OK, I've had enough. I've been reading this whole Apple vs. Adobe thing for months. I have my own strong opinions and they probably suck just as much as yours. And yours. And yours. So I won't bore you guys with my opinions. I am, however, just plain irritated over the whole thing. This crap shouldn't be happening. It's like two 14 year olds in an IRC chatroom arguing.

Mark Aplet and I were "discussing" the issue earlier and I mentioned a potential solution. He thought I should share this with Mr. Jobs, but unfortunatelty I'm job hunting at the moment so I just can't take the time out of my schedule to meet with him.

Now, before I outline my solution, let me just say that the only Apple product I own that I currently use is an iPod Shuffle. It's pretty awesome. I think Apple makes great hardware, and OS X seems like a decent OS. I don't use them for my own reasons, but I'm not a hater of their products, by any means. I do have an interest in the debate because I want the solutions I develop to work on all platforms. If I am working with HTML 5 in two years, so be it. I am fine with that. I love technology because it is ever changing and I love learning. But I think there's a solution to this problem which provides benefit to everyone.

Why not just create an "Apple Platform Certification" program? If a vendor, any vendor, wants to have a runtime on the Apple platform, be it iPhone, iPad or OS X, have the runtime/language/platform be certified through Apple before it is accepted. This provides two benefits:

1. Apple can guarantee that the platform runs acceptably on their platform.
2. Users can be sure that their experience will not suffer due to third party code.