Adobe Apollo Makes Alpha Release of the Future of App Development

Adobe has released the alpha version of its Apollo technology and after spending about 3 hours with it, I must say I'm as impressed as I expected I'd be. The alpha is, as you'd expect, not feature-complete, but there's enough here to get a real feel for what it's going to be like using the new technology to build desktop apps with Web technologies. And that is the unique and important promise of Apollo.

Until now, Web developers were effectively cut out of the desktop except for smallish applications made with things like Apple's Dashboard widgets, which of course run only on OS X. Vista Gadgets are a nearly identical idea that run on the new Windows release.

Apollo takes this basic idea and twists it in two crucial new ways.

First, it enables developers to create applications that will run on both OS X and Windows (with Linux to come at some point as well).

Second, Apollo provides full support for all of the great stuff in Adobe (formerly Macromedia) Flash which means you can create some really, really slick user interfaces.

Apollo apps can also be intelligent in ways that Widgets and Gadgets cannot, at least not easily. They can be self-updating and they can run disconnected from the Internet and then do the right thing when an Internet connection is avaialble.

Very, very cool stuff. This will make people like me who have spent a lot of time and effort learning DHTML, XML, Flash, ActionScript and other similar technologies able to create great-looking interactive desktop applications that run across platforms.