Adobe will stream their presentation free

Either by sheer coincidence or simple bad planning, Adobe -- about to kick off its annual Adobe Max developer conference -- has scheduled an announcement from the company on Tuesday, October 4th at 10 a.m. Pacific time, exactly the same date and time that Apple will be making its highly-anticipated iPhone (and perhaps more) announcements at the company's town hall stage in Cupertino. Adobe has said even less than Apple about the nature of its announcement.

Reporters from The New York Times were unable to pin down which company selected the date and time first, but Adobe Max is a week-long conference that Adobe has put on before. The keynote is described on the event's website as being an exploration of "the best solutions for delivering highly expressive and usable experiences, both in the browser and as apps" and will be presented by Adobe CTO Kevin Lynch.

The coincidence is an accidental reminder of the tensions between the companies that erupted in 2007 over Apple's refusal to include Adobe's Flash technology on iOS devices. Four years later, Flash on mobile devices that support it is still seen as a mediocre experience compared to the desktop versions, largely vindicating Apple's criticisms -- levelled personally by then-CEO Steve Jobs in a open letter called "Thoughts on Flash" -- that mobile Flash was too resource-hungry, diminished the overall experience and stability of other functions, and could largely be replaced by the more limited but promising (and efficient) HTML5.

Over time, Adobe stopped firing salvos of criticism back at Apple and embraced (to some extent) HTML5, incorporating it into its ">Adobe CS suite and creating developer tools to further extend the standard, even though they compete with Adobe's own Flash tools. The desktop version of Flash also became somewhat less resource-hungry, now opting to offload some of the processing onto graphics cards in newer PC and Mac models.

Given the lack of specifics on Adobe's part for its new announcement, however, it's a safe bet that the bulk of technology reports who may have to choose which event to attend in person will be in Cupertino rather than Los Angeles. Luckily, they don't have to choose -- Adobe's stream of the keynote is also available for non-Flash platforms such as iOS, a fact specifically mentioned on the company's event page. [via The New York Times]

by MacNN Staff