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….
