Nik Rawlinson
Apple and Adobe should come to a truce in the whole Flash débacle.
Adobe and Apple are not best of friends. Not right now, anyhow. That’s a shame, really, as both have great news to trumpet: for Apple, the iPad; for Adobe, Creative Suite 5. Both stellar products that are rightly garnering acres of print space that’s being sadly tainted by the ongoing Flash row.
On the off-chance you’re new to the whole affair, Apple doesn’t want Flash on the iPad, iPhone and so on. Adobe, naturally, would like to see the world’s most popular media and app plug-in on the world’s most popular portable media devices. Result: impasse.
You have to feel for both sides. Adobe has worked hard to establish a widely accepted standard that consumers know and trust. Apple wants to control its platform, end to end, and is probably worried that if it lets one plug-in into the ecosystem, a precedent will be set. What next? RealAudio? Windows Media? Liquid Audio?
Or is it?
The latest move (at the time of writing) to effectively outlaw iPhone coding in Flash looks to me like little more than spite. Your mileage may well vary, but I can’t see the harm in putting the onus for getting things right on Adobe. If its apps put out valid code that passes verification by the App Store gatekeeper, then what harm could it do? Apple is still free to vary the subroutines and published APIs into which developers can hook their software, and it will be up to Adobe to update Flash accordingly so that the code it spits out remains valid.
Apple must be careful not to paint itself into a corner here. With increased competition from Google and the imminent release of competing slate products running Android or a variant of Windows 7, it should be doing all that it can to foster strong relationships with its key partners.
None more so than with Adobe. Microsoft’s commitment to continue producing Office for the Mac may once have seemed the only thing that would keep the platform afloat, but now, with so many excellent competitors to choose from, its relevance has been greatly diminished. Not so for Creative Suite. Almost without exception, its competitors are pale imitations. We may be able to continue without Premiere, but the loss of InDesign, Photoshop and After Effects could well be terminal.
Adobe will no doubt support the Mac for as long as it remains a profitable endeavour. It may even – if it feels welcome – continue to do so during any future lean times in the hope that the market will pick up.
So, how do you think Adobe feels right now?
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