As already posted, I have been over in San Francisco this weekend. The purpose of my trip? Well.. partly sightseeing but mainly for Adobe’s ApolloCamp event - an evening dedicated to Apollo, Adobe’s new desktop application platform. Here is a roundup of some of the secrets gleaned at the event!

For over 10 years now, Flash has become a ubiquitous standard on the web, installed on an estimated 750 million PC’s. It is cross-platform, and cross-browser. More recently, it has made the jump to being cross-device, with the release of Flash Lite. But what if I want to take Flash outside the browser? With access to the local filesystem and windowing API’s?

There have been several attempts at this, the most notable probably being Zinc, but most have their quirks and detractors - making it difficult to really take a complex Flash based application and deploy it to the desktop. Thats where Apollo comes in, providing a cross platform runtime for desktop applications which can either be Flash-based or HTML/JavaScript based.Currently supported platforms are Windows and Mac OS X, with Linux support being promised for the 1.0 release which is due towards the end of 2007.

Interestingly, it also appears that Adobe are interested in supporting mobile devices as Apollo moves toward 2.0, although developers shouldn’t expect this to happen until later in 2008.

So, what kind of things can Apollo do? At the event we saw lots of demo’s which were quite cool, including:* Fine Tune* Dashboard Widgets* Widgets (in General)* Twitter* E-Mail Client* BuzzWord (Word Processing)More tidbits as I continue my experimentation with Apollo….

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I’m over in San Francisco at the moment, at the Adobe Apollo Camp event and for some St. Paddy’s day celebrations - more in depth blogging on that after the hangover, but for now here are some of the more interesting tidbits gleaned so far…

• Apollo will be released on Adobe Labs at some point in the next week! This will be the alpha version which is already in the hands of Adobe Prerelease developers.
• Lydia.com will be hot on the heels of this with training videos for Apollo.
• Apollo will see a name change for trademark versions, the new name is apparently really cool!
• We should expect public release towards the end of 2007

More later… (more…)

Its not been a good week for the web - on Thursday google mail was down for most of the day, also Digg and a few other sites also experienced outages. Is this the end of the world as we know it, or just a reminder that web applications seldom have 100% uptime and availability. This harks back to the article I wrote last year on Service Level Agreements in a Web 2.0 World, where I talk about the lack of any kind of service agreement in the current generation of web applications, and the consequences for those individuals or business which rely on them.Since that article, Google has made some steps around SLA’s within their Google Apps for Business and Education packages, which is good to see, by for the average user there is still a chance that outages and downtime can leave you without access to your data. But, is there a way round it?Interestingly, this week a company called Bandwagon unveiled an application which can backup your iTunes music library. The twist? It is based upon a concept labeled BYOS - Bring Your Own Storage. So, Bandwagon backs up your music to Amazon S3 (Amazon’s online pay-per-gb storage). If Bandwagon ceases to exist, all your music is safe on S3 and you can access it using a plethora of applications such as JungleDisk, which lets you mount S3 as a normal network drive. There are also plans allow users to backup their music to any FTP server, or other online storage solutions like OmniDisk.This is perfect for both Bandwagon, who no longer need to maintain the infrastructure and provide the bandwidth for their customers; and for the customer who is always in a position to access their music - even if they choose not to continue the Bandwagon service. So, why can’t this technique be applied to other applications?As the saying goes, “Don’t put all your eggs in the same basket?”. Also from a software architecture sense, one should strive to maintain separation between data, logic and presentation. What is to stop more web applications adopting this BYOS approach? As has already been outlined, its perfect for the developers, keeping the cost of launch down; and if its done in an open sense then its also a great choice for the developer.So, here is a call for anyone developing a web application which will contain a large quantity of user data - enable your users to store their data where they want, and either maintain that data in an open format, or provide code examples so that other application authors can get at that data. (more…)