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…)

Today has been a fairly frustrating day, mainly because most of it has been spent following up on why some of our customers have been experiencing problems with our pages not loading properly. It turns out that these customers have one thing in common - they have all recently updated to Windows Vista… so what is going on?! It appears that updating to Vista has the potential to upset users using the Flash player. Here is what I’ve discovered so far:

• Windows Vista does not ship with any version of the Flash Player, so if you buy it in the stores and perform a clean install then you will need to grab the Flash player from Adobe and install it separately.
• Many OEM’s have refused to accept this, and are shipping hardware with both Vista and Flash pre-installed. As far as developers are concerned, there is no way of knowing which version of the player is being loaded, but its probably safe to assume it is a version 9 release.
• If you upgrade an existing install of Windows, you may break your Flash Player and have to reinstall. Last week Adobe released an updated version of the player, listing Windows Vista support in the feature list. If you have this version installed when you perform the update (9.0.28), then you should be fine. If you have an earlier version of Flash Player 9, then Flash web pages should still work, though you are obviously missing the Vista compatibility updates, whatever they may be. If you have an earlier version of the player, such as Flash Player 8, then the upgrade to Vista will somehow corrupt your player install. You will need to reinstall and the corrupted player will still register as installed to web pages using Flash (though it may not work).

I’ll post more updates as I get them, but at the moment its looking a bit messy!I am curious as to why Microsoft chose to ship Vista without Flash, or at least without ensuring that upgrading to the new OS doesn’t have any ill effects on browser plug-ins. I’m sure the conspiracy theorists will point to Microsoft wanting to damage the ubiquity of the Flash player ready for the roll-out of Redmond’s long rumored Flash-killer, but that doesn’t really make sense given that the said Flash-killer is still some time away. If anything this can be seen as a good thing, user experience implications aside, as it is driving updates to Flash 9 - enabling developers to really start kicking with ActionScript 3! (more…)