Battle of the Apps

Apple has slammed into Adobe's Flash – generally, though time-wise because of the iPad. Apple has been a favourite of designers since its inception. I've worked on Apple computers for most of my design life – at work and for personal use (except for a period of years when I worked on The Daily Telegraph which switched to PCs). But Apple is, of course, gaining fans well beyond the design world for their iPods, -Phones, -Tunes and, perhaps, -Pads.

Adobe, meanwhile, holds sway over pretty much all the design software that counts (since the self-created "death" of Quark). InDesign, Photoshop, Illustrator, DreamWeaver  – and Flash. It's Flash that Apple's Jobs hates and yesterday openly criticised and condemned. Experts (ie not me) will explain more about this – though the comments from readers of The Guardian's take reveal more than the journalist's article.

So, as a designer, I use Adobe on Apple. And this confrontation is ugly. It's so plainly a battle of big business to be even bigger business that it leaves me cold. Yet, designers, myself included, used to warm to Apple. Those are the days of old, when Apple's superb user interface and simplicity of use and, of course, design, made it a natural for designers. Now, the company's frontage slips and reveals that it's just as it ever was in business (minus the surface appearance) – one big player making sure it's improving its dominance against another big money-making player where the two overlap. Such is business, of course. But, still, an element of encouraging your audience to "warm" to the product was no bad thing in the rise of Apple. (Adobe went, successfully, more for the hard sell – even sending two representatives, back at the turn of the century, to the small Quark-using magazine I used to work on in Tokyo to talk to us and provide free trial software in an effort to shift us away from Quark. Meanwhile, Quark foundered in its own smugness while Adobe adapted.)

Warming is a thing of the past. Ugly spats between the two companies that, for a designer, "work together" is just another reminder that it's simply about big money. The online world, too, with its users cries of "for the people, by the people" is perhaps too often blind to the massive, old-fashioned crawl-to-the-top capitalism of it all. I guess it's a welcome back to the real world. I'm an established Apple user – it just makes sense for me. But it certainly doesn't make me feel attached to the idea of being an Apple user "naturally".