TokBox, the impressive video chat startup that doesn’t require any kind of extra software, has launched a new AIR app that will bring the web service’s easy setup to the desktop. Thanks to Adobe’s AIR platform, the software will be cross-compatible and available for Windows, Mac, and Linux users.

The client offers a very simple interface that should be familiar to anyone who has ever used Skype. Users can access all of TokBox’s standard features, which include Video Calls, Instant Messages, and Video Mail. Beyond the easy interface, the client also improves on the TokBox experience by giving users instant notification whenever a contact initiates a chat with them, and also allows them to set their availability status so that others know when they can be contacted. The app also generates a standard TokBox link, so that users can invite their friends to the chat even if they don’t have the client.

The new client should appeal to frequent users of the site, but it seems a little counterintuitive – TokBox is special because you don’t need to use a client, as you do with competitors like Skype or chat networks like AIM and MSN. The release of a desktop client pits TokBox even more directly against these massive networks, and makes it clear that the company isn’t satisfied with just solving a problem (easy browser-based video chat) – they’re looking to take on the big guns.

The new client’s no-hassle setup and universal compatibility make it a strong addition to TokBox’s quickly expanding offerings, which include a recently launched Firefox extension that integrates with Facebook Chat, and integration with Meebo.

It’s slow this weekend so let’s offer a bit of service “journalism” by pointing you all to Snackr, an Adobe AIR-based RSS reader that pulls stories from your feed list or pre-made OPML file and displays them in random ticker along your desktop. It works in OS X and Windows.

I’m a NewsFire man myself, but I’ve been looking for a good, unobtrusive RSS ticker for a while now so I’m glad to find Snackr. Sadly, the icon – an RSS feed icon with a bite taken out of it – makes me think the application is broken whenever I look at my task bar, wasting valuable brain cycles until I realize the author, Narciso Jaramillo, is just being funny and ironic.

Today, Coghead is introducing the 2.0 version of its DIY, Web-based, enterprise-application development service. The site boasts a new user interface (screen shots below) based on Adobe Flex, with 50 new features and performance that is three times faster than the previous version. Basically, this amounts to a massive upgrade of its Website, but calling it Coghead 2.0 lets the company make a big deal about it. Some of the new features include a redesigned authoring environment, new drag and drop widgets, and support for Open ID.

Coghead is also now hosted on Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) Web service. “Amazon knows a lot more about running data centers than we do,” CEO Paul McNamara says of the move to Amazon. The way he sees it, he is now offering an easy on-ramp for anyone who wants to create an Amazon-hosted application simply by using Coghead.

The move to Adobe Flex is what gives the site its performance boost. On Flex versus Ajax, McNamara says:

A lot of people are talking about Ajax, but we see a world that goes beyond Ajax.

What attracted him to Flex was the cross-platform, cross-browser interoperability and the prospect of creating offline apps with Adobe AIR. He expects to offer offline capabilities to Coghead users by the middle of 2008. Coghead has attracted 25,000 registered users since launching last April, but its ambition, says McNamara, is to go after the “50 million businesses that don’t have a server.” It still has a long way to go, but this upgrade should help it attract its next set of users.

Adobe moved its new Apollo Platform forward this evening by releasing the beta version (the previous Apollo release was a developer preview). They’ve also renamed the platform to Adobe Integrated Runtime. They’re referring to it as “Adobe AIR” (meaning Adobe is in the name twice, but who’s counting).

The new version fully supports HTML and Ajax, meaning Apollo applications can be created without using any Flash at all. They are also releasing an extension to Dreamweaver web development software.

Adobe is also now saying that AIR will be fully launched by end of year. Our previous coverage of Adobe AIR is here.

The Adobe AIR site is here.

The Digg API Visualization Contest held to celebrate the launch of the Digg API is now in its final stages with 10 shortlisted candidates.

Four of the ten finalists are Abode Apollo based applications, remarkable for a platform launched just over 2 months ago.

The four Apollo based finalists:

D’Lite is an Apollo application that utilizes Digg’s API to retrieve data, information, and processes. Features include pagination, favorites, network detection, and smart auto refresh.

Digg Watch is a tool that lets users browse Digg and grab information from stories, like who Dugg what stories and how many Diggs a story gets over time. A nifty tool in looking up user activity.

