Last week I complained that the final version of the Wii Opera Browser did not support anything greater than Flash 7.0    Now it, it turns out, that this was neither Nintendo or Opera’s fault. 

This information was brought to my attention earlier this week by fellow deveoper Chris Cutler (the programmer for the immensely popular game Pixel Chix Hamster Jam ) and confirmed today by nintendowiifanboy.com.   It turns out, that Adobe is really at fault here.  They have not released a dev kit for either Flash 8 or Flash 9, and until they do this, it will be impossible for vendors such as Opera to add Flash 8 or Flash 9 functionality into their software.

I was worried about issues like this when Adobe bought Macromedia (just after Flash 8 was released).   At the time I heard chilling rumors that they were going to create a Frankenstein’s monster hybrid platform of Flash and Acrobat (not yet confirmed) and they would not be supporting ASP.NET 2.0 with the next version of Flash Remoting (still true).   The decisions are made because (IMHO) Adobe thinks of themselves as an “Enterprise” software vendor, when really they are vendor of excellent tools.   Enterprise vendors strive to make huge corporate deals, sometimes at the expense of their loyal, more individualize customer base.

Adobe has their own agenda and it not necessarily developer friendly.  Let’s hope they can come to their senses and realize that Flash is popular because it has been such and open, developer friendly, platform, and any attempts they make to “reign it in” will only lead to developers jumping to the next platform that gives them the creative freedom and flexibility that is now, and has always been part of Macromedia Flash.