May 18, 2006
Adobe Reveals More Details on Apollo
Source: Publish
Written by Don Fluckinger
Let the countdown begin for Apollo, one of the first fruits of the Adobe-Macromedia merger. The technology will be integrated into Flash Player and Adobe Reader, and will give developers the tools to create run-time apps that can be used offline without a browser, yet with the lower costs associated with Web development tools that require browsers.
Traditionally tight-lipped about products in development, Adobe offered Publish.com new information about its upcoming Apollo technology, which has been shown in bits and pieces at a few Flash developer conferences in the last year.
“This is the natural evolution of what [Adobe and Macromedia] have been promoting for a long time,” said Todd Hay, Adobe director of platform marketing and developer relations. “A lot of our core community really sees PDF not as a portable document format but rather a portable application container.”
The idea behind Apollo, Hay said, is to enable apps currently made from Flash and PDF to “move beyond the browser” by assigning Flash-based apps a desktop icon that can be launched like traditional apps and utilities.
“It’s incorporating the skills that people are using with HTML and adding to that much tighter integration with the desktop,” Hay said. “So it’s kind of a bridging the worlds of the in-browser Flash experience and the desktop client Reader experience—but focused on the delivery of a new form of rich-media applications.”