As they do with any major new iPhone OS release, people have been tearing apart the iPhone OS 4.0 SDK from the very second it was available. Almost immediately, someone noticed that bits and pieces of iChat had found their way into the new software.

By itself, it didn’t really make sense. The iPhone has plenty of incredibly solid third-party IM applications — some of them being amongst the App Store’s best sellers. Why would Apple be sneaking any parts of iChat onto the iPhone? Then the first mentions of a front facing camera were unearthed, and it all started coming together in the form of two little words: video chat. Alas, there was no concrete proof that Apple was following the same train of thought.. until now.

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It was inevitable. Adobe has an unofficial Facebook fan club: “I’m With Adobe,” an allusion to the viral “I’m With Coco” campaign for jilted ex-Tonight Show host Conan O’Brien. As of Saturday afternoon, the group (started by John Addis, a Web & Media Director at Rizzi Designs) has attracted more than 1,200 members in less than three days.

The group’s manifesto is:

The recent war between Adobe and Apple reached a breaking point on April 8, 2010, when Steve Jobs not only recommitted to never allowing Flash to run on the iPhone or iPad, but even banning Adobe’s new Flash-to-iPhone C compiler which was to go on sale Saturday, April 10.

There is no longer any debate as to who the “bad guy” is in this story — Apple has proven themselves to be anti-competition, anti-developer, and anti-consumer.

I stand with Adobe.

While you would expect a club like this to attract rabid Adobe supporters (and there is a lot of that), several members expressed their longstanding support for Adobe and Apple and the difficulty of reconciling their frustration with the new SDK agreement and their fierce loyalty to Apple. As one Facebook user put it :

How did we get to this point? The tension between Apple and Adobe has been simmering for quite a while, but the clear breaking point (as we all know) was the release of the new SDK agreement which essentially blocks Flash developers from the iPhone.

I tried to put together an (incomplete) collection of Adobe employee reactions— from the iPad release to Adobe’s “Viva La Resistance.” In my last post, “Adobe: Go Screw Yourself Apple,” some commenters pointed out that the title was unfair because it was the words of Adobe’s Platform Evangelist Lee Brimelow and not Adobe’s official position. True, Adobe CTO’s carefully worded (sadly, less colorful) blog was the “official” response, however, Brimelow’s post and comments by several of his Flash colleagues forms an interesting constellation that outlines a deep anger. Adobe is furious. Further, as we previously noted, Adobe did look at Brimelow’s blog and let him run with it anyway— only pushing him to extract one line and add a disclaimer (the disclaimer was added roughly one hour after he sent a Twitter link to his post).

First, before we look at the iPhone OS 4.0 fallout, let’s skip to somewhat happier times (to last weekend) when Adobe’s employees lined up at the Apple store to eagerly purchase Steve Jobs’ latest offering. Arno Gourdol, a member of the Adobe Air team, documents their morning: “After queuing for an hour at the flagship Apple Store in SF this morning, we finally got our hands on a stack of magical devices. We’ve spent the rest of the day having fun getting the first Adobe AIR apps running on the iPad….We have also been working on bringing up the first “HD” apps that take advantage of the gorgeous screen of the iPad.”

You can already feel the dark clouds forming. Fast forward to Thursday, developers find out that the SDK agreement will effectively ban Flash and other cross-platform development tools, like Unity, on the iPhone.

It Gets Ugly…

Thursday evening:
Adobe’s John Dowdell ruminates on issues of intolerance and the Seinfeld Soup Nazi:

Thursday 11:47pm:
Senior Research Scientist for Adobe, Dan Goldman, calls foul on Twitter. “No Flash in iPhone to save battery? OK, whatevs. No cross-compiling Flash apps to iPhone using Packager? That’s a mighty low blow.”

Friday 8:44am:
Dowdell’s done with thinly veiled analogies. “…If you’re looking for a more ethical company, Adobe is hiring:

Friday about 9pm:
Adobe’s Photoshop’s Principal Product Manager, John Nack, takes a jab at Apple in the comments section of his blog (his response is in italics):

Friday 12:47pm:
Lee Brimelow links to his now notorious: “Go Screw Yourself Apple,” post.

