ApolloCamp Keynote

Posted on March 16, 2007 | 1 comment

ApolloCamp CD bits has the Alpha1 (and alpha alpha1rc3 Flex Builder extensions). I am installing as I type…

Keynote started off by Kevin Lynch . Why Apollo? He talked about the history of the Adobe/Macromedia and his typical pitch about the channels of engagement (phone, computer, consumer electronics, cars). He went on to talk about the Flash Player and PDF penetration stats. Here is the why, RIA Technology Trends…. a slide hard to describe. But the idea is that Apollo builds on tools and technology that is already out there and move it further into Desktop RIA and phones (Apollo, Flash list).

Interesting note about reasons for choosing WebKit as the HTML engine. It was small, had a mobile version, Nokia has ported it…

On to the demo examples:
Amazon Item Widget (Built in Flex, Used Grease monkey to put a button on to their site to have it talk with Apollo app)
Fresh (Feed Reader knock off, done all in HTML… nice)
Buzzword (Built using Flex, this was shown at 360Flex by Ted)
FinanceCorp Desktop (Must be a built on newer builder, as it showed PDF support, pretty nice)
Finetune Desktop (did not show)
Maptacular (did not show)
TimeTracker (did not show)
eBay Desktop (did not show)

Questions (my answers are paraphrased):
Will you support the (HTML) embed tag (for plugins)?
No, because of cross-platform.
How is this different then Java WebStart?
Java is not quite crossplatform. Installing apps and application handling not so straight forward.

Kevin didn’t know what Moxie was!!!

How easy will it be to convert Flex 2 apps to Moxie?
Should be easy, note about porting Flex to Apollo will be quick.

Will the codename stick? or will it change?
Kevin, said we love it… but it comes back to rights and they can’t get the rights for Apollo, the alternate name is really cool. (Kevin says so).

Stragety for getting Apollo runtime out?
This is something we have done before and work on. Working through paternships and OEM-ing on it on the machine. Flash Player as the ability to install the Apollo runtime. They paid Netscape to put Flash Player into the newest player…. and a side note about Microsoft following suit.

Extending Apollo, will there be more then File App, 3rd party integration?
Starting with File i/O and we want to put more in, the developers will drive features. But it comes back to cross platform, security is a big issue also. Shockwave had “extras” but it causes apps not to really be cross platform.

Will we be able to do more CPU intensive apps?
Drawing, WordProcessor…

Compiling it down to Exe? Why didn’t you just by Zinc?
Zinc is cool… You can still use Zinc, our goal is not to make these native Exe’s, but an “air” file for any OS regardless of the OS exectuable extensions.

Databases?
Local storage for now, their is not yet a embedded database. Let the Apollo team know you use cases they it might happen.