Apple's Flash of Anger at Adobe May Lead to Anti-Trust Probe

The Department of Justice and Federal Trade Commission are looking in to Apple's recent ban of third-party programming tools being used to develop applications for the iPad and iPhone according to an anonymous source cited by the New York Post.

Apple has been drawing increasing scrutiny from the FTC ever since word of an investigation into its close ties to Google and other Silicon Valley companies got around last year.

Apple recently changed the terms of its developer's agreement to forbid applications that weren't built using Apple's tools.

Adobe had been developing software that would allow developers using its Flash programming environment to "port" their Flash applications to the iPhone and iPad, which do not run Flash applications directly.

Apple CEO Steve Jobs recently wrote an essay explaining his company's reasons for not including Flash or allowing Flash-developed applications anywhere near his precious mobile devices.

"We know from painful experience that letting a third party layer of software come between the platform and the developer ultimately results in sub-standard apps," Jobs wrote.

The essay also explained the long history the two companies share, though neglects to mention that in the 1990s when the Macintosh platform was struggling, Adobe essentially told Apple that they would focus on developing software for Windows.

Ironically enough, Apple's complaint then was essentially that by writing software native to the Macintosh hardware and operating system, Adobe's popular desktop publishing applications would prove slow and buggy.

Now, Apple has the market muscle to back that up with consequences, hence the reported interest from the FTC.

Jackson West hopes the cops don't bust down his door and discover his HP netbook running Mac OS X.