Rubénerd!

Remember all that obsessive hubub and media speculation regarding Microsoft's potential awkward marriage to Adobe? It seems their CEO has (or rather had) other ideas. Warning, two digressions in this post.

"Adobe's growth prospects are so great that our focus is on seizing these opportunities as an independent company," Adobe Chief Executive Shantanu Narayen was quoted as saying by daily Financial Times Deutschland on Monday.

So what did the two heavyweights have to meet up about? If this Reuters report is to be believed... they were discussing software compatibility as so many people from tech companies regularly do.

Ship, meet people jumping

There was a bit of a pun there. People who eat lots of meat are probably very heavy. But I digress. Did the Adobe CEO just admit that the media worked itself up into a gigantic frenzy for nothing? How could anyone EVER assume the tech media would be capable of such a thing?! It boggles the mind! Of course this could also just be an elaborate smokescreen, which would make more sense owing to the fact Adobe Premiere may be able to be used to generate such effects. I'm more inclined to believe the former for now.

While the rest of the tech community was foaming at the mouth at the idea of Midobe or Adobesoft or some other silly combination of words (like Ruben and Nerd, how patently ridiculous is that?), I never thought it made much sense. They have largely different portfolios of software, but enough overlap to cause problems. Microsoft has far too much pride to discontinue software like Silverlight despite the fact nobody in the real world uses or cares about it, and it would make sense for them to do so in place of Flash.

As an aside, this screenshot of Patented FreeBSD Flash Fail was taken around Christmas 2007 for this post about Adobe Air. I've never really watched any Type-Moon anime but I really like their art style. This was also before KDE 4 came out and broke my heart. KDE 3 was epic. But I digress, again.

Everybody is entitled to my opinion

At least all this Microsoft and Adobe whatnot is just my opinion, but then again I don't really use either of their companies products other than Air (for TweetDeck) and Visio. I also didn't think it made sense to discontinue PageMaker either, or to have Adobe buy Macromedia. Heck I'm just skeptical about mergers full stop, the only super successful one I can think of off the top of my head was Apple buying NeXT, and that only worked because the nimbler and infinitely more talented NeXT team took the reigns.

HP, Microsoft, Adobe... I'd bet a gigantic sushi train dinner they'd never let a smaller company dictate terms to them, to say nothing of being essentially run by the companies they buy. Can you imagine Steve Ballmer giving up the top job for Shantanu Narayen? Then again given Microsoft's decade long stagnant stock price, maybe its time for a change anyway.

Aside from everything else, Microsoft Photoshop is simply a terrifying thought.

With all this furore about the iPad not having Flash, I thought I'd share this screenshot. Yes Adobe, I would have begrudgingly installed your Flash drug in the past because I felt as though I "needed" it, but having been forced to give it up when I moved most of my machines to FreeBSD (which you don't support) I was forced to get clean and as a consequence I no longer use it even on platforms you do support!

Friends, don't let friends use Flash.

Of all the criticisms of the iPad that have been thrown around since it's launch barely a few days ago, the loudest seems to be the lack of Flash support. I'm going to get into trouble with a lot of people for saying this, but I consider it a feature, and on par with Google ditching support for Internet Explorer 6 on some of their sites.

Flash never liked Apple anyway

It's no secret Adobe has let Flash languish on the Mac for a long, long time, and they don't even acknowledge the existence of operating systems other than Windows, Mac or 32bit Linux (last time I checked a few years ago even 64bit Linux versions were unavailable). On my non-Mac machines that all run FreeBSD, if I wanted to view Flash content I needed to run the Linux version of Flash using the binary compatibility layer, and even then it was buggy even by Flash's poor standards. As a result I started avoiding sites that use Flash, and now I don't use it. Period.

In high school in 2004 I remember working closely with a guy a few grades below me on a site for the school newspaper and he insisted we use Flash. Even then despite the lack of HTML5 I loathed it because sites rendered in it were confusing, broke basic browser behaviour, didn't index properly and were more often than not ugly as heck. To be fair I levelled the same criticisms against Ajax sites back in 2007, but at least in those cases Ajax doesn't rely on a closed, slow, buggy plugin that is bad enough on the desktop let alone a portable tablet device, and the situation has since improved.

Flash must die!

Then of course there are the security and privacy concerns with Flash that the mainstream media and most pundits are refusing to discuss or even acknowledge. Flash cookies in particular are an extremely nasty invasion of privacy that intentionally and misleadingly sidestep all the preferences users have set with regards to sites remembering information about them. It's like somebody finiding a loophole in your restraining order against them that says they can photograph you from their car provided they use film instead of memory cards and wear a Neelix mask.

I like Apple products because they're simple, elegant and just work, but I'm not afraid to call them out when they do something silly. There are a lot of silly things about this iPad, but one of them is not the lack of Flash support.

If anything I applaud Apple for taking a stand by not putting Flash in their iPhone OS in much the same way I applaud Google for no longer supporting Internet Explorer 6 on many of their sites. Replace many of the arguments people make about the iPad and Flash with Google and Internet Explorer 6 (Apple should make it an option, some sites still need it) and the argument quickly falls apart, or at the very least develops some serious cracks in their credibility.

Sidenotes at the... bottom

One sidenote of note (hah!), how would a dodgy Flash application that requires a mouse to hover over it to reveal aspects of its hidden interface and/or to accept input work on a multi touch interface, without a mouse? It makes no sense.

Sidenote two, more of an observation: the stigma attached to sites that not only use Flash but require it to function has existed for a long time now -- I still remember people in 2000 complaining about sites that required Flash and without an alternative.

And as another sidenote, does anyone else find it ironic that many of the people complaining the iPad doesn't have Flash are also the ones who say the iPad is too "closed"? Double standards much? Double standards sounds like a great name for a pastry shop that sells savoury cakes.

I'm done ranting now, whew! Time to have a cup of green tea.

While reading a fascinating interview with senior contributors about the improvements in FreeBSD 7.0 at the OnLamp BSD Dev Centre, I couldn't help but notice a certain problem with the page:

Can you see it? I'll give you a hint: it starts with an "A" and ends in a "dobe"! Yes, Adobe is advertising their Flex framework, on a website dedicated to an operating system they refuse to support!

Just for more fun, if you click on their advertisement on your trustworthy FreeBSD box as I did, you're told you need to download Adobe Flash. Clicking on that link takes you to a page where they tell you that "We are unable to locate a Web player that matches your platform and browser".

Little hint Adobe, don't advertise your products to people who can't use them, even if they wanted to.