I repaired the solid-state disk using Apple’s Disk Utility. I cleared my caches. I blamed my browser and switched to another one. (At various points, I’ve used Safari, Chrome, and, most recently, Firefox as my primary browser.) Some of these tactics seemed to help–emphasis on “seemed”–but they didn’t resolve the situation permanently.

When the Mac was in one of its moods, it was no fun at all. That’s one reason why I’ve found myself using my iPad 2 (equipped with a Zagg keyboard) more often than the Air over the past three months. But I never stopped wanting the Mac to work better.

Then it struck me. The iPad, unlike any Mac or Windows PC I’ve ever used, is pretty much bulletproof. It doesn’t get bogged down. It has no equivalent of the spinning beach ball. Even its worst technical problems can almost always be fixed by powering it down.

And–in case you hadn’t heard–it doesn’t run Adobe’s Flash. New Macs don’t come with Flash, but I reflexively installed it on mine.

Last night, I was using the MacBook Air and it went from running just fine to seizing up. On a whim, I disabled Flash Player in Firefox. The computer instantly–and I mean instantly–became its old self again. Several hours later, it’s still happy and healthy, and so am I. I believe I’ve finally diagnosed the problem. (If I’d been paying attention, I would have been able to do so a long time ago.)

My MacBook Air, is, incidentally, a  model with 2GB of RAM. Memory’s a bit tight, and I think that having a few browser tabs with Flash content open at one time was capable of rendering the computer unusable. But with Flash deactivated, it’s once again the laptop I knew and loved, and 2GB is plenty of space–even for heavy-duty applications such as Photoshop. I won’t be surprised if my battery life improves meaningfully, too.

Will I miss Flash Player? Maybe, in certain instances. Much of the video I’ve encountered plays without it (in part because I’ve opted in to YouTube’s HTML5 version). But if I find myself needing Flash–for instance, if I absolutely must play Bejeweled Blitz–that’s okay. It’s easy enough to briefly enable it in Firefox, do my business, and then shut it off again.

(I’m still not sure if I’ll give Flash the boot in Windows; generally speaking, it seems to perform better over there than it ever has in OS X.)

I don’t take any particular pleasure in evicting Flash from my Mac. I first encountered the technology way back in 1994, when it was part of an obscure piece of software called FutureSplash SmartSketch, and thought it was cool from the start. I fondly remember the Flash of a decade or so that was mean, lean, and useful. It made the Web better.  But if Flash is capable of turning a reliable Mac into a basket case, there’s nothing it can do that would make it worth the performance hit and general hassle I’ve encountered. What a sad fate for a once-great piece of software.

Adobe’s Mike Chambers gives several reasons for mobile Flash’s death, but the first he mentions is Apple’s rejection of it:

This one should be pretty apparent, but given the fragmentation of the mobile market, and the fact that one of the leading mobile platforms (Apple’s iOS) was not going to allow the Flash Player in the browser, the Flash Player was not on track to reach anywhere near the ubiquity of the Flash Player on desktops.

And Mobile Opportunity’s Michael Mace–thoughtful as always–says that greed did Flash in:

So here’s what Adobe did to itself:  By mismanaging the move to full mobile browsing, it demonstrated that customers were willing to live with a mobile browser that could not display Flash.  Then, by declaring its intent to take over the mobile platform world, Adobe alarmed the other platform companies, especially Apple.  This gave them both the opportunity and the incentive to crush mobile Flash.

I agree that there were a bunch of reasons why mobile Flash never amounted to anything, but I still think one of them trumps all others: It didn’t work. If it had been fabulous, even Apple might have had to reconsider the situation.

The real reason why Adobe is dropping Flash mobile support is not iPhone. It is Windows 8.

Microsoft made it very clear that they won’t allow Flash to run in Windows 8 Metro browser and they are pushing HTML5 as a platform. You do not need a crystal ball to see that without Windows’ (which runs on 95% of PCs worldwide) support, Flash is dead. It will be supported for legacy reasons for a while, but it has no future.

Windows 8 isn’t a mobile operating system–it’s an OS that aims to run well on both mobile devices and garden-variety, traditional computers. If its browser doesn’t support Flash–or any plug-in, how much longer will Flash in any form live on?

Over the past two years, we’ve delivered Flash Player for mobile browsers and brought the full expressiveness of the web to many mobile devices.

