From my perspective, that of a Flash developer and web designer... Flash doesn't suck any more than any other sucky platform that doesn't occasionally not work... and that includes pretty much anything Apple has released.

I also have anger toward Adobe, because rather than FIX the problems with Flash (and other problems)... they continue to coast. They are lazy and arrogant because they are the only game in town now.

Flash is, and could be, a terrific development platform. I've seen just too many good Flash sites, and deployments of Flash, to ever even CONSIDER not having it be a part of any designer or animator's arsenal.

There's a whole wide-open field of educational uses and applications. Flash content is being used widely on digital whiteboards across the country... shows how out of touch Apple is with what used to be one of their core markets in education.

Meanwhile, pretty much every great Hollywood site is Flash based. These are the kind of sites I'd be designing every day if I could. I see them as the cutting edge of creativity and excellence on the web. They can crash Macs... but you can't just hang that on Adobe. You have to hang it on how crappy OS X has been from the beginning.

OS X has always been buggy, inadequate beta freeware. Largely based on OpenSource crap. It's never been truly commercial grade as an operating system. There is stuff that hasn't worked right or looked right since what, 2001? That's ridiculous.

Meanwhile, I don't think it's up to Apple to decide what technologies should or shouldn't be used, simply because their terrible OS can't handle them. They should continue to TRY. And they need to continue to give users a choice. The BENEFITS of Flash far outweigh the drawbacks.

Are you kidding me, how can you say with a straight face that this is about interface consistency, when Apple is the LAST person to have that. They have so badly pooched THEIR OWN human interface guidelines, and so completely heaped up any sense of consistency with happy horseshit and competing useless layers of interface, that what the hell difference would it make if Flash was yet another option? Every widget and mobile app these days comes out with a different interface. Interface novelty is driving the market... stupid skins and animation touches and other jolly jumping crap is completely more important than consistency, so spare me.

I look at it from the pro perspective. Apple has established the very clunky rule-breaking crap that you're railing against. They just want to control it. Designers and developers want to, um, design and develop it, because that's the way we make money. Dictating what software we should or shouldn't do to create OUR contributions to the overall spinning-gears happy horseshit world of competing dumb web bells and whistles should not be Apple's.

I'm totally not on Apple's side here. Choice and adaptation should be their game. But when something is too hard for them, they duck and cover. They're still trying to prop up this terrible, inefficient operating system that was designed as a file server. They complain that Flash crashes it. What, any more than their OWN media playing software Quicktime? Puh-leeez. The glaring inadequacies of Apple engineers, and their own software are the real issue. It's frustrating having to face that people eventually see when the emperor has no clothes.

Apple has managed to go far by controlling certain aspects of its own interface, and showcasing its own proof of concepts and nobody bats an eye. But Flash allows everyman or every designer to actually compete with their widgetified nonsense, so of course they balk. They see it as stealing their thunder.

Adobe? Theoretically they are only supplying the tools. And they wouldn't have bought Macromedia if they didn't believe in the potential of Flash. Flash makes more MONEY for designers than any other technology right now. It's absurd, absolutley absurd to abandon it, rather than try to make it work.

I'd put it in the category of WELL worth fixing. I can think of plenty of other things that are NOT worth fixing... uh, APPLE, I'm looking at you.

But Apple and Jobs can't tolerate things that make them look bad or expose their own shortcomings. But the fact is, they need to fix Macs so they work with Flash content, AND Adobe needs to stabilize the Flash platform so it works better. With the end in mind of giving designers and end users the maximum possible choice of creative tools.