Thoughts on Job's letter towards Adobe

While I agree with alot of points Jobs makes about Flash for the iPhone I would also like to call his bluff on one comment a little bit.

Here is the latest open letter from Mr. Jobs:

http://www.apple.com/hotnews/thoughts-on-flash/

Now, in this article he states:

"Adobe has been painfully slow to adopt enhancements to Apple’s platforms. For example, although Mac OS X has been shipping for almost 10 years now, Adobe just adopted it fully (Cocoa) two weeks ago when they shipped CS5. Adobe was the last major third party developer to fully adopt Mac OS X."

At the WWDC in June 2007 was when Apple just finally spilled the beans that they would be dropping all support for Carbon 64 in their next OS. Prior to that I believe it was even advertised on Apples site or in a keynote that Carbon 64 WOULD be included and Adobe had full plans on shipping CS4 Creative Suite in 64. Adobe had to rewrite MILLIONS of lines of code at that point making one of the biggest transitions ever for a software company.

I do believe they dragged their feet a bit on this but in reality... we should be pointing a finger at Apple for blindsiding developers on this whole Carbon/Cocoa issue.

Now, Apples bigger bluff. Lets look at this part again:

"Mac OS X has been shipping for almost 10 years now, Adobe just adopted it fully (Cocoa) two weeks ago when they shipped CS5. Adobe was the last major third party developer to fully adopt Mac OS X.""

Well, now what about Apple? Is Apples own Final Cut Studio solid Cocoa yet? Unless I missed an update Final Cut Studio is still riddled with Carbon, restraining the unvailing of a FCS 64 bit advantage via Snow Leopard. I believe all this came down to Apples Quicktime not being Cocoa until Quicktime X. So correct me in places I'm wrong people but I believe Apple is actually just as slow IF NOT SLOWER then ANYBODY at adopting and embracing OS X "fully".

Now, I am all for the pushing of H.264, HTML 5, and Java as I think Flash is garbage. Flash lite has got HORRIBLE reviews for consuming battery life and being lame. So I'm not pro flash for the iPhone but I do believe Apple finally has an upper hand on Adobe and playing the "injured bird" routine. Apple could allow Flash and the world wouldn't implode. This is a long war between the two companies and consumers are just stuck in the middle.

One last point. In the letter he mentions "mouse over hovers" not existing in iPhone land. I agree that on such a small device as the iphone implementing such a feature would cause a little bit of a headache. BUT, I think we developers should be able to test their sites and choose their own OS, Browser, and Device compatibilities. On the ipad and iphone all they would have to do is simply put a little button by the bookmarks button in Safari that's called a "rollover state button" or something. When it's activated it locks the current web screen so your finger can glide across a navbar menu and view any drop downs or roll overs... Just a thought. I admit it would overall be best to not include such things when developing a website for devices but alot of us want our site to take advantage of normal PC browser/mouse technologies still without having to write 2 completely separate websites.