Update: John Nack of Adobe posts on his blog, strongly refuting the claim.

Since Steve Jobs demoed the iPad, showing quite blatantly that it didn’t support Flash, the backlash has been severe. Lots of (frankly stupid) journos have blathered on about how no Flash spells doom for Apple’s device, forgetting that people don’t care about technology—they just care about what you can do with it. In other words, Flash isn’t important, but the things you can do with it are. Flash is mostly used for games, ads, video and overblown interactive websites. Right now, popular Flash-originated games already exist on the App Store (often for free), everyone hates ads, video services are transitioning to open standards and overblown interfaces can go die in a fire.

But despite what some claim, Apple’s rather brutal stance as far as the web goes isn’t to block competition, but to push open standards, rather than proprietary ones. People forget that Flash isn’t open—it’s just very popular. Somehow, even many geeks are OK with this, despite the fact they rallied against Microsoft’s Internet Explorer for being in much the same position fairly recently.

Perhaps the difference in reaction to Microsoft and Adobe was down to the former’s appalling business practices, using its ‘unfair’ advantage to bully the competition into submission. Sadly, it appears Adobe’s now overstepped this mark. Various sources reported yesterday that Adobe has blocked the latest publication of HTML5 (AppleInsider), the standard that could knock Flash down a peg or 20.

This revelation comes off the back of months of regular comments from Adobe about the importance of supporting open standards. Nonetheless, if there’s any truth to the linked article (and similar ones doing the rounds) it appears Adobe’s narked about the ‘canvas’ element in HTML5, which is a direct threat to Flash. What Adobe should do is start work on some amazing authoring tools to create content for HTML5, rather than trying to slow its ascent and keep Flash in the spotlight for longer. As Microsoft will tell you, a company can only hold back the tide for so long, and the tech community holds grudges for many years.

Adam Banks on Flash:

Flash is a technology that emerged from 1990s multimedia and appeals to developers, especially developers who aren’t really developers and are hoping they can get away with it.

I’m going to be smiling for the rest of the day now.

Designer Tom Muller earlier today linked on Twitter to a hateful Times article where Emily Gosden rips into the costs of graphic design and branding. This time, it’s the ‘NHS 60′ logo that’s under fire—the argument is that adding a couple of digits to the existing logo shouldn’t have cost £12,000. Yet again, an article in the mainstream press undermines the entire graphic design industry, without actually bothering to consider or research why the costs were as they were. God forbid that there’s anything more to design than ‘just doing it’. And, of course, Emily Gosden is presumably being paid about £3 per article for the Times, because as everyone knows, there’s no consideration or research behind writing—you ‘just do it’, right, Emily?

Tory MP Greg Hands also can’t resist having a pop at the designer scum who clearly ripped off tax payers (unlike London-based Hands himself, whose £300,000 of expenses—including £5,524 for ‘London Supplement’—were clearly all absolutely essential); he says: ”Surely adding two digits doesn’t need to be outsourced at all. Civil servants can do this themselves. Modern graphic design packages surely allow anyone with an average brain to design something as good as, or better than, what we see in front of us here.”

Oh, really? Well, this blog likes to go the extra mile itself (and for the staggering fee of nothing at all), and so here’s what would have happened had Hands got his way:

The final brand: smart, stylish, and it probably went through 11 billion revisions to get to this stage, hence the £12,000 fee.

What would have happened if you’d armed a civil servant with Photoshop and told them to create the logo. And you wouldn’t have gotten any actual branding advice and alternative versions of the logo for print/web, and so on.