The highlight of this morning was Mike Chambers’ “Understanding Apollo” session.
Apollo is the thing I’m most excited about in the Flash world right now, and Mike gave a lot more details and even walked through creating an Apollo “Hello World” application right in front of us. I think I got pics of every slide. Very awesome stuff. As Mike said, they learned a lot from Central – learned what NOT to do. Apollo looks very promising.
Photos here:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/bit-101/sets/72157594314029184/
Nice to hear it looks good but can you go into a bit more detail when you find a min?
I´d really like an official flash->desktop solution by Adobe but the fact that it needs another runtime got me way disappointed. Ideally (to me) Adobe would work together with the zinc people to create a flash->desktop solution which allows at least most of the nice custom command features zinc offers but wih the advantage of full on Adobe support and maybe closer integration into the core language api.
Where if at all does apollo fit into that picture?
To me it seemed like it was a combo of acrobat reader+flash player+html rendering features on the desktop by using an own runtime. Nice and surely useful for a certain target group, but sounded quite restricted to me, especially regarding propper full spec desktop app delivery and deployment (compared to the picture i drew above at least, which would allow way more commands to add features common in dekstop apps and also deploy created apps as full-on standalones)
You said they avoided failures they made in the past with central,that´s good to hear,though one of those failures to me was that it needed an own environment for the apps, they would never become propper standalones and well,that issue is still there now 🙁
Let me know what´s so great about this please, really curious, your excitement at least made me interested in it again 🙂
Tomsamson – Apollo apps do require the Apollo runtime but delivery is different from how it was with Central. With Central you always had to have this little program running in your taskbar and you could only install and launch the Central apps through that.
Apollo has two delivery mechanisms. The first requires the Apollo runtime already be installed, and your program is distributed as an AIR file that when run, installs to your system, places a shortcut to the app on the desktop, etc. just like a typical desktop app would be. The advantage of this delivery mechanism is that AIR files are platform independant.
The second distribution mechanism does not require the Apollo runtime be pre-installed, but instead packages it into an installer that will install both the runtime and your app. Now the downside to this mechanism is that those installers then become platform dependant, so you’d have to have one for Windows, OSX, and Linux posted to wherever it would be downloaded from. The advantage being you don’t have to have the runtime already installed.
I’m hoping that Adobe will make the Apollo runtime “discoverable” so that you could have a bit of javascript on your site that would detect if Apollo was already installed and serve up the appropriate file, AIR if it is, or the applicable packaged installer if it’s not.
thanks for the info Nick, sounds way nicer to me now 🙂
I´ve also watched a presentation on Apollo yesterday which made me curious to try it,too.
Good call on the Apollo detection and then handing out the right file for download based on whether the runtime is installed,would be handy.