Today Adobe is holding an
event called Engage, where it is explaining its Apollo web development platform
for tech bloggers, developers and others in the Web industry. John Dowdell from
Adobe has a useful
page of links. The coverage is quite diverse, from Tim O’Reilly
commenting on the user experience aspects, to David Berlind on Brightcove, to
James Governor on Acesis, to Scoble on positioning, to Ryan Stewart’s blanket
coverage.
But let’s step back and look at the high level. Michael Coté from Redmonk sums it
up well:
“Apollo itself is, to be blunt, a new GUI framework evolved from Flash, Flex,
ActionScript, and lots of XML. The idea is “bringing the web to the desktop”…”
Really, to put it even more bluntly, Apollo is Adobe’s Web platform – only its plays
to Adobe’s strengths, which is “rich” desktop apps. And in particular, Adobe has two killer
assets which it wants to push forward in this new world of desktop/web integration: Flash
and PDF (Portable Document Format). David
Berlind reported some interesting stats around those two things:
- Between Flash Player and PDF, the company’s reach extends into over 700 million PCs
and 150 million devices - The Flash Player 8 upgrade reached 85 percent market penetration in 9 months. Lynch
claimed this to be the fastest update of any client technology in the world. - There are already 250,000,000 PDF-formatted documents on the Web.
The buzzword for all this is Rich Internet Applications (RIA). As Ryan Stewart nicely
laid out in a previous post, Apollo
will compete with other RIA platforms – OpenLaszlo, Microsoft’s WPF/E and WPF platforms,
and of course Ajax itself (the rich internet app weapon of choice for Google). There’s
also another one, which Ryan didn’t mention, that I will be posting on later today
😉
- 1st half of this year: Apollo public labs release, Flex “Moxie” (possibly
Flex 3) public labs release, Creative Suite 3. - Second half: Apollo 1.0, Flex “Moxie”, “Phillo” 1.0 (Internet
TV), Flash Media Server.
