February 03, 2010

Adobe defends Flash, takes light jab at Apple

Adobe Systems came out with a polite objection and a couple of veiled jabs Tuesday, just days after Apple CEO Steve Jobs reportedly slammed the company's Flash software and its corporate culture.

Despite Apple's refusal to let the widely used animation software run on the iPhone or its new iPad, Adobe Chief Technology Officer Kevin Lynch said in a company blog post Tuesday that Flash is ready for smartphones and would work just fine on all of Apple's products, "if and when Apple chooses to allow that for its users."

Lynch also suggested that using HTML5, an alternative Web program reportedly favored by Jobs, could lead "back to the dark ages of video on the Web" because it lacks a common format for working across all browsers.

As tech industry trash talk goes, this was relatively restrained — especially compared with remarks attributed to Jobs by several bloggers over the weekend. At a meeting with Apple employees after last week's launch of the iPad tablet, Jobs reportedly took swipes at both Google and Adobe, calling Adobe "lazy" and saying that Flash "is too buggy" to work on Apple devices.

Without referring directly to those statements, Lynch defended Adobe's record of creativity. And in a reference to Apple's iron-fisted control over which software runs on its devices, Lynch argued that, "open access has proven to be more effective in the long term than a walled approach, where a manufacturer tries to determine what users are able to see or approves and disapproves individual content and applications."

Source:-http://www.mercurynews.com