During a shareholders meeting yesterday, Apple CEO Steve Jobs strongly implied support for Adobe's Flash format in the iPhone and iPod touch is still, unfortunately, a ways off. Flash is the most widely used way for delivering animations and videos on the Web.

Apple's mobile devices don't have enough juice to run the full version of Adobe's ubiquitous multimedia system for the Web effectively, according to Jobs. And, in his opinion, Adobe's Flash Lite player, the version for cell phones and smartphones, simply isn't up to Apple's standards.

The full version of the Flash player "performs too slow to be useful," Jobs said, and Flash Lite "is not capable of being used with the Web." He added, "There's this missing product in the middle," but "it just doesn't exist."

So instead of giving iPhone users Apple at least partial Flash support, it appears Apple would rather wait and not give them anything it all - at least for the time being. Jobs and company asserts the iPhone and iPod touch deliver the real Web to users. While this is true in many respects, when it comes to streaming video and animations, this assertion will remain far from accurate for the foreseeable future.

When it comes to Internet video, they'll have to continue to rely on Apple's special YouTube application, which streams specially-formatted video from the mega-video site, but only a fraction of the number users would get through YouTube directly.

In other iPhone news, Jobs also promised shareholders, "You'll see a lot of apps out there this summer." On the surface this is an extremely positive development.

However, it also seems to indicate the software development kit (SDK) to deliver "official" native applications—programs that run directly on the devices themselves and not through the Safari Web browser—to the iPhone and iPod touch won't be released tomorrow, at an event Apple is holding to reveal details about the SDK, as hoped.

Meanwhile, those who want to greatly expand the capabilities of there iPhone and iPod touch will have to continue to rely on tenuous hacks, called jailbreaks, that Apple often disables when it releases a firmware upgrade for the devices.

Rumor has it all official software for these devices will have to be sold directly through iTunes, which would give Apple maximum control over what software folks install on their devices.