The Financial Times and the Wall Street Journal were both carrying full-page "We Love Apple" adverts on Friday morning, but the space was not bought by the Californian technology giant but by Adobe, the web technology firm that is locked in a bitter dispute with Steve Jobs.
The adverts, using a variant of the famous "I love New York" motif created by Milton Glaser, have appeared in newspapers including the Wall Street Journal and San Jose Mercury and online on websites including Wired and TechCrunch.
They present the latest front in an increasingly nasty war between the two companies. Adobe's web video technology Flash is not supported by Apple's iPad or iPhone and Jobs has publicly criticised it for causing battery problems and crashes.
In a blogpost last month, Jobs said the most important reason for keeping Flash off his devices was that "letting a third party layer of software come between the platform and the developer ultimately results in sub-standard apps and hinders the enhancement and progress of the platform."
He contrasted Flash, over which Adobe has control, with open web standards that Apple has adopted - HTML5, CSS (Cascading Style Sheets, used to format sites) and the programming language Javascript.
Today's adverts follow the large "We love Apple" with a pointed list of 13 other things that the company loves: "We love creativity. We love innovation. We love apps. We love the web. We love Flash. We love our 3 million developers. We love healthy competition. We love touch screens. We love our Open Screen Project partners. We love HTML5. We love authoring code only once. We love all devices. We love all platforms.
"What we don't love is anybody taking away your freedom to choose what you create, how you create it, and what you experience on the web."
The adverts appear to have been prompted by Apple's decision last month to change its iPhone Developer Program License Agreement so that all developers have to write applications for the iPhone and iPod – and by inference iPad – so that they run directly on the device, a move that effectively bans software translation solutions like Adobe's CS5.
Adobe's founders, Chuck Geschke and John Warnock, have posted an open letter on the company's website – to which the online version of the "We love Apple" advert links – arguing that "freedom of choice on the web has unleashed an explosion of content and transformed how we work, learn, communicate, and, ultimately, express ourselves".
They warn that Apple is trying to control the world wide web, something which would damage its evolution.
"We believe that Apple, by taking the opposite approach, has taken a step that could undermine this next chapter of the web — the chapter in which mobile devices outnumber computers, any individual can be a publisher, and content is accessed anywhere and at any time."
Apple responded: "Yes, we believe in open web standards too, like HTML5. Flash is not an open web standard like HTML. It is a proprietary Adobe product. Just ask the W3 consortium that controls web standards – they have chosen HTML5 as the open web standard to move forward with."
Alan Rusbridger, the editor of the Guardian, complained that the lack of Flash on Apple products - which means no video content is accessible of websites including guardian.co.uk and the BBC - was an "extreme irritant at the very least" in a review of the iPad in the Observer last month.
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