I’m at the Adobe Engage event with a bunch of other bloggers including David Berlind, Tim O’Reilly, Robert Scoble and James Governor. We’re getting demos from Adobe customers (and in some cases products the company is working on) which I’m covering over on my ZDNet blog, The Universal Desktop. The big highlight so far has been Adobe senior vice president and chief software architect Kevin Lynch’s keynote covering Apollo (You can listen to recent a podcast interview with Kevin Lynch, Steve Gillmor and Michael Arrington here).
Having a lot of inquisitive bloggers in the room meant a lot of good questions as Kevin gave his presentation. Kevin talked about how widespread the Adobe Engagement Platform has become with 700 million PCs and 200 million devices. In describing Apollo’s place in the ecosystem, he showed a slide charting richness and reach. Up to now, Adobe has focused on cross platform web based experiences, but with Apollo they’re hoping to move into richer desktop experiences as well as richer mobile integration.
A lot of the basic information on Apollo has been covered pretty extensively, including here on TechCrunch, so I’ll focus on the things that got the most discussion amongst the bloggers here. Security, which has been a concern of a lot of people in the community, seemed secondary to this audience. There’s a lot of talk about whether Apollo is going to be used for spyware or malicious software, but at the end of the day, Adobe is of the opinion that users have final control over what’s installed on their machines. They’re making sure that Apollo can’t wreak havoc (it won’t be
able to write to or delete system folders and each Apollo application is sandboxed so that Apollo applications can’t steal data from other Apollo applications).
The installation experience for Apollo goes through the Flash Player, so it bypasses Microsoft’s controls which results in a better experience, and one that Adobe controls. Kevin showed how quickly and easily it is to install individual Apollo applications and it’s a pretty good user experience. The one thing that seems to disappoint people here is that there are no plans to allow Apollo to access native applications on the OS. Adobe wants the Apollo experience to maintain its cross platform portability and they are aiming to keep up with developer needs without opening up OS-specific possibilities. The other thing that is becoming clearer is how Apollo applications will store data. Kevin said right now they’re looking at XML-based storage along with the possibility of advanced file-system caching that developers could tie into via an API. That’s all doable by developers now, but they’re talking about making it easier.
There is a lot of excitement here about Apollo. There are concerns about how viable it and how people are actually going to use it. A persistent question for the presenters has been “how does Apollo help you” and the main answer seems to be file system access. There aren’t a lot of people pushing the boundaries.
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still no preview release or beta yet…
So… when can we developers play with it?
Darren, that’s true… there has been increasing public guidance over the months about the Apollo project, and today’s event was preparatory to the initial public release. More info, as it arrives:
http://www.adobe.com/go/apollo
http://labs.adobe.com/wiki/ind.....eleased.3F
http://weblogs.macromedia.com/mesh
jd/adobe
No interest to use it - and certainly no interest to let flash install/do anything to my OS without my knowledge.
The sorts of applications that can be created from Web/Direct OS integration is concerning and something that I would not working on my PC mainly for the data that it could collect.
A simple keylogger would be easy to create with Apollo then what? Everything I type gets sent to some server, for a review………No Thanks
Thank god for Zonealarm - Apollo will be shut out good and proper.
Seems like a good idea to not allow access to native apps, cross-OS performance really is the name of the game. Without that Apollo is an interesting but ultimately not that amazing utility. With the ability to produce once and run anywhere on the other hand… well potentially Apollo could be turning point or at the very least a herald for a new way of looking at the role of OSes in the future.
I feel like we’ve been waiting for quite some time though - as Darren says above me - for a preview release or beta. I suppose all things in time…
There’s an Apollo Camp that is sold out in a few weeks, with speculation that we might see the official bits come out there.
http://weblogs.macromedia.com/....._apol.html
Mike
What is the advantage of using Apollo over Mozilla’s XUL plaform? XUL is multiplatform as well.
Sorry guys, my fault. Release is first half of this year. There is an Apollo book that is shipping for the public beta and it’s shipping March 31st, so the public release should be before that sometime.
Jason, I think that’s an interesting question, and one up for discussion. XUL is a great platform, and I think how it and Apollo compete is something worth exploring in depth.
Ryan,
I would like to know, is it possible to use FCS (Media server) framework with Apollo?
Kind rgrds
saran
Hey Saran, yes, you can, but you won’t be able to take that content online. But if you’re looking at streaming video to an Apollo application, that’s definitely possible as I understand it.
With Apollo, can I run Codlfusion code on the local machine without a “Codlfusion server licence”? Also, can I run / link my application with the free desktop version of MS SQL?
Anything that makes it easier for developers is welcome. You can do so much these days especially around XML but the effort that is sometimes required to do that is not worthwhile.
“They’re making sure that Apollo can’t wreak havoc (it won’t be
able to write to or delete system folders and each Apollo application is sandboxed so that Apollo applications can’t steal data from other Apollo applications).”
Sounds eerily familiar..
“A persistent question for the presenters has been “how does Apollo help you” and the main answer seems to be file system access.”
The security model here isn’t clear - can it or can’t it read/write any/all/some local/system files/folders ?
This is administrivia, but since TechCrunch posts are written by several different people, it would be really helpful if the name of each author were included in the RSS feed. We shouldn’t have to click-through to figure that out. Thanks.
Ryan
When I was developing a conferencing application few years ago, I used Client & Server side FCS objects to stream data (Text/Audio/Video), both in real time and on demand. I am not clear whether it is possible to do the same thing using Apollo platform, I guess, its not possible in Apollo 1.0.
kind rgrds
saran
Peter, I don’t think you can run ColdFusion like that.
Nick, I believe they’re still working on the specifics around the security model, so they haven’t nailed it down. I think they’re also still soliciting feedback on it.
“Peter, I don’t think you can run ColdFusion like that.”
Thanks Ryan Stewart. So… if I programmed using .NET I could do this but Adobe isn’t providing a platform to do this?! I don’t mind even having to pay a $10 per seat licensing fee to run ColdFusion on the desktop EASILY (for a beginning user)!
The only support for storage is XML? So there would no way to implement application update functionality. For example, I want to update the javascript that my apollo app is using offline. I understand the rich use of the internet while the computer has an active internet connection, but once disconnected will the app use the most recent version of a script or default to one packaged with the apollo app.
Also, does anyone know if the apollo team has sent out pre beta releases out yet. I applied the other day from the ajaxian blog.
–Howard
Andy, you really don’t seem to have a grasp on Apollo nor basic computer security. What is to stop anyone generating a keylogger in any development platform to send info to a remote server? Instead of focusing on that you should be looking at the positive potential that Apollo is going to bring to developers who want to take applications from the web and onto the desktop but which also make full use of the advantages of both web and desktop environments.
I can’t wait to get a hold of this.
I love this forum because people so often ask the questions that I would. With this post, however, I actually agree that I’m not as worried about the revenue. So many companies these days play what I call the “YouTube Lottery.” Everyone knows about the crazy money YouTube got, but not much is written (even on TechCrunch) about the 100s of companies that made it nowhere, They didn’t win the lottery the way that YouTube did.http://www.xmasdownload.net