Apple isn’t under any ethical obligation to support Adobe’s products. Nor is Adobe under any ethical obligation to do the same. That’s the long and the short of it. I like both companies and use products from both of them. Both companies play these sorts of games for strategic advantage. There’s no reason you or I should take it personally.

As for designers and musicians, I’m a musician and I use Macs for my music production work, and so most musicians I know. Most of my designer friends also use Macs. Macs are still a very popular choice among that demographic.

What has changed is that Apple products, especially their mobile products, have become tremendously popular with a broad range of consumers, even consumers who use Windows boxes otherwise.

(And put some proper cpu’s in your stuff before you start shouting ‘full web access!’ Like you own the web. Hating on adobe just to keep alive this gimmick app-store-bubble which will be over soon like betamax. The whole powertrip reminds me of… MICROSOFT! During Apple 90′s crisis it was the designers and musicians who kept it alive, but that seems to be long gone forgotten…)

I like SWF as an output format and use it in all of my Captivate 5 production work, which is consumed primary on desktop and laptop computers, mostly Windows but also OS X.

There’s no way for OS X to lock out Flash, as you aren’t limited to the App Store for installing applications, as you are on iOS devices. Having to install via the App Store has always been the case for iOS devices and has never been the case for the desktop/laptop version of OS X. Even thought there is now an App Store for OS X, Apple would have a pretty hard time convincing people that they should have to go through it to install apps on their desktops/laptops.

As for Blue-ray, who cares? Blue-ray is the last gasp of content merchants who can’t admit that web-based delivery is the future, and that they should pay twice as much for it as for the same thing on DVD.

Any web server is able to play embedded Flash and that is why anyone would choose to export as Flash in the first place. Most web servers however are not enabled to play streaming movies and shared hosts disallow it because it is too server intensive. Apple clearly understands this and so I also don’t understand Apple’s reasoning at all.

Apples reasoning does not however surprise me when I observe my Macbook Pro and its total incompatibility with BluRay. Apple presently focuses much of its time directing customers into the iTunes and their online shop. It appears that Flash competes against that.

If we customers are not careful I would not be surprised if OS X and Safari prevent playing Flash altogether just like other Apple portable devices.

Of course, it’s not just a technical problem. There’s clearly bad blood between Adobe and Apple. And neither company is blameless in fostering and continuing it.

I used to be a Flash expert back in my freelance era, but these days mostly use Keynote to quickly create small interactive Flash media for my organisations website.

Exporting to Quicktime is NOT a solution to me.

QT creates a bitmap based video file. Flash is not just about video – it is on the whole a vector-based format with excellent real-time animation and interactivity, meaning file sizes are very small (especially if you only have vector artwork and text). Flash SWFs are emminently scaleable and retain their quality without compression artifacts (unless you have embedded images/video).

99% of the world has Flash installed on computers, and not just for Youtube videos. Quicktime requires the installation of the full QT package, a huge download, and the plugin is a media player, not a seamless interactive element on a webpage.

Apple’s irrational hatred of Flash is perhaps just cynical revenue protection for their iPhone/iPad App Store, meaning people can’t use the multitude of free Flash-based tools, interactive media and games on their mobile devices on the web so have to buy similar ones via Apple.

I get as annoyed as anyone by the horrendous overuse of Flash banners and video advertising on commercial websites, but as a creative tool for small, interactive media it’s brilliant. And Keynote was a nice easy shortcut to production.

Thanks for the ‘upgrade’ Apple!