14 DAY TRIAL // The Apple versus Adobe debate has seen its fair share of headlines, but it looks like things may be dying down. Steve Jobs himself stepped in to make Apple’s position on the matter crystal clear, and Adobe has announced that it has given up on development for the iPhone and iPad. But that doesn’t mean that content created with Adobe tools won’t land on the Apple devices. Adobe says Flash and HTML5 aren’t self-excluding. What’s more, the company plans to enable developers to create great HTML5 content.
At the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco, Adobe CTO Kevin Lynch talked about HTML5 and weighed in on the whole Apple vs. Adobe situation. When asked how Adobe would “react” to HTML5, he said that the new web standard wasn’t an actual threat to Flash and the company. In fact, he believes HTML5 is a great step forward and said that Adobe planned to support it fully. “We’re going to make great tooling for HTML5. We’re going to make the best tools in the world for HTML 5,” he added.
Adobe believes that there is a place for both Flash and HTML5 technologies and they can be used together taking advantage of their respective strengths. That may be true, but it looks like Apple’s strong stance against Flash is gaining supporters, or at least, people are choosing sides. And, unfortunately for Adobe, most people want to be on Apple’s side at the moment.
But the reason behind Apple’s decision, Adobe’s CTO believes, has nothing to do with the technology and a lot more to do with Apple’s desire to control its platform. In fact, he thinks that Apple may very well be threatened by Flash’s popularity and the fact that developers chose it instead of Apple’s own SDK for many apps. Again, there is truth in the Adobe exec’s words, but he’s probably putting more spin on it than it deserves. While it’s true that Flash isn’t as bad as Jobs would have you believe, it’s not as good as Adobe claims either. The truth, as always, is somewhere in the middle. [via TechCrunch]