It can’t have escaped the notice of very many people that Steve Jobs posted an open letter concerning his ”Thoughts on Flash.”

I agree with it for the most part. I despise flash! I have a plugin installed to block flash unless I specially tell it to load. And I CERTAINLY don’t want it draining my mobile phone’s battery. But I digress.

Toward’s the end of his letter, Mr. Jobs notes his beef with Adobe over the fact that Adobe has only just come to fully support OS X’s native programing language of Cocoa even though OS X has been shipping for 10 years now. And I agree, it has been quite irritating that Adobe stuck with the Carbon API for so long when it was obviously an intermediary step in the transition from OS 9 to OS X. And of course the Carbon API in OS X is now no longer being maintained, and will never have support for 64 bit, thus finally forcing Adobe to move to Cocoa with the release of CS5 recently. So yeah, I completely agree with Jobs that Adobe is VERY LATE to this party. And frankly the apps have suffered from having been programed in Carbon. This is a layperson’s perspective, but there is always a difference in feel and responsiveness between an app written in Carbon, and an app written in Cocoa. It’s noticeable to the user. And it was noticeable in apps like Photoshop.

Now I come to my beef. Steve states in that latter portion of the letter that, “Adobe was the last major third party developer to fully adopt Mac OS X.” And he is correct. The last major third party dev to fully adopt the platform. But here’s a dirty little secret. Apple released an update, not too long ago, to one of it’s major applications that is still written in Carbon, and is still 32 bit. It’s Final Cut Pro! You would think, given that Final Cut really is a major player these days, that Apple would put a little more effort into it’s development. I remember thinking at one time that surely Final Cut 6 would be a native Cocoa app. And here we are at Final Cut 7. No 64 bit, no Cocoa! I mean, speaking of being late to the party…

So uhh, yeah… as much as I hate flash myself, this makes Steve seem rather silly to me! I’m thinking he should get his own house in order before he starts trying to clean Adobe’s!