Apollo and Blaze
Reporting live from Toronto at FITC. Went to a number of sessions on day one. By far, the most excting news I heard was at the Keynote Address. Mike Downey talked a bit about Blaze (Flash 9) and gave a few hints about what direction it would be going in. Although he claimed he didn’t have a beta build of Blaze to show us, those with sharp eyes will have noticed that the version of Flash he was demonstrating stuff on said “Flash 9 Public Beta”, though I didn’t see anything in the interface that looked any different than Flash 8. Hmm….
And Mike Chambers gave probably the most detailed public description of Apollo to date. Apollo, if you don’t know, is the next generation solution for building desktop applications using html, Flash and PDF. Think Central, done right. Apollo apps will be just like any other desktop application. Download, install, they run in the OS, not some shell, and you have complete control over the “chrome” or the way the application’s window looks. Apollo apps will have access to the file system an all the other stuff that you would expect in a real application. I’m really excited about that one.
Earlier in the keynote, Sho Kuwamoto did a quick walkthrough of building a Flex 2 application, creating an mp3 music player in about ten minutes. Mike Chambers then showed that same app after it had been turned into an Apollo application. Pretty cool.
Lots more photos on my flickr page, including some I don’t totally recall taking. 🙂