Wednesday, May 12, 2010

Adobe and Apple

In addition to being my two favorite technology companies they are also in quite the feud. It has been hard to watch two companies that I have so much respect for have such a hard time coming to terms. The because the iPod, iPhone, and iPad do not support the Flash Player and will not be allowed Steve Jobs posted his "Thoughts on Flash" to clarify his position. Jobs stated reasons including performance, multi touch support, and feature adoption as to why Flash would not be included. I don't think it is Apple choice to say that a developer can't use a tool or not. If Flash has some limits and developers want to use it anyway, we should be able to.

One point I am surprised I have not heard is that Apple is restricting Flash to grow the Objective-C community. The number of Objective-C developers that know how to write Mac apps has always been small, but since the iPhone those numbers have been growing rapidly. If developers that know Flash can port their exiting apps to the iPhone they would not need to learn Objective-C. To me that is the real reason Apple has been holding up a front against Flash. They want a large community of developers that know how to write Objective-C apps because those developers will also know how to write apps for OS X. Job says, "we want to provide the most advanced and innovative platform to our developers, and we want them to stand directly on the shoulders of this platform...". 

Kevin Lynch states in his rebuttal to Job's blog that Adobe is no longer going to work toward Flash support on the iPhone, iPod, or iPad and in turn is going to focus on the Android and other mobile devices.

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