I’ve been excited about Apollo and talking it up for about 7 months now. A lot of the conversations I’ve had have been in trying to convince people it’s not just Central 2.0.
Well, it looks like Mike Chambers and crew have been getting the message across just right out at MAX. Although it’s been a bit eclipsed (pun intended, sorry) by the release of Flex Builder 2 for Mac, the Adobe-related blogosphere is abuzz with Apollo news.
Some still don’t quite get it, but at least they are starting to realize they don’t get it, rather than thinking they get it when they don’t. The funniest protest, in my opinion, is the fear of having one’s computer loaded up with dozens of Apollo apps. What? I really don’t get that one. What, is someone going to sneak into your house at night and install them? Yeah, when it’s released, everyone and his brother will be creating useless, crappy, experimental apps, which everyone else will probably install just to get the idea of what Apollo is. And then they’ll uninstall them and things will settle down and you may or may not have a few Apollo apps that you use on a regular basis.
Anyway, it’s good to see the excitement about it. 2007 should be fun.
Haha,
It makes me laugh too when I hear people talk about having to many Apollo apps installed. I don’t think that they realize that an Apollo app is exactly like a regular desktop application.
I don’t know about anyone else, but I actually like my computer to be able to do things. Having applications on my computer is something I find useful.
In terms of Moms not being able to use them, well my mom knows how to double click on a desktop application to launch an app. The only moms out there that will have trouble with Apollo apps, are the ones that also have trouble turning a computer on.
The main thing that I have noticed from posts in the Flash/Flex dev community is folks that ‘don’t get it’ are missing the point of content delivery and the benefits that offers. If the user is notified of new content and it is delivered to their desktop – they’ll check it out. If the user has to constantly check for new content – that never lasts long.
I think the fear, for some is that Apollo apps will somehow “replace” web apps. Like instead of having gMail, they will be forced to use Apollo gMail. Instead of visiting MXNA in their browser, they’ll have to use the MXNA Apollo App.
Not only would it be stupid for any company to drop their web apps and offer only Apollo versions, but it’s a REALLY short sighted view of what Apollo will be able to do.
Personally, what I see is going to be really useful is the ability to quickly create some useful app for myself, that performs some specific task that I want to do, and there isn’t something out there that does it exactly like I want it to. And if I want to share it and someone else finds it useful, cool.
I admit I’ve thought about the ‘too many little apps’ thing too, but by the time theres a full release, we will probably have spread enough knowledge to land us on the other side of that short-sighted thinking. Adobe is way way out ahead of the curve as they say.
Me, I’m thinking social networking type apps you can take with you. Like Wallop or MySpace anywhere, not tied to a browser. With all the raw power, binary sockets, camera and mic support, we could make a whole new type of similar experience across device platforms. Apollo would even allow the device to use its wireless to discover nearby people using the service, or on your personal network, whatever. Would be a killer app on a college campus.
So, what you are saying is that Apollo is the next version of central and it’s going to eat up my computer with useless applications. Sounds like it’s going to suck! 😉
Yeah, I hear ya, we are experiencing a very similar phenomena with Red5. “It’s just an FCS replacement.”, “It’s open source FMS”, “It’s only used for streaming video”, “It only runs on Linux”, “You have to know Java to use it”, etc… So much misinformation and many confused people.
With that said Apollo combined with Red5 is going to be amazing, imagine John Grden’s Midi drum application running natively on the computer and being able to broadcast to Flash players running on web browsers. Hell yeah, 2007 is going to be fun!
I wonder if the bidirectional support will be handled in apollo, so that flash/flex can truly go multi-lingual. This is a major consideration on some apps that have to support gargantuan amount of languages.
hehe, gotta love your cynicism! 😉
One thing that bugs me about regular windows apps is the registry changes and other things that don’t get undone when uninstalling.
I’m assuming Apollo won’t rely on such amendments due to the cross platformness, could however be something for Adobe to promote, that an apollo app is a single file download and delete (if that is the case?). So when it’s gone it won’t leave any nasties behind.
Not sure about registry stuff, but as you say, the cross-platform aspect would tend to make that not feasible. Mike did talk in his presentation in LA about a local storage area that would be more robust than shared objects, yet not as heavy as straight file i/o. I would assume that all files, local storage and shared objects would get left behind in an uninstall unless the developer is able to hook in to the uninstall process and clean up after him/herself.
I really got excited after going to the birds-of-a-feather session with the apollo team. I see some great potential with allowing for lightweight local versions of some of our tools. I could see a sometime connected LMS that allows the various SCO’s to be downloaded ahead of time and run locally-then just do a batch update to the lms/server on the next connection. Also a lot of internal enterprise production webapps could be mobilized so the user can go to the location of what they need to work on(wireless networks are not always reliable.) So workers could go to the shop, production line, and at a later point sync all their work up later.
Those guys just seem to have a real good focus on what they want the goal of apollo to be. Mike Chambers saying that it will be free over and over seemed to help remove the “central-like” issue too!