Let me preface this with some information about myself and my experience:

I own an iPhone, a MacBook Pro, and have built every other computer I’ve ever had in my possession. I am a licensed iPhone developer. I’ve been using the PC format since the early ’90s. I experienced the BBS era, the IRC era, the Linux-as-my-desktop era, the Prodigy-Compuserve-AOL era (DOS/Windows). I’ve written device drivers, enterprise server daemons,  GUI client interfaces, end-user utilities, patched *nix email servers…. I know Ruby, Delphi, VB, Javscript, C++, C#, TCL, Python, CSS, HTML, AS2/AS3, etc etc etc…  I’ll stop here and just say I’m pretty well rounded.

Everything I know I learned by experience. Try troubleshooting IRQ conflicts when you’re eleven years old, and there is not a single, accessible, person that knows how to help.

The only push I’ve ever had was my cousin introducing me to the world of the modem, from there on it was like an insatiable explosion of curiosity.

With that out of the way, I will begin the actual article.

I use Adobe (on a constant basis, almost every day for the last 10 years) and Apple products. If I had to give one up I would choose to keep Adobe.

Apple I can do without, there are other operating system options out there, nobody does everything that Adobe does, as well as they do.

Correct me if I am wrong here but from what I know a very, very high percentage of Apple computer users use it specifically for design… using specifically Adobe products.

This is the main problem I see with Apple’s latest actions, creating bad blood between yourselves and one of the most used software suites for your platform? Are you nuts?

Do you really want to alienate that group of your users? Are you that full of yourselves???

The Flash snafu is mainly about the iPhone/iPad, however it’s bound to bleed into the world of the OSX user — you know, the whole I drink your milkshake thing.

I have developed for both OSX, and Windows. Microsoft may have made a lot of mistakes on the way but if you take a look at their frameworks, SDKs, and what they expose to the developer I think you will see what I am talking about when I say Microsoft has also done a lot of things right, including embracing support for third party hardware and software.

No 3rd party toolkit limit on Windows Mobile!

I like to tinker, so I’ve gone absolutely the most evil, most devious route and, brace yourself, used OSX86 — for those who aren’t savvy, OSX86 is a project to let you install OSX on almost any PC platform.  What’s interesting about doing things like this is that you learn a LOT in the process. Nothing is easy during the process.

You have to consider that Apple only supports and writes drivers for a very small range of hardware, so it’s hit or miss whether your computer will boot, your sound will work, your internet will work, etc… I’ve installed it a few times, every time it’s been quite the “experience”. One can spend days, weeks, months trying to perfect the setup of their hackintosh pc… but wait… why should someone even HAVE to do this? Why doesn’t Apple support more hardware in their operating system? Because Apple seems to have this idea that they can make all of the decisions for the end user, force them to pay premiums for hardware, and live happily ever after.

This is just not the case and I feel that Apple will feel people moving to other phone devices within the next one to two years. I know I will be.

Apple, while I admire your capacity to push new technologies forward, your recent actions have been immature and unacceptable. You need to fix this. Work with Adobe.

Get Flash running with acceptable performance, setup an approval process for third-party developer toolkits.

Otherwise, I’ll be canceling my iPhone developer license, switching to a different phone, and completely removing OSX from my MacBook… I have a feeling I won’t be the only one.

Whatever. Apple doesn’t care anyways.