Well, judging from the deluge of mail flooding our inbox, there are an awful lot of Mac users out there filled with righteous indignation at Adobe's decision to skip next month's Macworld Expo due to "budget constraints"-- mostly because, according to the PC Expo exhibitor list, the company evidently found the cash to sponsor two booths at that decidedly non-Mac-centric trade show taking place right now. To make things look even worse, it just so happens that PC Expo takes place in the same city and the same convention center as Macworld Expo, thus rendering any possible excuses along the lines of "New York's too expensive" or "the Javits Center is haunted by the vengeful ghost of a graphic designer who perished violently in a freak PageMaker accident" utterly without merit. Given the facts, it all came down to a simple choice-- and Adobe apparently chose Wintel over the Mac.

But cool your jets and drop the nooses (at least for now), because you haven't heard the whole story yet. Despite what the PC Expo exhibitor list says, faithful viewer Stewart Prentice tipped us off to a message sent by an actual Adobe employee to the GoLive-Talk mailing list yesterday-- which indicates that, yes, Adobe is skipping Macworld Expo, but it's also skipping PC Expo. We quote: "PC Expo is this week and Adobe will NOT have a booth there. We also do not plan to have a booth at MWNY in July. We will not have a booth at either event for the same reasons, so there's no need to suspect a platform bias. We WILL be at both events with meetings, event sponsorship, and speaking engagements, just not a booth." That statement jibes with Adobe's own Events List, from which both Macworld Expo and PC Expo are conspicuously absent. In hindsight, we probably should have checked that list first; if we purported to be actual journalists, we'd probably be mighty embarrassed right about now. But hey, you can't tell us that a little groundless furor isn't entertaining as all get-out, right?

And perhaps "groundless" isn't the right word, anyway. Indeed, if you're still bent on fuming at Adobe's lack of commitment to the Mac platform, don't let the apparent platform-agnostic nature of the company's show-skipping behavior stop you; there are plenty of other reasons you can use to fuel your rage. If you like, you can always borrow our favorite angry thought-- namely, why is it taking so freakin' long for Adobe to get those Carbonized applications out the door? After all, there's only so much fun you can have with Acrobat Reader before you start craving the use of a slightly more creative app under Mac OS X.

Now, clearly Adobe isn't entirely to blame, what with Apple having taken just a hair short of forever to finalize the Carbon APIs-- but the one fact that keeps sticking in our heads is this: Adobe demonstrated a Carbonized version of Photoshop 5 over three years ago, onstage at WWDC '98. The Adobe rep even commented on how relatively quick and painless it had been to tune Photoshop for Carbon. So why, then, do we have to wait for the release of Photoshop 7 (which, as far as we can tell, hasn't even been announced yet) before we can use Photoshop natively under Mac OS X? That's a puzzle for the ages-- and a reason to gnash your teeth over Adobe's snubbing of the Mac platform, Expo attendance notwithstanding. See? We're always glad to help!