However, HTML5 is now universally supported on major mobile devices, in some cases exclusively.  This makes HTML5 the best solution for creating and deploying content in the browser across mobile platforms. We are excited about this, and will continue our work with key players in the HTML community, including Google, Apple, Microsoft and RIM, to drive HTML5 innovation they can use to advance their mobile browsers.

Our future work with Flash on mobile devices will be focused on enabling Flash developers to package native apps with Adobe AIR for all the major app stores.  We will no longer continue to develop Flash Player in the browser to work with new mobile device configurations (chipset, browser, OS version, etc.) following the upcoming release of Flash Player 11.1 for Android and BlackBerry PlayBook.  We will of course continue to provide critical bug fixes and security updates for existing device configurations.  We will also allow our source code licensees to continue working on and release their own implementations.

Yup, Adobe–the company that has been maintaining that the Web isn’t really the Web without Flash–just said that HTML5 is “the best solution for creating and deploying content in the browser across mobile platforms.” That’s true. I didn’t expect it to concede the point just yet, but I’m glad it did.

The modern era of Flash on portable devices began just last year when Adobe released Flash Player 10.1 for Mobile.  The notion, however, has been around in one form or another for over a decade. Adobe, therefore, isn’t axing mobile Flash prematurely, and you can’t blame Apple for doing it in.

I never had a religious opposition to the idea of mobile Flash. Actually, I would have been delighted if it had worked well. But even as Adobe and hardware makers kept telling the world that mobile Flash was fabulous, my own personal eyeballs kept telling me otherwise.

When I’ve reviewed devices with the mobile version of Flash Player–ones like the Motorola Xoom, RIM BlackBerry PlayBook, HP TouchPad, and a bevy of Android phones–I’ve tried it out. The experience has always ranged from unimpressive to excruciating. Watching video was frequently like going to see a movie at a theater with a projector that keeps breaking down. Bits and pieces of user interfaces didn’t work, and was often painfully obvious that they were designed for mouse input, not fingertips. Games either didn’t play at all or weren’t fast enough to be fun. Certain things did perform as promised, but I never knew whether they would until I tried, and none of them were exciting enough to make up for all the hassle.

Which has always left me completely befuddled by the industry’s excitement over Flash. Why did it continually claim that the next version would be great? Why did hardware makers come up with phrases such as “Flash-enabled” to cover up the fact that they were shipping without Flash support? Why, oh why, would a company like RIM triumphantly run pricey TV ads focused on Flash support?

(This is a UK version, which is all I can find on YouTube, but I believe it’s the same as the U.S. one except for the voice of the narrator.)

I could never tell whether Adobe and its partners never actually used Flash on shipping products, or were desperate for something that sounded like a competitive advantage over the iPhone and iPad, or were simply caught up in some sort of irrational exuberance. Maybe all three. As I think about it now, I’m still mystified. (I sometimes wondered if it was somehow my fault that I couldn’t make Flash work.)

Whether you think Apple’s decision to bar Flash from its devices was cynical, pragmatic, or idealistic, it’s tough to make the case that it was bad for iOS users. In fact, it ended up benefiting them, because site owners and software developers who couldn’t use Flash ended up using other technologies–HTML5 and native iOS apps–that actually worked.

Belatedly and reluctantly, Adobe has come to the conclusion that a similar approach makes sense for all mobile platforms. Apple’s customers simply got to the future first. Now everybody who uses mobile devices will be going there. And everybody’s going to be better off for it.

Well, maybe. It’s true that the inability of Flash to run natively on iOS gives Adobe a powerful incentive to get on the HTML5 bandwagon. I tend to think, however, that this take gives Apple too much credit, and Adobe too little. Edge isn’t about Adobe bowing to Steve Jobs; it’s about it acknowledging reality. And Adobe shouldn’t be building this product in a grudging, grumbly fashion. If Edge is a great HTML5 tool, there’s no reason why it can’t be an enormously popular and profitable component of the company’s portfolio. It would be nuts for Adobe not to do it.

I’ve run Flash on a bunch of mobile devices based on three operating systems: Android, WebOS, and QNX. Sometimes it works, sort of. But that’s the best thing I can say about the experience. It’s usually painfully obvious that Flash really wants more computing horsepower than phones and tablets have. And even when performance isn’t a serious issue, it’s too often clear that most Flash content wasn’t designed with touchscreen input in mind.

