complaining that cross platform oriented code bases just "water down" everything, not at all true when it comes to games, a major segment of mobile apps.
Also if you are a really creative person, you should be creative enough to deal with restrictions. Good developers will pickup the obj-c (I know good AC3 developers who now develop just in obj-c).
It's against Apple's interest lower the entry bar to create their application, because that would mean make life easier of those people who focus on develop low quality apps. That doesn't mean that Flash developers are bad. But the good ones won't have problems learning a new language.