Adobe Outlook
April 2, 2007
Anyone who is interested in Flex and Apollo should watch a presentation to financial analysts given by Kevin Lynch. It will be well worth the time. Thanks to Ryan Stewart for the link.
Ryan Stewart – Rich Internet Application Mountaineer » Adobe’s Rich Internet Application Head Start is Huge
“The numbers are great. Flash Player is on 98% of computers in the world, and by 2010 it will be on a billion devices. Flash Player 8 penetration is at 95% and the update mechanism ensures that when Adobe rolls out a new version of the Flash Player, people quickly and easily grab it. With Apollo, they’ve now embedded the platform into the desktop making the “Flash stack” run from devices, to video game systems, to web browsers, to the desktop. And all of these access points use the same tools and technologies so developers can become proficient and then access the entire spectrum.”
Chapter 1 from the Apollo Pocket Guide
March 28, 2007
Apollo is a new cross-platform desktop runtime being developed by Adobe that allows web developers to use web technologies to build and deploy Rich Internet Applications and web applications to the desktop.
In order to better understand what Apollo enables, and which problems it tries to address, it is useful to first take a quick look over at the (relatively short) history of web applications. “
360 Flex Apollo Demos
March 15, 2007
video.onflex.org » Christian Cantrell Demos Apollo
“Christian shows some examples of HTML / Flex integration within Apollo, including ActionScript to JavaScript script bridging.”
360 Flex Coolest Demos
March 15, 2007
video.onflex.org » Ely Greenfield Shows his FlexBook Component
“At 360Flex last week, Ely Greenfield gave a talk on creating Flex components. I video taped the entire session, except for the last 3 minutes (my tape ran out). Unfortunately, that is when Ely showed the coolest stuff. He was cool enough to talk with me after the session and demonstrated his new FlexBook component.”
Building Apollo Apps Conference Session
March 5, 2007
Mike Chambers from Adobe is the senior product manager for the Apollo team.
Apollo is just the codename for a desktop runtime to leverage web development skills to build and deploy desktop RIA’s. It will be able to work with:
- Flash/Flex/Actionscript
- HTML/Javascript/CSS/AJAX
- Combination of these
- PDF can also be leveraged
Apollo will be closer to a browser application then a desktop application.
He showed a demo of an MP3 player called Ascension. It is a mashup of local music files plus information from the web. It uses the iTunes library to show music and then accesses extra information from Amazon. It can cache the Amazon data so it will be available when the user is offline. It can also look at the album and artist and then load Flickr images that are related. It can also load webpages of lyrics and display them natively from the originating web site. Apollo can load the HTML directly.
HTML Engine
- Uses Webkit Open Source Engine
- Used in Safari
- Webkit was used since it was an Open Project
- Can run on mobile devices
- Small size
Flash can interact with HTML as a bitmap. He showed loading an HTML page and then using Flash to rotate and blur it. And the links still work.
Apollo Functionality/API
- Offline
- Run in the background
- Network: HTTP, XML-RPC, REST, Sockets
- File I/O
- Custom Chrome
Desktop Integration
- Installation
- Shortcuts
- Drag and Drop
- Clipboard
- Cross Application communication (Desktop, Apollo and Browser)
- Notifications
- There are no cross domain security issues
Scripting
- Actionscript and Javascript will be supported.
- Complete access to Flash and HTML DDOM and API
Mike showed how simple it is to get HTML to render. You just create an HTML control and then it will render the code you send it. The app only needed six lines to save an HTML file to the desktop.
He is the co-author of the Apollo pocket guide from O’Reilly. It will be released with the alpha release.