End result: On mobile devices, Flash gets out of sync. Or freezes up. Or has odd display glitches. Or doesn’t let you control apps the way they were intended to be controlled. It introduces as many problems as it solves.

Even if Adobe is inclined to be biased in favor of Flash, and in favor of the profits that Flash currently brings, it must understand that mobile Flash in its current incarnation has severe issues. It keeps saying that the next version of Flash is going to be great. But by the time mobile Flash is great–or even just tolerable–it might be largely irrelevant. (Its absence on iOS hasn’t hurt Apple devices so much as forced sites and developers to redo their Flash-based creations so that they don’t require Flash anymore.)

But you know what? If Flash did run on iOS, it wouldn’t solve Adobe’s Flash problems.  It would almost certainly be less than satisfactory there, too. It would still feel like the past, and HTML5 would still feel like the future.

And even if Flash somehow worked great on every mobile device, HTML5 would be here, and would be burgeoning–and it would make perfect sense for Adobe to create Edge.

There’s no scenario under which it’s a bad idea for Adobe to build a top-notch HTML5 authoring product. Adobe, I suspect, is capable of understanding that without Steve Jobs’ help. The hard part will be making sure that Edge is, in fact, that product.

Adobe may be in no hurry to wind down its huge, aging, sometimes frustrating business built around Flash, but it isn’t dumb. It’s obvious that the future of rich Web sites–especially on phones and tablets–is about HTML5. And therefore it’s practically mandatory that Adobe release an application that lets creative types build such sites–a program that can join Flash, Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, and other Adobe products as a standard part of the world’s design toolbox.

That product is called Adobe Edge, and it’s now available in a free very-early-preview version that Adobe says isn’t even a beta yet. It joins Wallaby, a Flash-to-HTML5 converter, among the company’s offering for an era in which Flash is hardly dead and HTML5 is still getting going.

Like Flash Pro, Edge is built around a timeline editor. But it’s not a Flash clone: the interface is quite different. And in its current incarnation, Edge is an animation tool: there’s no way to add interactivity or logic or video or any of the other things that would allow designers to build full-on Web apps that would truly give Flash a run for its money. You can’t even draw any shapes except for rectangles and rounded-corner rectangles.

Adobe says it plans to build Edge out feature-by-feature in future previews, taking user input into account along the way, until it has a more well-rounded product that it can officially ship. (The company isn’t saying when or how it plans to release the final product, but it seems inevitable that it’ll eventually be part of one or more editions of its Creative Suite megabundle of design applications.)

How far will Adobe take Edge? We’ll see. But the company sounds like it’s being serious and ambitious and doesn’t intend to dumb Edge down to prop up Flash. It says that it sees Flash continuing to be the most logical tool for certain types of creations, such as advanced games–which is another way of saying that HTML5 will be capable of doing most of the things that Flash does today. (Of course, HTML5 living up to its potential is contingent on browser makers and other interested parties finalizing its features and supporting them in a more or less consistent fashion: at the moment, HTML5 is different things to different people, and it’s sure not the same thing in every major browser.)

It’s certainly in Adobe’s interest to have a polished, comprehensive Edge ready by the time HTML5 loses some of its current experimental tinge. Some software company is going to come up with the definitive HTML5 authoring package. If Adobe doesn’t pour its heart into making Edge that product, it’s opening up a huge opportunity for some other outfit. Even if Flash doesn’t fade away as quickly as some folks expect (and, often, hope) that it will.

I’m not making any predictions about what’s going to happen at either company–except to note that lack of change is usually a more likely outcome than change in these situations, at least in the short term. But the stories got me thinking about the durability of many of the top executives in tech companies. I decided to graph out the management of a few major corporations.

This chart starts in 1975 and all the companies included have been around since at least the mid 1980s; the bars for each executive indicate that person’s tenure as president, CEO, and/or chairman of the board. (Click on the graphic for a larger, more legible version.)

For several reasons, it’s hard to grind this stuff down into an infographic. The roles of president, CEO, and chairman can vary wildly from company to company. (For instance, Steve Jobs was chairman of the board of Apple in the early 1980s and deeply involved with his company’s everyday management; Bill Gates is chairman of the board of Microsoft now, and isn’t.) I may have missed some folk who should be here–I’m not an expert on the changing of the guard at Oracle and HP.