Mini Digg allows users to view stories and see the story activity. A story tracking feature allows users to save favorite stories for future tracking.

DiggGraphr is a desktop application that lets users browse Digg stories in treemaps. The application allows customization as well as choice of Digg Channel.

All four have individual appeal and are generally clever implementations of data pulled from Digg and generated under Apollo. Voting closes May 30.

At the Web 2.0 Expo, online auction giant eBay seems to finally be rethinking their user experience with the announcement of a new Apollo application currently called “Project San Dimas” released into a limited beta. The new application is meant to make buying and selling items on eBay more efficient, competing with third party “Power User” auction service giants Vendio and Marketworks, and the Y Combinator upstart Auctomatic. No word on whether it was named after the patron saint of reformed thieves (fraud detection?) or referencing the quiet suburb that served as the backdrop to “Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure”.

The project was started last year by Alan Lewis of the eBay Developers Program, and eventually became an internal initiative for eBay after being demoed last year at Adobe MAX in Las Vegas. Ryan Stewart blogged the demo and Rob Abbott, a member of the San Dimas team, also has some coverage. San Dimas features a UI created by EffectiveUI and uses eBay’s API’s to make creating, and managing auctions easier and faster. Because it’s written in Apollo, the program can improve performance by cutting down on repetitive requests for data, caching it locally instead. The application will also feature real-time auction monitoring and allow sellers to add in pictures directly uploaded from webcams and cameras.

Today’s release is made on the backdrop of a continuing controversy between Microsoft’s new Silverlight and Adobe’s Apollo, outlined by the WSJ today. Microsoft has already effectively lost as an online video standard to Adobe’s Flash. Silverlight marks the begining of a new battle over web standards as the two companies fight over the tools that will shape the future of web applications.

There is a video demoing the application here.

Adobe just announced that it’s much anticipated Apollo platform is now available for developers. The software developers kit can be downloaded at adobe.com/go/apollo.

Although this is the official release of the SDK, many developers have been working with Apollo for quite some time. Ryan Stewart recently covered the some of the better Apollo demos from an event they put on last month. See more on the launch from his ZDNet blog.

Readers have noticed our recent infatuation with the Apollo platform. I honestly believe that entirely new classes of companies can be built on this platform, which takes Flash, HTML and javascript completely outside of the browser and interacts with the file system on a PC. Photos, music, email and many other everyday tasks make a lot of sense in a single environment that is both local and in the cloud simultaneously. There is going to be a lot of creativity coming off of this platform over the near term.

There were a bunch of product demos today at Adobe’s Engage event, but there were a few that stood out and should have a big impact on the startup world. They also happened to be some of the best demos of the day.

Virtual Ubiquity – Rick Treitman demoed their word processor application, BuzzWord, which was built entirely in Flex 2 and looks like it could be a direct competitor to Google Docs. The team focused heavily on making sure pagination and typeography were first class, something Flash has been bad at. They’ve created a great UI around the document workflow and have features like ruler tooltips when embedding assets that help people work with their documents. They are focusing on the collaborative document space so that users can be designated as reviewers, read-only, or actual authors and discuss the document. They are aiming for a public beta later this summer.

Scrybe – Faizan Budar presented Scrybe and showed the features that were in the video that generated so much buzz. He demoed all three major features live and made a point of saying that everything in the video is now working in the application. He showed off the calendar portion of the application, which has a great UI, the “PaperVision” which allows you to print your information into special pocket size chunks, and the option to save content to your Scrybe account from any website. The user interface is clean, useful, and it all works offline. They’ve opened up the beta to a limited number of people and hope to open it up to the general public after their next round of features are complete.

yourminis – Alex Bard, the CEO of Goowy Media , demoed what yourminis is working on. A lot of it has been covered by TechCrunch, but they really dug into Apollo and the API that they plan to release next week. With Apollo, they are building out a widget platform that will touch the web, embeddable properties, and the desktop. Alex took a yourmini widget and dragged it to the desktop straight from the browser which made for a poweful demo. Their API is going to enable developers to create their own widgets on the yourminis platform. They built a Twitter widget using the API that is great, so I think content providers are going to be excited about the freedom that the API allows.

