Apple vs. Adobe, Round 3

Remember when Apple and Adobe played nice while thousands of scruffy graphic designers happily used Photoshop to retouch images on their Macs ... and all was right with the world? Well, it all seemed to go downhill over the Great Flash War of 2010.

I saw inklings of trouble when Adobe continued to not fully optimize their CS suite of applications for Mac's Cocoa OS framework throughout most of this past decade. And when the iPhone was released without Flash support, you felt there was trouble brewing. But now, it's getting ugly.

Apple and Adobe have gone tit for tat on the subject. The latest have involved Steve Jobs's open letter regarding Flash, and now Adobe has published founders' Chuck Geschke and John Warnock's open letter in response.

My take ... Is Apple right for not allowing Flash to run on their devices? Yes, it's their device, and Flash is a resource (battery) hog. Is Apple right for restricting creation of iPad and iPhone apps to Apple development platforms? No, that's just plain selfish; Apple's not the only one who knows how to make apps. Is Adobe right for whining about others trashing Flash (which they didn't even make, by the way)? No, Flash is showing its age in an era where computing is becoming more and more portable, where the need for battery life exceeds the need to play Farmville.

And Adobe's argument that Apple should support Flash because it has a 99% install base holds no merit. I'm sure the manufacturers of asbestos had a 99% install base at one point. That didn't make it a good thing. (Okay, that example was harsh, but you get my point.)

Apple and Flash

There's been a lot of talk as of late about the battle heating up between Apple and Adobe. In particular, Apple's decision not to support Adobe's Flash plug-in on some of its best-selling devices like the iPhone, the iPod Touch, and the upcoming iPad.

At a meeting with Wall Street Journal executives, Apple CEO Steve Jobs called Flash a "CPU hog" (it is) and didn't build the iPad to support it. Adobe retaliated on its blog, pointing out how the iPad isn't really a good way to experience the Internet if so much of the Web uses Flash (it does).

Frankly, I think this less about Apple's quibble with Adobe and more about their storied tradition of abandoning technologies that, frankly, were on their way out. Apple just sees these demises sooner than most and usually gets pilloried for their efforts. Let's take a look:

• Floppy drive: In 1998 Apple officially dumped the diskette with the introduction of the iMac. Thank you!
• SCSI: The only thing more confusing than configuring SCSI devices was ... okay, there was nothing more confusing than configuring SCSI devices. I'm serious.
• Serial port: Hey, the printer's not printing. Can I unplug the serial port and plug it back in? No, that's worse than crossing the streams.
• ADB port: Okay, the Apple Desktop Bus was their fault in the first place. No harm, no foul.
• Modem: Anyone who remembers what "baud" is, has no love loss for modems ... or this sound.
• Firewire400: It was getting slow, and if you accidentally plugged it in backwards, you could fry your device.
• PCMCIA: This laptop cardbus was about as fast as physically shoveling the data onto your computer. Apple did the right thing by dropping it for Express34 and then the wrong thing by dropping that for SD.

Perhaps Flash is just another in a long line of soon-to-be-aging technologies in which Apple is first to recognize their inevitable obsolescence. If you've ever checked your task manager (Windows) or activity monitor (Mac) while running a Web page with Flash, you've seen how much of a resource hog it can be.

Out of the (MS) Office

At first, I was very skeptical about cloud computing, specifically word processing and spreadsheets. I couldn't wrap my head around relinquishing access and direct control over my documents to something other than a hard drive that was no more than three feet away. I'm sure you, too, have been burned by server crashes that have wreaked havoc on your Word docs on a shared server. Still, Microsoft Word always kept a local copy that was never more than ten minutes old. To boot, the hacking of Twitter's sensitive Google Docs further justified my apprehension.

However, I'm a realist ... a pragmatist ... and a technologist. But what happens when these attributes conflict, as is the case with trusting cloud computing? First, the realist in me understands that cloud computing / online document management is where things are headed. Why fight it? 'Nuff said. The pragmatist in me knows that cloud computing introduces more points of failure (Internet connection, remote servers, hackers). The technologist in me loves the idea of real-time access to all of my documents, well beyond the benefits of a USB jump drive. Let's face it ... where do you go nowadays that you don't have at least some level of Internet connectivity. (Answer: The one place you'll need that document the most.)

I already do some level of cloud computing with Apple's MobileMe file storage service, but adding the capability to edit and collaborate on documents takes it to a whole new level. That said, I've decided to jump in and start porting my documents over to the cloud where I can both access and edit them from (nearly) everywhere. The big-player options:

• Google Docs. I've used Google Docs before when collaborating on a document or spreadsheet in my work with the ADM to some success. As with all collaboration editing, it gets a little hairy when a lot of people try to edit something. It's like five people trying to make a batch of cookies all at the same time.
• Google Wave. This is really just an expanded implementation of Google Docs, but the principles are the same. Plus, I'm really looking forward to using the collaborative functionality of Wave and its gadgets for work use. However, for personal use, I think I'll stick with the simpler tools.
• Acrobat BuzzWord. It seems like Adobe looked at the mistakes of others before releasing this slick update. They really hit it out of the park with this iteration. BuzzWord maintains the core functionality that's critical to word processing (text, paragraphs, images, etc.) yet made it so elegant and user-friendly. To look at BuzzWord and Google Docs side-by-side, I think one would naturally gravitate towards BuzzWord, if only for its design. With this (and Google Docs), you can create PDFs of your work, which is recommended for delivering a finished, uneditable version of your work. Note: with BuzzWord, you can only export five PDFs for free.
• AjaxWrite. This one can read and write MS Word files and is completely free. In fact, it feels a lot like early versions of MS Word. The two main drawbacks are that it only works in Firefox, and it's a bit slow. I often have to wait for it to load a blank document. Seriously?

For me, the only feasible options are Google Docs (formerly Writely) and Adobe BuzzWord, the former for being more ubiquitous, the latter for being ... well ... cooler. It's a shame that whichever route we go with online word processing, they all feel the need to pay homage to the Microsoft Word mother ship. Hell, I'd love to use Apple's Pages, but who else will be able to open a .pages file? Everyone knows what a Word DOC is.

Update on Friday, November 20, 2009 at 4:47PM by Matthew Snodgrass

Other benefit to plain old desktop-based word processing ... you won't ever get a message like this:

But then again, know that your computer will crash a lot more than Adobe's or Google's.