While CS5 is going to be a fantastic release, one feature in one product of the suite was perceived as sufficiently threatening to actually get a reaction from Steve Jobs. So if one feature was that awesome, consider what else is going to be in that box on Monday! But I digress...

Adobe is doing what it does best: release tools that make designers and developers more productive. This has little to do with Flash and everything to do with unleashing the collective output of the web development community. Flash is merely an enabler for the most dynamic, engaging and portable web-connected software experiences we have. But Dreamweaver, ColdFusion Builder, Flash Builder and the upcoming Flash Catalyst are the tools that make it all possible. They're not sexy but it's what we get to look at all day long.

The ability to develop an app using a language and IDE you're comfortable with means that you, the developer, can focus more on the creative and innovative aspects of your product instead of getting tripped up on syntax or negotiating the quirks of a new platform. That's just good business sense and makes for a happy, productive development team. Apple doesn't see it that way and would prefer that we do it their way, using their tools or just stick to web development.

It's not about getting Flash on the iWhatever; it's about getting developers working on apps for the iWhatever using Adobe tools. Really. Apple has plenty of specious reasons for not allowing Flash on their mobile hardware and only one legitimite one. Adobe's not out to decimate ITMS or the App Store (even if that might be fun) - it's looking to increase the size of the Flash developer market and thus sell more tools (which also includes our server-side favorites like ColdFusion and Flash Media Server). Flash isn't perfect (and if you actually read posts from Adobe folks, they're not arrogant enough to assert otherwise) but it's really fantastic for what it did for rich media delivery and standardizing the delivery of application experiences in the browser, a task that the major browser vendors continue to struggle with. Performance will never be as good as native apps - so what? Adobe continues to throw resources at optimizing the player and now that they have (at least in this one area) help from Apple on hardware acceleration the OSX crowd should be somewhat placated.

The blowback from the developer community on the latest SDK changes is the sound of people ticked off that the iPhone/iPad will remain mostly inaccessible without learning Objective-C. Not everything we'd want to do is exposed through the browser. It's an inferior platform and forever relegated to second class citizen status on the device. Why do developers like Flash in a desktop/laptop/netbook browser? Because it gives back a lot of things that the browser takes away. These things Apple wishes to keep for itself and a small cabal of trusted (or at least solid revenue generating) developers. HTML5 does not restore them - that seems to have been conveniently forgotten - despite Steve's assertions that the browser is all we should be paying attention to.

This will still be a great week for Adobe. It's also a great week for the web development community. One sentence in one document tells us where to shift our attention - away from Cupertino and towards a more open future.

Fine. I didn't want to pay your rent anyway, Steve.

Adobe wins, with or without you.