My take on the Adobe/Apple debate and how to move forward.

This week we all got some news that upset the Flash community. Apple is trying to avoid any development not produced with tools coming from the Cupertino company. Like many of you I felt outraged about it. Is like Apple had slammed a door to your face. It´s logical to feel angry. We all have invested a lot of time on improving our skills and now they seem to be useless on a growing platform. Even more angry if, like me, you started learning new skills like Unity. Why is Apple making this move? Giving them the benefit of doubt I would think that Apple is becoming paranoid about their platform/product and want to protect it as much as they can (they even patented the coverflow design concept, maybe they do not want to repeat the desktop/windows metaphor all over). When Mac came out, the target user was the creative type like designers and developers. And thanks to Adobe Postscript technology it found a niche among us. Are the creative guys still the target market for Apple? NO. Since the launch of the iPod is the common folk. Even more since the launch of the iPhone. Anyone who needs to listen to music, make calls or check his e-mail. Developers and designers are too little a niche market now to bother. If anything we are the target user for Adobe. Will I start learning Objective-C? No. I still have way too much work on Flash coming in and for sure Flash is certainly not going away anytime soon. I will continue learning Unity and I hope some day to create a killer game for the web and/or the desktop. How can Adobe "counter-attack"? My two cents:

1. Improve Dreamweaver to the point it is the "de facto" HTML 5 development tool. You know, not everything has to be an .ipa file. You don´t even have to pay Apple to develop web apps. Take the open source WebKit and make it into a rendering engine/mode for Dreamweaver. I wish to see how Apple will respond to that.
2. Make Flash really open source. Open up the Flash Player. Just as Apple is closing all the gates to non-propietary software, Adobe should lift the ban to creating your own player. Can you imagine if a lot of companies start developing apps that read the .swf format as if it were a common .xml file? Our creations eventually will show up on the iPhone/iPad
3. Finally improve Flash publishing to other platforms. Not only say I can create Android apps, show me how to do it the way many Adobe Evangelists have shown the publishing to iPhone: make a lot of noise about it.

Adobe I´m with you. Now back to work, my client wants a lot of tweening effects not possible on HTML.