Overall, though, I’m struck by how many major figures in the industry have stuck around for most of the history of the industry. In 1984, when the PC business was still just getting going, Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Larry Ellison, Michael Dell, Chuck Geschke, John Warnock, and Mike Lazaridis were all running the companies they’d founded. And in 2011 they all still have posts at those corporations, although some (Gates, Geschke, Warnock) are chairman of the board and removed from day-to-day affairs.)

The day will come when none of the people currently running these companies are involved with them in any way. But I bet it won’t come soon. Chances are pretty decent that some of them will hit forty years of service–I wonder if anyone will make it to a half-century?

SendNow's upcoming branding feature.

Last week, the company announced some new SendNow features. The service, which has been focused on graphics and business-document file formats, now supports major audio and video formats as well. In June, it’ll give companies the ability to apply their own branding to the SendNow service, so their logo appears on the pages that people see when they download files. And it says that in the third quarter of this year–ie, sometime in July, August, or September–it’ll use Adobe Air to provide a SendNow app that lets you use the service from your desktop rather than a browser.

Do you use a big-file transfer services If so, which one, and do you recommend it?

Adobe is announcing the Touch SDK as part of an extravaganza of Creative Suite news tonight that includes the announcement of Creative Suite 5.5 (an interim upgrade due within the next month with a bunch of new features, many of them focused on creating Flash and HTML 5 content and apps) and the introduction of subscription plans that will let users opt to pay monthly fees for ongoing access to the latest versions of the Creative Suite apps rather than buying them the traditional way (prices range from $35 a month for one app, such as Photoshop, to $129 a month for the Master Collection, which includes everything). Creative Suite 5.5′s version of Photoshop will support the SDK, but you won’t need to upgrade to it to use Photoshop-enabled tablet apps: Adobe will make a free update available for Photoshop 5.5 on May 3rd, the company says.

(The launch of Creative Suite 5.5, incidentally, introduces a new update schedule for the suite: Instead of releasing a major overhaul as often as every eighteen months or so, Adobe intends to release a big one every two years, with a smaller interim one coming in between. That means that the company will never be more than twelve months away from being able to add new features.)

You start using Touch SDK-enabled tablet apps by turning on Remote Connections within Photoshop–which involves creating a password–and then pairing the tablet apps with Photoshop so they can communicate with each other over a Wi-Fi connection.

Adobe has built three iPad apps that utilize the Photoshop Touch SDK, all of which it says will be in Apple’s App Store in early May. The company provided me with early access to them and to the new version of Photoshop that supports the SDK.

Adobe Nav is a navigational aid that lets you choose Photoshop tools and jump between open images by tapping oversized thumbnails.

Eazel lets you do watercolor-like painting, then zap your creations into Photoshop.

Color Lava is a color mixer that lets you mix custom colors on the iPad with your fingers, then transfer them into Photoshop.

Nav is pretty darn nifty, especially the feature for bopping between open files, which makes a common task way easier than it is using Photoshop alone. Eazel and Color Lava are okay, but they feel more like proofs-of-concept than full-blown, well-rounded apps–both are interesting, but they’d benefit from more features, more straightforward interfaces, and a bit of online help or other explanation. Adobe will sell them on Apple’s App Store (for $4.99 and under apiece) and will, I hope, beef them up over time. But I wonder if it might be more productive to give them away to get Photoshop users and developers excited about the possibilities of the Touch SDK.

And clearly, the big idea here isn’t Adobe making money by selling tablet apps–it’s to get other developers building Photoshop compatibility into their tablet creations. I think the potential exists for some cool all-new programs centered around the Touch SDK, but it’ll be at least as cool if the creators of existing graphics related tablet apps such as Brushes and Artrage use the SDK to connect turn their programs into extensions of Photoshop–and vice versa.

The basic concept behind the Touch SDK isn’t all that Photoshop-specific; other Creative Suite programs such as Illustrator and Premiere could benefit from similar integration with tablets. Adobe isn’t announcing anything about extending the SDK to other apps, but it acknowledges that it’s an intriguing notion.

Actually, programs of all sorts from other companies–word processors and e-readers, for instance–could use SDKs to utilize tablets in helpful ways. If this catches on, tablets could develop a second identity as a whole new type of input device that’s sort of like a second monitor and sort of like a Wacom-style pen tablet (but with no pen involved). The idea isn’t without precedent–a company called Informal Software, for instance, tried something similar with Palm PDAs more than a decade ago–but maybe the time is finally right. It’s certainly far more appealing with a big tablet screen than a little PDA or phone one.