#adobe

What do you get when you spend the last decade and a half exploiting the very same people you were supposed to empower?

Adobe's decision to stop developing mobile Flash shouldn't surprise: Adobe can see there's more money in preventing people watching stuff than enabling them to do so. ... Amazon's Kindle might be the biggest kid on the block, but just about all the other electronic book readers rely on Adobe's Digital Editions DRM to protect (and distribute) their content (which is laid out using the Adobe-owned-but-happily-shared ePub format).

The Web is singing this morning. The coming death of Flash on mobile devices has made a lot of tech pundits and developers very happy. There is a big fat "I told you so" coming from all corners the of Internet while all Adobe can do is quietly sit back and rue the day the original iPhone was announced.

A former manager and engineer of Flash at Adobe said today that when the true smartphone revolution came in 2007 with the announcement of the iPhone is 2007, Adobe ignored it. Carlos Icaza co-founded Ansca Mobile, the creators of the Corona SDK, left Adobe in 2007 when his call for embracing the touchscreen smartphone evolution was ignored by Adobe executives.

While the market for TV apps is incredibly fragmented, it doesn’t appear that Adobe’s Flash will provide a solution. The company confirmed through a statement that like mobile, it will no longer focus on porting the Flash plugin into web browsers on CE devices, but believes developers should build native apps on those devices instead.

Yesterday, Adobe announced major job cuts and a company restructuring, and indicated that their focus on Flash may not be what it used to be, by cutting off Flash development on Android and the Playbook. Meanwhile last week, Microsoft was reluctantly admitting that Silverlight isn't a big part of their future either. The message is clear, and even if it means some relearning for long time web designers, it's time to switch to HTML5 if you haven't already.

"It's been almost 15 years since I created HomeSite, and I stopped working on it in 1998 when I left Allaire Corporation. Several other developers took over after I left, but to the best of my knowledge nobody has touched it for several years, so the fact that it was still being sold until now is a nice testament to how useful people found it. Kudos to Macromedia and Adobe for keeping it around, despite the fact that it competed with some of their other products."

"Adobe® Flash® Catalyst is a new professional interaction design tool for rapidly creating application interfaces and interactive content without coding."

"Muller spent his days at Sun focused on GUIs, leading all of the company's client Java work." ...which were a success, how?

"It turns out that the AIR runtime installer installs a framework in ~/Library/Frameworks. In a vanilla installation this folder doesn’t exist, but I had one, and the permissions we’re not what the installer expected. I changed the permissions and ran

"I've been working on an Amazon S3 client in Apollo, and I finally got around to extracting the S3 library and making it its own project. I put it up on Google Code under the name as3awss3lib."

"We also don’t make you sign licensing agreements to get the format specifications, or prevent you from competing with us. We don’t tell you where you can and can’t install the software. We don’t tell you what you can and can’t tell people about

"Sigh. I used to have the strength to argue against such foolishness. Nowadays I’m reduced to nothing more than Grey’s-Anatomy-esque catchphrases."

"Adobe is announcing plans to open source Flex under the Mozilla Public License (MPL). This includes not only the source to the ActionScript components from the Flex SDK, which have been available in source code form with the SDK since Flex 2 was released

"With Apollo, you can leverage existing web development skills (HTML, Flash, JavaScript, Ajax, Flex) to build and deploy RIAs to the desktop. ... Apollo will enable anyone with basic web development skills to create a desktop application."

"I’m confused. What is Grand Central? Is that Apollo alpha. A pre-cursor or just something everyone wants to forget about? Google remembers it - 611k mentions of it - in fact. Others panned it back then."

"Lua is a scripting language that was designed to extend applications. It's interesting to see it suddenly take off."

"Come on Adobe, you both can and should do better than this."

"With a high performance open-source VM like Tamarin available, maybe more developers will start to re-examine JavaScript's role outside the browser."

"We didn’t buy Macromedia, we bought the market."

"Flash is a distraction." HERETIC!!! (*snicker*)

In comments: "I felt as if I was just told my grandmother died. Let's all have a moment of silence for Macromedia."

"Synergy schmynergy; these integrated solutions from the acquisition are almost certainly going to result in (relative) stagnation. At least until someone can seriously compete with an $800 million (revenues) company." Ugh.

"Adobe Systems Incorporated (Nasdaq: ADBE) has announced a definitive agreement to acquire Macromedia (Nasdaq: MACR) in an all-stock transaction valued at approximately $3.4 billion." Holy crap.