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Today Adobe released Flash Player 11.1 into the Android Market, fulfilling its promise to support Flash on Ice Cream Sandwich. Adobe is finally burying mobile Flash, a standard that has had one foot in the grave since Steve Jobs passed a death sentence on it when the original iPhone came to market.

As of now, the Flash Player update will only be available to users with Ice Cream Sandwich devices. Basically, that means anybody with a Samsung Galaxy Nexus, which was released through Verizon this week and has already sold out at most stores.

It isn't easy to make the case that a product and a technology are mutually dependent and inseparable, in the same paragraph with a statement that you're going to be separating them for the benefit of both. This afternoon, Adobe is giving it one heck of a try, in a blog post that fully confirms what my friend and colleague at ZDNet, Jason Perlow, first reported at midnight last night: Adobe is parting ways with Flash Player for mobile devices, in the first move of what could eventually spell complete obsolescence for the venerable plug-in.

Two weeks ago, Apple launched iOS 5 and along with it came Photo Stream, the photo-syncing feature of iCloud. With it, Mac and iOS users can syncronize their photos across the desktop, iPad, iPhone and iPod Touch.

For those who aren't thrilled with Photo Stream, Adobe launched an alternative today called Carousel. The new applications for Mac and iOS allow users to centralize their photo library in the cloud, making them accessible across devices. The software also syncs edits that are made regardless of which device they were made on, and also keeps a back-up copy of the original.

Microsoft earned a reputation for its "embrace and extend" development philosophy, which recalls a time when it assimilated existing ideas by hook or by something else. Adobe's plan with respect to HTML5 technology is more like "embrace and pummel." Although it's been telling analysts and reporters that Flash is embracing HTML5, the message Adobe's product managers gave to developers this week at its MAX 2011 conference is that the plug-in reigns supreme.

Adobe is making big news on the first day of its Adobe MAX conference. First they announced that they are buying Web font pioneerTypeKit. Then came the news that they have acquired framework provider Nitobi and its powerful PhoneGap code. In keeping with the theme of mobile innovation, the company has announced Adobe Touch Apps, a family of six applications to enable creative professionals to produce dynamic work that will run anywhere.

Touch Apps will be part of the Adobe Creative Cloud. That includes Photoshop, which Adobe will release as a mobile app that will work with a finger or a stylus. The six Adobe Touch Apps will be able to run across devices and be transferred into the company's Creative Suite CS5.5. Check out what Adobe has in store after the jump.

Adobe just made a big splash in the mobile development world today by announcing that it has acquired Nitobi, the maker of the popular PhoneGap framework. Nitobi confirmed the acquisition and added that part of the acquisition was that Nitobi continue with its application to place the PhoneGap source code in the Apache Software Foundation.

PhoneGap is a "wrapper" that developers use to turn Web applications built through HTML5 and Javascript into native applications for mobile platforms such as iOS and Android. Terms of the acquisition were not announced. Essentially what Adobe has done is to distance itself from the problems it has created with Flash on mobile and align itself with the hottest mobile developers in the ecosystem.

Adobe announced today that it has acquired Typekit Inc., provider of ready-to-go Web fonts for designers. It's a natural fit for Adobe, which produces the industry-standard suite of design software and has a long history of producing fonts.

Typekit allows Web developers to load and display a vast range of fonts on the server side, enabling websites to go far beyond the limited range of Web-safe fonts installed on most computers. Its flexibility and easy implementation has transformed the use of type on the Web.

In its ongoing quest to help publishers and designers adapt print-style layouts to the Web across devices, Adobe has admittedly run into a few limitations. As powerful as HTML and CSS are, they don't yet offer the means to create layouts with unlimited flexibility like print designers can.

Not content to settle for what's possible, Adobe has recommended some specifications to the W3C that will allow CSS to create much more fluid, flexible layouts.

The first major release of Adobe's Flash Player in two years was announced today. While anyone could download a beta of v11 over the past several weeks, the finished code will be available early next month and comes packed with new features. As an indication of demand (or just paranoia about potential security exploits), the beta was downloaded a million times in its first week. Flash is used in 98% of desktops that are connected to the Internet, according to Adobe and in just about every device imaginable with the notable exception of the iOS family.

One of the unambiguous messages we heard from Microsoft's Build 2011 conference in Anaheim all last week was that development of HTML5 "Metro-style apps" for Windows 8 would be "plug-in free." All requests for Microsoft to "clarify" that rule only underscored the blunt reality of the statement: HTML5 is about the absence of plug-ins, and thus, Metro will have an absence of plug-ins, including Microsoft's own Silverlight.

In a company blog post dated last Thursday, Adobe platform business developer Danny Winokur said his company expects for apps installed in the Metro Start Screen to be capable of supporting Adobe's AIR platform, one way or the other. His comments echoed an emergent theme from Adobe - a clever effort to rework the HTML5 "openness" theme in Flash's favor. By being platform-agnostic, the argument goes, HTML5 should look the other way when any plug-in is being utilized.