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Hinds Hall, Syracuse University campus, 2:48 am ET November 11 - Three in the morning is a magical time. There's a certain weightlessness about 3 am, when you're up all night working on a huge project, after midnight has hurdled you into the great unknown, when you realize you're reaching maximum altitude and every action seems effortless. Inertia seems to carry you forward, and for a few moments, it's as though your body were floating in front of you.

From the point of view of 3 am, everything seems equalized. The pressure subsides, a new rhythm enters your head, and only tomorrow exists. For the students cranking away at the MLB.com University Challenge, there's no question any more about which way to go. That decision was already made, the booster stage has already blasted off, and from here until the rest of the project, they'll be feeling more and more like passengers.

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.

Hinds Hall, Syracuse University campus, 2:48 am ET November 11 - Three in the morning is a magical time. There's a certain weightlessness about 3 am, when you're up all night working on a huge project, after midnight has hurdled you into the great unknown, when you realize you're reaching maximum altitude and every action seems effortless. Inertia seems to carry you forward, and for a few moments, it's as though your body were floating in front of you.

From the point of view of 3 am, everything seems equalized. The pressure subsides, a new rhythm enters your head, and only tomorrow exists. For the students cranking away at the MLB.com University Challenge, there's no question any more about which way to go. That decision was already made, the booster stage has already blasted off, and from here until the rest of the project, they'll be feeling more and more like passengers.

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.

A former manager and engineer of Flash at Adobe said today that when the true smartphone revolution came in 2007 with the announcement of the iPhone is 2007, Adobe ignored it. Carlos Icaza co-founded Ansca Mobile, the creators of the Corona SDK, left Adobe in 2007 when his call for embracing the touchscreen smartphone evolution was ignored by Adobe executives.

"They ignored it until it was too late," Icaza said. "They were not looking out for the best interest of developers." According to Icaza, Adobe chose to focus at the time on apps for feature phones. Adobe's lack of foresight put the company in catch up mode and ultimately headaches and ridicule of the mobile industry leading to the news that Flash for mobile will soon die.

The Web is singing this morning. The coming death of Flash on mobile devices has made a lot of tech pundits and developers very happy. There is a big fat "I told you so" coming from all corners the of Internet while all Adobe can do is quietly sit back and rue the day the original iPhone was announced.

There could be several books written about the battle for Flash against mobile. "Steve Jobs' Last Laugh" could probably be finished in time for the holiday shopping season. "How To Kill Flash For Dummies" would be an enlightening title as well. It is a bittersweet day for many. We want to know: how are you reacting to the passing of Flash for mobile? Take the poll below.

Alt title: A Win for the Web.

Sources close to the news have told ZDNet reporter Jason Perlow tonight that Adobe will announce soon that it has given up on the development of mobile flash and will increase its investment in supporting HTML5. The company will say, according to an email published by Perlow, that it will encourage app developers to work with the cross-platform Adobe AIR platform to be distributed across mobile app stores, a caveat that could mean the news is less dramatic than it might seem. Rather than building with AIR for mobile, though, it seems likely that more developers will focus on HTML5 instead.

Feisty Twitter user Counternotions quotes Adobe's CEO from 2010 "Technology problems [w/ Flash] Mr. Jobs mentions...are 'really a smokescreen.'" Apple's refusal to go with the glitchy, gloppy proprietary protocol that performs poorly on Apple devices had to be a big part of what turned the tide.

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.

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.

Shortly after Google unveiled Swiffy, the Flash-to-HTML5 conversion tool designed for WebKit browsers, mobile app development firm appMobi launched a related utility called appFlash. This new tool takes advantage of Swiffy's capabilities, allowing mobile developers to convert app assets coded in Flash into native iOS applications.