Friday, October 27th, 2006
Adobe Apollo at MAX
Category: Adobe
, Announcements
Kevin Lynch presented at the last Ajax Experience and couldn’t be in Boston this week as he was speaking at Adobe’s MAX show.
His keynote included talking about Apollo, which they released as a preview.
Apollo makes it possible to run Flash applications that aren’t confined to being plugins within a browser. This means: watch out Swing and WinForms, there is a new desktop development tool in town, and this one is easy to use for anyone who already does Flash development.
Developers can write Apollo applications using Flex Builder, Adobe’s development tool for writing Flash applications. Apollo also runs Web applications written in JavaScript and HTML. That means that AJAX-style applications, which are allow for an interactive user interface, will work with Apollo.
Adobe on Tuesday introduced a preview version of Flex Builder for Macintosh, which is available as a separate product or a plug-in to Eclipse. A Linux software development kit for Flex is expected in January of next year.
The Apollo runtime software will be between five and nine megabytes and needs to be downloaded or preinstalled on users’ machines.
Desktop Features
- Cross-platform : Win, Mac, Linux
- Packages for quick installation from web
- Self-updating applications
- Filesystem access
- Close-maximize-minimize window operations
- Drag-n-drop of files from OS into the app
- Networking
- HTML page effects (the secret is that they render html page as a bitmap pipe and stream it to modified Flash Player that is merget with xHTML renderer based on open source WebKit renderer). That is, html page can be blurred, rotated, etc but still be fully functional
- ActionScript can call JS objects and vise versa
Read more in the Adobe Apollo FAQ
Love JavaScript? Now you can write desktop apps, widgets, and web pages all using the same platform.
Now why can’t someone do this with something that’s FOSS? Python makes a great candidate!
You can do it with Python if you know it (and math) good enough to create a rich visual experience. If your primary skills are JavaScript and DHTML, you can’t do that. The idea of stucking with only FOSS here makes no sense. It’s free, it works, it won’t be trashed in a couple of months after release. What else do you really need?
It’s interesting to have an embedded Ruby or Python interpreter in Apollo.
In comment above I meant “you can’t create desktop-deployed RIAs with Python if you’re just a JS/DHTML developer”. Sorry if someone misunderstood that sentence.
[...] Anf finally today - here goes Macromedia again trying ot jump start their own ecosystem. Haven’t they learned by now? Nobody wants to hang out with slimeballs? Does anybody remember Grand Cenral or their earlier attempts at capturing and locking up a content distribution network? This latest attempt is just pathetic. Someone please tell Kevin Lynch to just go cash out his stock and buy a mansion and chill. They just don’t get the web or us. The technology and platform we handed to them (or one could say “stole”) is ALL they’re ever gonna innovate with. That juice ran out years ago. Just cause you’re called Adobe now - doesn’t mean all your problems go away. Throwing $100M at something doesn’t make it right. IMHO. [...]
Correct me if I’m wrong, but Adobe hasn’t actually released Apollo as a preview yet.
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Correct me if I’m wrong, but Adobe hasn’t actually released Apollo as a preview yet.
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That is correct. It will be on labs as a prerelease sometime in early 2007, and released as 1.0 sometime in 2007 (around mid-2007).
mike chambers
mesh@adobe.com
[...] Ajaxian discusses Adobe’s new “Apollo”: Apollo is client-based software that will run Flash applications separately from a browser, whether online or offline [...]
Lots of links
Lots of links: Too much stuff to read last week, but here are some of the pages I’ve kept open in my browsers so I wouldn’t forget ‘em, you may find something here you missed…….
hmm - gee can’t you already do that with mProjector?
Thanks.Good article
Interesting ADOBE Apollo Article. Armenian Genocide