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Apollo Public Alpha
I am excited by the potential to build hybrid desktop/web apps around the Flash technology. Apollo, the desktop piece of the Flash equation, launched its public alpha today.
As much as I like web apps, I'd love to be able to have some desktop/offline functionality at times. Maybe this is the way we are going to get there.
Comments (6) | Posted March 19, 2007 in Venture Capital and Technology
Comments
Apollo will definitely enable a new breed of rich internet applications but the real challenge is the word *new*. How many more desktop apps do we need?
I am more excited by the possibility of taking existing desktop applications that do what they do well and creating light-weight peer to web interfaces for them that essentially open them up to web 2.0 type sharing - bridging the best of the both worlds: ubiquity of web with efficiencies of desktop.
I talk about how this could be applied to Photoshop here. Other apps prime for exposing to the web: iTunes, iPhoto, Google Spreadsheets.
Posted by: Ash Maurya | Mar 19, 2007 10:14:09 AM
It's certainly becoming an intresting space. I've not had much of a look at Apollo yet - I've been an ASP.NET developer for a while so concentrating on more the C# development route rather than Flex/Flash. Building on the experiences with Microsofts cross platform Ajax library (Ajax.asp.net) I've been having a play with WPF/E (microsoft.com/wpfe) to get a feel for what this move to RIA is going to let us do and it's pretty awesome.
Both Apollo and WPF/E are at about the same level now - though I suspect WPF/E may be a couple of months ahead in stable capability from talking so some Australia based FLex folks over the weekend but with both technologies it's way too early to tell. I wonder what this is going to do to Java... after all Sun have been touting that as the platform that should give us this capability for many years and they've failed to realise that goal... I sure hope both Adobe and MS learn that making it lean and easy to develop for it much more important than an overengineered bloat monster....
Posted by: OffBeatMammal | Mar 19, 2007 12:34:33 PM
I think Apollo is a very interesting advancement in blurring the lines between web and desktop applications. My hope is that out of this we see more and more web enabled lightweight desktop applications (auto update, sharing, etc) as well as web applications that take advantage of desktop capabilities (offline mode, local processing, drag and drop, etc.)
At yourminis we are launching in the next few days an alpha of our widgets running on the desktop leveraging the apollo platform. Its the next step in taking widgets anywhere.
Posted by: alex | Mar 19, 2007 12:37:45 PM
We're porting our app over to Flex, and we're finding that while it's a really cool platform and everything, there aren't many people in the world who know the ins and outs of it, and there are still a bunch of bugs and difficult problems in using the development tools, which is scaring away some potential developers. So, while Flex is a cool platform and there's a lot of potential in Apollo, don't just think you can go out and develop something very complicated with it without quite a lot of frustration. Clearly the Flex/Apollo team at Adobe are some of their sharpest people given that the flash 9 authoring tool still isn't out, but there are still bugs and this stuff will take a while to be (relatively) easy to develop complicated apps.
Posted by: Chris Neumann | Mar 19, 2007 12:56:39 PM
We've been doing teh hybrid web for years. It's not really that new--we've been doing the online-offline data thing for 4 years. But then again, we're not Adobe.
Posted by: Charlie Crystle | Mar 19, 2007 5:14:53 PM
We are right onto this! My business, Veetro, www.veetro.com has tried several haphazard web-offline-cross platform implimentations over the last 5 years.
We have great developers but have never been able to deploy a cross platform offline-online installation with consistent UI. Looking forward to reviewing it forward.
Posted by: Daniel Barnett | Mar 19, 2007 11:24:56 PM
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