Friday 4:08pm:
Adobe CTO, Kevin Lynch, issues the company’s formal response.

Saturday around 7:00am
Adobe’s Sujit Reddy retweets a call to give up Macs, says he plans to do the same.

Saturday around 11:00 am:
Brimelow tweets a picture of his new Apple free set-up: “My new setup (http://tweetphoto.com/17920343). Asus U Series laptop, Windows 7, BackTrack 4 VM, and Alfa AWUS036H for wireless mischief.”

Anyone get the sense that this is just the beginning?

Medialets, an advertising and analytics startup, bet big on the iPhone early, rolling out its universal SDK at the launch of the App Store two years ago. And the startup just launched a universal SDK that works with the iPad. And the company’s Apple-centric strategy has paid off; Medialets is one of the most widely used ad platforms and counts NPR, CNN and Fox as clients. Today, the startup is moving in a new direction, announcing a Rich Media Ad SDK for the Android platform, allowing publishers and developers to seamlessly switch between ad networks and first-party ad servers.

With the Android SDK, Medialets allows advertisers to create and deliver the mobile specific ads across both Android devices and iPhones. Similar to the universal SDK for iPhone and iPad, the Android SDK will allows publishers to modify and change their ad tags from various networks without having to update their app. As the Android platform continues to grow, more and more mobile ad networks are launching Android specific platforms, making Medialets offering appealing. The SDK works with any first or third party ad sever, network or mediator, including AdMob tags.

As we’ve written in the past, Medialets promises rich media and display advertising on mobile phones that provides deeper engagement with users. In fact, engagement is a primary measurement that the ad platform focuses on when determining the success of its advertising campaigns. But developers and advertisers may be more beholden to click-through rates, which Medialets claim are between 1 and 8 percent. However, eight percent seems a bit high, considering that other rich media mobile ad platforms, including Greystripe and AdMob, are seeing between 1 and 2 percent, in terms of click-through rates.

But Medialets has seen considerable success with its universal SDK offering, most recently striking a deal with The New York Times to use the startup’s rich media ad units for the Times’ iPad app. With the popularity of Medialets’ universal product, I imagine that other mobile ad networks will develop their own universal SDKs in due time.

When Steve Jobs tells the technology industry to get in line, it gets in line pretty quick. All the initial hair-pulling and angst surrounding Apple’s decision to not support Flash on the iPad is already mattering less and less. At least for video, most of the major online video platforms such as Brightcove and Ooyala are supporting HTML5 playback in the iPad browser. YouTube might eventually get there as well.

Now Kyte is jumping on the HTML5 bandwagon. Kyte videos will stream in an HTML5 player in the iPad browser using the same embed code that triggers a Flash player on other computers. But Kyte is also going to release a software developer kit (SDK) in the next couple weeks which will let its media partners create apps specifically for the iPad. The SDK will also let them create versions of the same apps for the iPhone and the iPod Touch. This will replace the iPhone framework Kyte released last year.

The SDK will customize apps for the larger screen of the iPad, allowing for a larger video player and more room for chat and show guides. In the mockup above from Om Records, you can see how there is more room for the various elements of the app on the iPad.

Kyte’s main customers are media brands, music bands, and brands such as ABC, Fox News, MTV, Lady Gaga, Alicia Keys, and Calvin Klein who want to publish videos to their Websites and mobile apps all from the same system. Kyte’s new Apple “universal” SDK will allow developers to create apps for both the iPhone and the iPad, and send out the correct version depending in the user’s device. They can also charge once and deliver different versions of the app to multiple Apple devices.

AdMob, the mobile advertising unit bought by Google last year for a whopping $750 million, is upgrading its platform today. The company is launching new SDK’s for Android, Flash Lite and iPhone platforms and is also rolling out a number of new publisher tools, including a new publisher dashboard, an enhanced Reporting UI, a new Reporting API and Server Side SDK Controls.

The new Android SDK allows for expandable canvas and multi-panel banner advertisements on Android devices, with the updated iPhone SDK featuring performance enhancements and additional server side flexibility. The new Flash Lite SDK, which is in beta, enables monetization with CPC text ads. And AdMob is rolling out a new adaptive mobile ad unit, which allows for a banner sizes ad unit to remain a constant size as consumers pinch and scroll through a Web site that’s designed for a PC screen on their mobile device.

