My last source of confusion (on this matter, at least) is that people are going after Apple on this at all. Until the iPhone there was never an expectation that phones should either run Flash or be open. A phone is not a personal computer. It’s a phone. All smartphones are just phones. They play by a whole different set of rules. And that set of rules is much longer and stricter than that of a personal computer. No one ever complained that Nokia’s phones weren’t open. Or Motorola’s. Or Samsung’s. Why now is it completely offensive that Apple’s phones should be? Moreover, there are no phones in existence today that can display Flash content because of all the reasons cited by Jobs in his letter. Google’s phones don’t. Neither do Palm’s. So why is everyone going after Apple? It’s just crazy. →

Quick update: About the only thing that has changed since he posted this, I think, is that Google has announced with Adobe that they’re going to get Flash on the Android platform. We’ll have to see how that turns out, but I honestly don’t have high hopes, primarily because touch is not the same as keyboard, monitor and mouse, and I’m not sure Flash content designed for web-on-PC will translate well.

I won’t go into the details here (though this guy can explain it in great detail), but because I very occasionally need features of Adobe Reader, I still keep it installed on my Mac, while I use Preview for all my other PDF needs. I’ve gone so far as to install the Firefox PDF Plugin for Mac for when I use Firefox, just to avoid Adobe Reader. And, really, there’s no point in Adobe Reader for most cases where you just want to be able to view or print PDF files. Doubly so, since Mac OS X lets you print any document to a PDF file as a default feature of the OS.

There are, though, edge cases where having Adobe Reader installed and available are useful. So I have it installed, but I refuse to use their web plugin. Adobe doesn’t care, though, and will periodically, sometimes randomly, and sometimes even without my consent, re-install the plugin. Even though I’ve told it not to. Adobe Updater, I’m looking at you, here.

Sadly, my solution is heavy-handed. I created a launchd task that will forcibly remove the Adobe Reader plugin from /Library/Internet Plugins whenever it’s created. It’s fast, efficient, and works.

And, as soon as I can figure out the new wordpress theme, I’ll post it here in a legible form

UPDATE: Thanks to Lynne and Chad on Twitter for suggesting the Preserve Code Formatting plugin!

And now, the Launchd config. Save this as:
"/Library/LaunchDaemons/org.unnerving.RemoveAdobeReaderPlugin.plist"

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN" "http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd">
<plist version="1.0">
<dict>
  <key>Label</key>
  <string>org.unnering.RemoveAdobeReaderPlugin</string>
  <key>ProgramArguments</key>
  <array>
    <string>rm</string>
    <string>-rf</string>
    <string>/Library/Internet Plug-Ins/AdobePDFViewer.plugin</string>
  </array>
  <key>QueueDirectories</key>
  <array>
    <string>/Library/Internet Plug-Ins/AdobePDFViewer.plugin</string>
  </array>
  <key>WatchPaths</key>
  <array/>
</dict>
</plist>