I’ve watched the all of the discussion about how Apple refuses to support, aka, pay for access to, Adobe products for their portable devices. First it was the iTouch, then the iPhone, now the iPad. They’ve either offered their own proprietary solution, or started adding html5 support to accommodate the requirement for a flash alternative. I think most end users really don’t know the difference; they see YouTube videos the same way regardless of what device they are using.
But for those of us working the nuts and bolts of things in the background, this continued standoff could keep many things from moving forward.
I have not been shy about my opinion about Adobe over the years. I often compare them to Microsoft in my own thinking process, and know that I’d rather deal with Microsoft than Adobe when it comes to forced and assumed product upgrades. My college campus has to upgrade to the latest and greatest of Adobe products regularly, and even using it in a metered status so we don’t have to buy more seats than we absolutely need, costs a small fortune every year. And every yearly upgrade to things like CS4 Design Premium can mean you also have to upgrade equipment to go along with the new software. And that, as we all know, is no small matter.
I think many of us have looked for years for alternatives. Alternatives to QuickTime Pro, alternatives to Flash, Alternatives to CS4. There are some good ones out there, granted, but many of them don’t quite have the polish of the Adobe products. But as they are knifing us in the back and turning that knife a little bit more every once in a while, I get a little more resentful.
So when Apple refuses to dance to Adobe’s tune, I can understand it, and even to some degree, agree with it. Adobe has hacked me off more than once over the years with all kinds of issues. But if there’s no decent alternative to what Adobe can provide, we are rather stuck in the situation we are in. And while Apple refuses to dance to the tune and purchase Flash support for their portable devices, I have to wonder if we’re all being ill-served by Apple not taking the next step and making alternatives available for developers outside of Apple. Html5 can’t be all there is, right?
I know, I know…Apple isn’t a “software company.” But they do make an operating system, and they purchase and approve apps that are distributed through their systems, whether portable or desktop. Why aren’t they taking this next step? If they are so hell-bent against using Adobe, then it should logically follow that they have an alternative to offer.
I don’t expect Apple to change. And I don’t expect Adobe to change. But one can hope, right?
Beeing a designer, Adobe is even worse for me. I am forced to use CS software. There is NO alternative for Photoshop in the prepress business (because its the only pixel image editor working in CMYK – not even Gimp does that). And they have buried FreeHand, which was the only real alternative to Illustrator. Yes we have alternatives to Indesign, but it has become such a standard, there is hardly a way around it. I still use FreeHand, because Illustrator is so much inferior for the complex work I do in 2D vector graphics. That Adobe is responsible for the end of FreeHand makes me angry to the bones – and I have 5000 members at http://www.freefreehand.org who feel the same way! I would love to see Apple kick Adobes ignorant ass. By the way, Flash is one of the most bad software to handle I have ever seen, so far from beeing intuitive – but thats Macromedias fault.