Intelisea – One application that didn’t fall into the category of web startup but demonstrated how far the Flash application has come was an app from Intelisea. The application, built in Flex 2, is the front end for controlling a yacht. It runs on a touch screen interface and allows the user to look at engine stats, fuel levels, weather and GPS coordinates. There’s also a security feature that uses RFID tags to track the people on the boat and sounds an alarm when someone falls overboard. It displays a red dot on a schematic of the ship to indicate where the person fell off. It’s something that will never be seen on Web 2.0, but makes for a fun story when it comes to the Flash Platform.

Engage did a good job of showing how diverse the Flash platform is. There were a lot of great questions about the role Adobe needs to play in the design community and what makes web apps better (it’s not gratuitous animation or UI). And there are a lot of interesting startups using the Flash platform. Luckily we got a look at some of those today.

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.

Undoubtedly you’ve heard the term “Rich Internet Application” (RIA) with increasing frequency lately. Sometimes you hear about it in context of Ajax, sometimes with Flash, and now even Microsoft gets talked about as having an RIA solution with “WPF/E”. The reality is that this is still a very unknown subset of the technology world and anyone who tries to define it (myself included) is fighting an uphill battle. However, there is one technology which has sparked quite a bit of interest across the board, Adobe’s soon-to-be-released Apollo platform.

For those who aren’t familiar with it, Apollo is a cross-platform runtime that is still in pre alpha and allows developers to build applications for the desktop using web technologies including Flash, HTML and PDF. While Web 2.0 has prominently declared the desktop dead, its demise has been greatly exaggerated which is why I implore you to take a look at Apollo. Mike did an interview with Adobe senior vice president and chief software architect Kevin Lynch about Apollo over on TalkCrunch and I recently interviewed Mike Downey, the Sr. Product Manager for Apollo. I also interviewed Kevin Lynch himself about Apollo earlier this year.

The reason Apollo is so important is because it changes the rules of the game. It is taking the technologies and tenants of the web and bringing them to the desktop. Apollo is cross platform and gives web developers access to things like the file system and close integration with the operating system in a set of APIs that are the same whether you’re writing in JavaScript or ActionScript. The web fostered an explosion in the creativity of application development and Apollo will undoubtedly do the same for desktop development.

So as entrepreneurs and developers, you need to be aware of the potential impact of Apollo. The desktop will see the same creative infusion that the web once did, but with more features and with the web’s most ubiquitous display formats (HTML, Flash and PDF). Early adopters to the platform have the potential to reap a bonanza and bring about the gold-rush like mentality that swept the web. Is someone going to figure out how to serve AdWords on the desktop with Apollo’s online/offline capabilities? Is it a new way to deliver rich media? A killer solution for email that spans web and desktop and integrates IM or VoIP? A new way to tie customers back to online properties? Desktop development is now going to be as open as web development was and the entrepreneurial spirit is going to bring about some fantastic innovation that blends the best of the web and the best of the desktop. That’s something that end users and startups alike will benefit from.

Ryan Stewart is an expert in Rich Internet Applications. Ryan writes his personal blog here and also writes a RIA blog for ZDNet called The Universal Desktop. We hope to have him back regularly to review new Adobe Apollo applications.

2007 will bring the launch of the much anticipated Adobe Apollo platform, a cross platform run time that will allow developers to take rich internet applications, whether they be built on Flash, HTML, JavaScript and/or Ajax, and turn them into desktop applications.

Apollo will be useful for running desktop versions of critical web applications like email and calendaring, where offline access and application speed is sometimes important. Potential developers are already taking notice: eBay is working on a project called “San Dimas” to run on Apollo, although there are no announced plans to release it yet.

We’re excited about Apollo because it has the potential to be the launchpad for entirely new classes of startups. It could be the technology to watch for 2007. And Adobe is certainly counting on it to drive future revenue.

I had the opportunity to interview Kevin Lynch, Adobe’s senior vice president and chief software architect, about the upcoming launch of Apollo. Steve Gillmor joined me as well. Listen to the 37 minute podcast over on TalkCrunch, and let us know what you think Apollo’s “killer app” might be.

Screenshots below.