get at me!

The really funny thing here, of course, is how Adobe couldn’t dump SVG fast enough when they got their claws on Flash (when was the Adobe SVG plugin last updated, Jack?).

Oh, you made it on to one alright. well, more of a podcast than a site, but rest assured, you’ll get allll the attention you want.

[Rant away, John. I'll be off living my life and building software, not being JAFO. --J.]

Actually, i think you’re 2SJD at times, (2nd String John Dowdell), but if you’re personally going to be off building software, how about y’all do something about the unending string of actively attacked zero-day exploits in Flash and PDF? hmm…I wonder what computing device I own that isn’t affected by Adobe’s screwups?

Oh, before you start, no one, not Apple, not Adobe, not Microsoft, not even Google are innocents here. But, if you’re going to keep pumping up the “war” between Apple and Adobe, then you might want to chat with your security team so you don’t get so hilariously blindsided.

Yeah. I’m really bummed about the lack of Flash on my iDevices about now.

Once again, an informative post about a neat near feature gets Whitlocked by yet another need to keep the “Apple vs. Adobe” nontroversy going. What, bad weekend?

[Nope. I am genuinely curious about whether Mac people will say, "You know, we gave Adobe tons of shit, framing them as the devil (because we deeply need devils), and yet here they are doing what we nominally wanted--working to solve customer problems regardless of technology. Maybe we should express some pleasant surprise & give them a little credit for these good-faith moves." But having been a Mac guy for so long, and knowing how deeply a lot of people in our world need villains & bogeymen, my hopes aren't too high. --J.]

bullshit. Why should Apple and Apple users have to live up to a standard that *neither* you personally, nor Adobe live up to?

Where the hell are the countering admissions from Adobe, or you? You know, the ones that go:

“Gosh, we framed Apple as draconian facists for not allowing Flash on iDevices from the start, when to be honest, it wasn’t until 10.1 that we had any non-beta version of Flash that was anything but pure garbage on mobile devices. That was wrong of us, and we were just as guilty of using it for cheap PR shots as anyone in the tech web, or at Apple.

Even now, to be completely honest, Flash on mobiles, even with 10.1, still isn’t at the “it just works” stage. We have some real tweaks to go, and there’s a lot of content out there that’s going to have to be modified to work right on mobiles. We’re going to help as much as we can, but no, you can’t just install Flash on an Android, or any mobile and get the exact same level of experience you get on a desktop or conventional laptop. That may never happen, due to obvious hardware and environment limitations, and we were wrong to imply that it would somehow all happen the day Flash 10.1 for mobile devices was released. ”

You and Dowdell and a few other Flash evangelists talk all this smack about how Apple should talk and how Apple users and fans should talk, and yet you are every.bit.as.guilty as they are of what you’re complaining about. The shorter, more biblical version:

“Cast out the beam in thine own eye before thou pointest out the mote in mine.”

Neither side has been clean in this, but I’ve not seen Apple advocating Adobe employees come to work at Apple because Apple is a “more ethical” company than Adobe. I *have* seen that coming from Adobe employees about how Adobe is more ethical than Apple, so Apple employees should consider leaving Apple for Adobe.

That’s bullshit, you know it, and if Dowdell thought at all, he’d know it too. But, in your world, only Apple and Apple users/fans are wrong.

You want Apple and Apple users/fans to operate at a higher standard, lead the way or stop telling others how to behave.

[Well, releasing real, concrete improvements like this is exactly in the spirit of saying, "Whatever differences of opinion Adobe and Apple may have, we're not going to get distracted from solving customers' problems." I *am* going to call on people who've said "We just want to see Adobe support standards" to back up their statements with, at minimum, some links. Otherwise they're exposed as simply axe-grinding phonies who are more interested in cheering for Apple (and hating others) than getting anything done. --J.]

Release Flash, including DRM, to a standards body, ala PDF. Until then, it’s a published, non-open standard. Y’all might want to note the difference in your PR.

That would be the problem people have with the Flash team nattering on about standards. In a very real sense, calling Flash an open standard, as it currently exists, is a lie.

Fair enough, but honestly I don’t think Adobe had a serious game plan for HTML5 et al until Apple came along and spit on their burger by shutting out Flash, so to speak. Sure, they certainly were thinking of how to do this in CS6 and beyond, but I doubt we would have seen anything before that. After all, even the inclusion of the HTML5 templates in Dreamweaver was hugely driven by the public uproar surrounding those events…

Not at all true. It may not have been much relevant for what it was originally intended, but it has ever since a firm place in scientific analysis and data visualization. And SVGtiny has been used extensively on mobile devices for a few years now long before Apple declared the war on Flash…

I am! Frankly, it’s like Adobe gets the hots whenever Apple releases a new gadget and either

a) you want to share on cashing in (some of this weird iPad stuff you proposed) or
b) it seems to threaten some of your market potential – whichever way the wind blows.

As for the matter at hand – I couldn’t think of a program less suitable for anything web-centric than AI. As I already mentioned, unless Adobe is truly commited to fixing the various issues with SVG in the first place, what’s the point of throwing on features for HTML5 and CSS3 (which at this point are optional at best, anyways)…? I really think you have your priorities wrong here!

It’s not so much whether the tools work perfectly from the start, but that Adobe seems more responsive to the users it has (even the hostile ones) than any company I can think of.

Other than maybe Microsoft who doesn’t have much choice. (/joke)

[Apple has done a ton of good work with WebKit. Their desire to avoid a technical dependency on Flash has strongly motivated them to enhance what their Web renderer can do, and I believe they've said that they'd share the patents they've been granted on related techniques. Again, I'm not taking any issue with Apple here; I'm taking issue with rah-rah fanboys & sheep. --J.]

[Well, releasing real, concrete improvements like this is exactly in the spirit of saying, "Whatever differences of opinion Adobe and Apple may have, we're not going to get distracted from solving customers' problems." I *am* going to call on people who've said "We just want to see Adobe support standards" to back up their statements with, at minimum, some links. Otherwise they're exposed as simply axe-grinding phonies who are more interested in cheering for Apple (and hating others) than getting anything done. --J.]

HTML5 isn’t an Apple-specific standard and there’s every reason for all of Adobe’s tools that touch the web to adapt it. Adobe is arguably in the best position of any software development company to make the best “HTML5 for designer” tools. Whether or not the folks who believe that HTML5 is going to kill Flash — which is only slightly less nonsensical than arguing that XML is going to kill InDesign — are mollified by any given Adobe release really shouldn’t be relevant. Some people will never give Adobe credit, just like some people will never give Apple credit.

As for building on SVG support, IIRC Adobe bought Macromedia when SVG failed to slow down the Flash juggernaut. Is this trying to set the stage for a sneaky comeback? (I gather all major browsers — albeit IE, not until 9, because being slow is IE’s greatest talent — support SVG natively now.)

[You can't really call it a comeback if there was no glory in the first place. SVG has been largely irrelevant & has been destined to remain so until browser support becomes ubiquitous. --J.]

Mmh, but then again, isn’t Adobe always rushing to these things like a cow gone mad after a bee sting? Dunno, this just feels rushed on every level…

[Are you serious? We're rushing *and* we're dragging our feet? That's some impressive physicality! (Savion Glover's got nothing on Adobe...) --J.]