Job's complaint about Adobe & Carbon is slimy enough to run for Congress -- and a nasty case of the pot calling the kettle black. If you want to hear the real facts, I posted about this earlier in the thread.

There are lots of Flash-based apps on iOS (see: Adobe AIR). You probably just don't notice it because you assume everything related to Flash sucks, and it never occurred to you that apps you actually like might be using Flash under the hood...

Actually, the Flash file format is published openly and the entire Flash VM is open source. The fact that no one else seriously tried to create a Flash implementation doesn't mean it's not possible (although it's maybe a testament to the fact that what Adobe built was a lot harder than most people give them credit for).

There were many problems with Jobs's arguments, but the most important one is that Apple's own actions proved him wrong. Remember that after all this bluster, a few months later Apple actually reversed course and decided to allow Flash-based apps into the App Store after all. There are currently hundreds of Flash apps available on iOS, and some have hit #1 rankings on the charts.

That's a clear demonstration that -- contrary to everything Jobs wrote -- Flash apps aren't guaranteed to suck, are enjoyed by consumers, and thus contribute to the device's ecosystem. If Jobs had kept on the course set out in his letter, who knows how many of those popular apps would never have been available on iOS?

Except that Jobs calling Adobe lazy over Carbon/Cocoa (or 32/64-bit) was about as disingenuous as you can get. Apple dragged their feet far worse than Adobe did during that transition: Finder, QuickTime, Aperture, and Final Cut Pro all made very slow transitions to 64-bit / Cocoa. In the latter cases, the competing Adobe products (Lightroom, Premiere, After Effects) all finished the same migration about two years ahead of Apple's products.

Apple also publicly promised that 10.5 would support 64-bit Carbon as a transition stage. They even shipped multiple betas with that support in place -- only to yank it at the last minute, even though Cocoa at that time didn't have full parity with Carbon APIs.

So Apple reneged on a transitional API they said they would support, shipped a new API with missing features, and didn't even bother to convert most of their own flagship apps over to the new API... and then had the audacity to call others "lazy" for not instantly dropping everything and making that same conversion? Sorry, but that's politician-worthy behavior right there.

Comments like this are reading wayyy farther into the Adobe announcement than is warranted. Flash as a technology has been available on mobile devices in two forms for well over a year now: the Flash browser plugin, and AIR apps (essentially Flash apps packaged for distribution in app stores). On iOS, Apple disallows browser plugins, but AIR apps can and do run on iOS (i.e. Flash is ok as long as it goes through the App Store garden gate). The only part of that story Adobe said they're changing is the Flash browser plugin. Flash-based apps will continue to be possible, even on iOS.

Incidentally, some of the top-selling iOS apps running on Flash/AIR. So it's awfully hard to justify the claim that Flash will "never work on mobile" -- since it already works well on mobile, and has for quite some time.

Flash has had hardware-accelerated video decoding for quite a while now. That's why it DOES play back 720p and 1080p... even on mobile devices (see: Xoom, PlayBook).

Also, I don't know what makes you say Flash was "designed for mouse" (other than the fact that Steve Jobs said it first). Flash is like any other interactive platform. It gives you mouse events, keyboard events... and on mobile, things like accelerometer and multi-touch/gesture events. You can make content that's optimized for mouse, touch, or both. Complaints about Flash and the mouse are essentially complaints about legacy content in general, which applies to basically any website that predates mobile devices. What Jobs should have said is that all websites need a rewrite to support small-screen, touch-only mobile phones well. (Don't want / can't afford a rewrite? Tough -- that's been Apple's mantra since way before iPhones were around).

Visual Studio is not what I'd hold up as the gold standard for toolsets. Have you ever used a good, modern Java IDE like IntelliJ? Or even Eclipse? After years of using those, I cry a little every time I'm forced to go back to VS.

No... the same exact version of Flash is available on Mac, Windows, and Linux/Solaris. See the table here: http://www.adobe.com/software/flash/about/

And of course Flash is fully supported on OS X... what on earth makes you think it isn't?

Huh? No, Stage 3D works on every web browser that Flash runs on – IE, FF, Chrome, Safari, Opera, etc.

Actually, the Flash file format (SWF) is published openly: http://www.adobe.com/devnet/swf/. If you really want to write your own Flash implementation for some other platform, have at it.

But of course, that's hard work. This is an issue with open source projects too. 99% of the world (even most engineers) are at the mercy of the small set of committers. If, say, Firefox doesn't support your random obscure platform, all you can do is beg people in the FF community to support it (and the response would probably just be "we welcome your patch!"). This is not much different from begging Adobe to support your random obscure platform. In the vast majority of cases what really matters is good stewardship of a project, whether its open source, proprietary, or something in between. If the company/nonprofit/community behind a project is committed to it and well-intentioned, I personally find it pretty hard to complain.

I'm sure it feels nice to say that, but what can you back it up with?
Performance: Most HTML 5 gaming / graphics demos I've seen peg the CPU worse than comparable Flash apps. Where are the examples that outperform Flash?
Security: In recent years, Flash has actually had fewer security vulnerabilities than most major browsers (2010, 2009).
Privacy: Flash has always given users full control over local storage ("Flash cookies"), and has made changes in the past year to make that UI easier to find. Flash also integrates with "private browsing mode." So, what privacy concerns are unique to Flash exactly?

Sure, but a secure Flash Player = secure Flash, too. Problem is, no software is perfect and so today we have neither secure browsers nor secure Flash. Thankfully both are moving increasingly towards a process-sandboxing model that will go a long way toward making both more secure.

At MAX yesterday Adobe showed actual gameplay in the Unreal engine: check out this video, at about 15:50.

Also, Adobe does have a technology that lets you compile C/C++ into Flash bytecode. It's called Alchemy. Dunno to what extent that was used for the Unreal demo, though...

Well, really both have been working to catch up to native APIs that have been available for 5-10 years. I wouldn't really say either one is "ahead" at this point – they've been on roughly the same development timeline, and while WebGL has somewhat better shader support, Flash's Stage 3D has far more widespread availability (which matters a lot if you're Zynga or Disney.com or whoever and actually care to make money off this technology now).

It's available already: http://blogs.adobe.com/flashplayer/2011/10/adobe-flash-player-11-air-11-available-later-today.html