Adobe retaliates

Adobe's chief technical officer, Kevin Lynch, has slammed Apple's policy on Flash as anti-competitive and anti-Internet, reports V3.

“If you look at what's going on right now, Apple's playing with this strategy where they want to create a walled garden around what applications people can use,” he told delegates at the Web 2.0 conference in San Francisco.

He compared the situation to the railroad industry in the 1800s, when different operators would have different sized tracks, which meant cargo had to be loaded and unloaded every time the railroad cars changed networks. This harmed the industry and economic activity in the US, he said.

Google plans to begin selling digital books in late June or July, throwing the search giant into a battle that already involves Amazon.com, Apple and Barnes & Noble, states The Wall Street Journal.

Google has been discussing its vision for distributing books online for several years and for months has been evangelising about its new service, called Google Editions.

The company hopes to distinguish Google Editions in the marketplace by allowing users to access books from a broad range of Web sites using an array of devices, unlike rivals that are focused on proprietary devices and software.

Starcraft II fans who want to tout their strategies and winning scores will soon be able to conveniently do that in the usual place: Facebook, writes CNET.

Blizzard Entertainment announced its next-generation online gaming platform, called Battle.net, which hosts the upcoming and highly anticipated RTS StarCraft II, will integrate with Facebook to offer players an enhanced social-gaming experience.

The first step in the integration will enable StarCraft II players to quickly add Blizzard gamers who are their friends on Facebook to their Battle.net friend lists, facilitating their social-gaming experience on the service.

For years, Apple has ruthlessly ridiculed Windows users with its Get a Mac ads - but like many a schoolyard bully, the company can dish it out, but it can't take it, says The Register.

American comedian and talk-show host Ellen DeGeneres apologised to Apple on her eponymous television show for a parody iPhone commercial that ran this week in which she gently chided Apple's smartphone for, among other things, having a keyboard that was difficult to use.

One representative line of her lampoon: fumbling through an attempt to send a text message in the fake commercial, she mused: "My fingers are so much thicker than I remembered."