No Climb Down for Apple
Looks like there won't be a climb down for Apple - Steve Jobs has released a public letter on Flash - and why he doesn't want it on Apple's mobile devices. He went through a whole set of points, building up to this last one: Jobs doesn't want cross platform tools being used to build apps:
Flash is a cross platform development tool. It is not Adobe’s goal to help developers write the best iPhone, iPod and iPad apps. It is their goal to help developers write cross platform apps. And 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.
Maybe there was some kind of compromise possible before this, but - not so much now. Apple has - from the very top - told Adobe (and every other non-native toolset, for that matter) to "go fish". That means the lines are drawn now: there's the bright lines of Apple's app store, and the less well drawn ones for Android. Meanwhile, HP sounds like they intend to invest real money in WebOS, so there's going to be real competition in this space. Game on.