New publisher tools include a enhances Publisher Dashboard with a customizable interface for publishers to view all the key statistics for their mobile Web sites and various applications in one location. AdMob has rolled out a better Reporting UI and now allows publishers and advertisers to build their own tools and dashboards via a new reporting API. Other additions include Server Side SDK Controls, which gives publishers the ability to dynamically control the display and format of the ads in their applications; and AdWhirl (which AdMob bought) for iPhone and Android applications.

In a recent survey AdMob found that 31 percent of developers in its network are working across multiple mobile platforms today and almost half (47 percent) said they plan on developing on more than one platform in the next six months. Other findings from the survey include:

AdMob also released some interesting stats from the app developers the company works with. The advertising network says that more than 70 percent of iPhone developers plan to develop apps for the Android platform over the next six months and close to half of Android developers (48 percent) plan to develop for iPhone. Developers were most satisfied with the iPhone platform and least satisfied with RIM. And 58 percent of developers said they currently develop mobile Web sites.

Google is currently awaiting approval for its deal to buy AdMob. We recently heard Google has been reaching out to mobile companies for help in getting the acquisition cleared by the FTC. Specifically, they’re asking select companies to write letters in support of the deal, which Google will then forward to the FTC.

Mobile advertising company AdMarvel, fresh off the heels of being acquired by Opera Software for a reported $8 million plus earn-out, has teamed up with Gannett subsidiary PointRoll to launch an advertising platform for Apple’s iPad.

Dubbed the iPad Advertising Platform, the companies aim to combine PointRoll’s rich media technology with AdMarvel’s mobile advertising capabilities.

The launch of the platform is part of a broader partnership between both companies, who will develop cross-platform solutions for ad mediation, campaign management, ad serving and analytics tailored to the latest mobile devices and operating systems.

AdMarvel boasts about its cross-browser, cross-application SDK for developers to build services that include rich media advertising options for iPad, iPhone, iPod touch and other mobile applications including Android and Blackberry. Developers can source from some 60 ad networks from around the globe to deliver geo-targeted ads.

In turn, marketers and ad networks can tap into the platform to manage campaigns, targeting and frequency control and get clear performance metrics.

The iPad Advertising Platform is said to support JavaScript, expandable ad units, animation, interstitials, transparent overlays of content and interaction. The platform also supports in-app advertising units for the promotion of new features or content channels. Finally, the iPad Advertising Platform features click-to-contact, click-to-maps, click-to-app and click-to-video actions.

AdMarvel / PointRoll is far from the only one coming up with solutions for Apple’s iPad – rival Mobclix released its iPad SDK just last week.

And to think Apple has yet to commence shipping the first iPad units to early adopters.

(Source: press release)

Mozilla platform engineer Rob Sayre has probably had better ideas.

Hoping Microsoft might allow Firefox on their new Windows Phone 7 Series, Sayre wrote an open letter this morning to Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer. “Hola, amigo. I know it’s been a long time since I rapped at ya,” is how it starts.

He then proceeds to make fun of Windows Phone 7 Series, the iPhone, Cocoa Touch, and Unix — all in three concise paragraphs. He notes that Windows Phone 7 Series has a “busted” UI, calls the iPhone’s UI “ugly jelly beans,” and mocks the “allegedly cool” Cocoa Touch “stuff.”

Once he’s done with all of that, he asks Ballmer to consider making an NDK for Windows Phone. An NDK is a companion tool for an SDK that allows you to build parts of apps in native code. For example, it’s the Android NDK that allows Mozilla to make Firefox for Android.

There’s currently no plans to make an NDK for Windows Phone 7 phones — hence Sayre’s post. Without it, a version of Firefox for the OS is probably unlikely. And that’s may be a good bet anyway, considering Microsoft seems to be pivoting its new phones closer to the iPhone’s closed model rather than Android’s open one.

Sayre’s approach to the post apparently didn’t go over too well — he quickly followed up with an apology post, “Things I’ve Learned.” “Blog posts that sound like Jim Anchower really irritate people for some reason. I won’t do it again, I promise,” he writes.