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Jan 29

Adobe Plays the Porn Card in Flash Campaign Against iPad

Posted in: adobe, Apple, flash, ipad, Media Players, Today's Chili

Apple has clearly hurt Adobe’s feelings. When Steve Jobs demonstrated an iPad at Wednesday’s tablet event, its Safari browser clearly did not support Flash. Adobe has published a blog post calling Flash the Apple iPad’s “broken link.” And now Adobe’s platform evangelist Lee Brimelow has compiled an illustrative montage (partly screengrabbed above) in an effort to illustrate what the lack of Flash means for the iPad.

Note row two, column two. Adobe has included a porn site. Though porn is certainly relevant to many people’s web experiences, that’s kind of a desperate move. My friend Matt Drance, Apple’s former iPhone evangelist, summed up what this means on Twitter: “Adobe has resorted to playing the porn card. It’s over.”

Update: Brimelow has updated his post to remove the porn image, explaining it was a joke — not something we disputed. He also notes that he is only speaking for himself and not on behalf of Adobe. However, we consider him a representative of Adobe because he is the company’s Flash evangelist, and his post is related to his work at Adobe.

Meanwhile, DaringFireball’s John Gruber has posted his response to Brimelow’s montage with an interesting observation:

Flash evangelist Lee Brimelow made his little poster showing what a bunch of Flash-using web sites look like without Flash without actually looking to see how they render on MobileSafari. Ends up a bunch of them, including the porno site, already have iPhone-optimized versions with no blue boxes, and video that plays just fine as straight-up H.264. iPhone visitors to these sites have no idea they’re missing anything because, well, they’re not missing anything. For a few other of the sites Brimelow cited, like Disney and Spongebob Squarepants, there are dedicated native iPhone apps.

Kendall Helmstetter Gelner put together this version of Brimelow’s chart using actual screenshots from MobileSafari, the App Store, and native iPhone apps. The only two blue boxes left: FarmVille and Hulu.

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