Now Adobe’s launching an ad campaign in the name of “openness” and “fairness” designed to…do what exactly? Pressure Apple into allowing Flash on their iDevices (not going to happen) or their Flash-to-iPhone conversion tools?

This is a waste of their time and money, or at least of our time. There are enough terrible apps in the App Store without the need to make it easier to convert terrible Flash or Air apps into iPhone apps. Look at Air on the Mac…terrible, nonstandard-looking apps.

Yes, Flash is used on a lot of websites, but I don’t enjoy hearing my computer’s fan spin up just so some company can display a flashy (cough) animation (that’s why I use the excellent Click2Flash plugin in Safari). Yes, there are some things you can do with Flash that you can’t do with HTML5…but most of what Flash is currently used for can be done. Video works well, though Firefox is still being a pain (the battle is over, FF…Ogg lost) and many interactive Flashsites could easily be redone without Flash.

A simple request for Adobe: instead of wasting your time trying to trumpet Flash (which, despite many web video demos, STILL isn’t available for Android), how about making a decent updater and installer for my computer that doesn’t make me quit Safari every time I want to do an update (that has nothing to do with web browsing)? And stop acting like my decision not to install Adobe’s browser plugin is some sort of technical problem. And how about actually shipping Lightroom 3?

Adobe made a lot of great products, and I’ve been a huge fan of Photoshop. Despite loyally upgrading each Creative Suite they crank out, I’m not sure I’ve really seen a huge value in each upgrade since CS2. I haven’t yet made the plunge to CS5 – the installer annoyances have made me wonder whether I could get by with tools like Pixelmator. So far the answer has been no, but I would never have started looking had Adobe made the experience less painful (don’t get me started about the tabs in Photoshop).

I’m done ranting. For now.