Adobe has ceased development of its tools to export Flash content into a format suitable for the iPhone. “We will still be shipping the ability to target the iPhone and iPad in Flash CS5,” said Adobe’s Mike Chambers. “However, we are not currently planning any additional investments in that feature.” Apple CEO Steve Jobs has previously slammed Adobe as “lazy” and Flash as unsuitable for use on mobile devices. Apple has not enabled Flash playback on the iPhone, pushing the open HTML 5 standard instead. Adobe’s announced cessation of development follows Apple’s decision…

Lee Brimelow is a Flash evangelist and developer at Adobe, and the author of the Flash Blog. Needless to say, Brimelow is less than pleased at Apple’s decision to “slap developers in the face” by removing Flash support on the iPhone OS 4 update. While the blog was obviously changed at his employer’s request after the fact, before the redaction Brimelow had typed “What is clear is that Apple has timed this purposely to hurt sales of CS5.” What has remained on the blog is the resounding conclusion of “Go screw yourself Apple” and the fact that Brimelow refuses to purchase any Apple products under there…

Adobe’s Flash plugin has become a stalwart in online multimedia content with a massive install base, so why is it suddenly the least popular kid on the block? Back when Netscape ruled the web and Microsoft was the pretentious young upstart nipping at its heels, HTML was the most dominant form of content on the web by a huge margin. Nothing about video, audio or multimedia content made it appealing to work with or serve to visitors, but the demand was great, so great that what ended up happening was inevitable, if not entirely predictable. How Flash Rose To Dominance By version 5 Internet Explorer had…