Live Report – Adobe Apollo Camp

I’m here in SF at the Adobe Apollo camp which is a big promo event to talk about Apollo. Since it’s NOT NDA’d, I present to you the play by play realtime Apollo Camp report. Click below for more and refresh occasionally to get the latest.

• We’re in Adobe’s cafeteria. Free ‘za and Red Bull!
• Schwag bag included a full copy of Flex Builder with Charting, Apollo, an Apollo Pocket Guide from O’Reilly, and a tutorial DVD. W0W l00tz!

• Kevin Lynch takes the stage.
• Flash is available on over 700 Million systems
• Chart showing the intended growth of the Flash platform from the web to the desktop.
• Kevin digs on WPF/E a little bit. LOLz!
• Showcasing some demo applications.
• Demo’ing an Apollo Amazon application. HTML and flash are seamlessly integrated.
• Demo’ing an Apollo RSS reader
• I’m sitting down but I feel like I’m standing. Too much red bull.
• Showing Buzzword by Virtual Ubiquity – a multi user word processor
• Showing a financial application demo.
• Apollo will be public on labs next week!
• Flex Moxie (Flex 3) on labs this half of the year! so is CS3
• Apollo 1.0, Flex 3, Philo 1.0 (video application) and Flex Media Server will all come out in the second half of 07.
• Adobe wants feedback from us to help steer their development in the future.
• Apollo won’t support embed tags or Quicktime anytime soon. This is because of cross-platform issues.
• Apollo will probably not be the final name of the product but the new name is “good”.
• Apollo supports file system, windowing, and other core functionality. Apollo will add more functionality that interfaces with the OS over time.
• A witness asks “Why didn’t you just buy Zinc” and the crowd said “LOL”. Crap, I missed his response cause I was writing this. Sorry.
• Kevin leaves. Thanks Kevin!

• Mike Chambers takes the stage.
• Mike: There will be more beer soon. (applause)
• “Apollo is a cross-operating system runtime that allows developers to leverage their existing web development skills (Flash, Flex, HTML, Ajax) to build and deploy desktop RIA’s.”
• Apollo is not just about Flash.
• Apollo includes Flash, Flex, AS, HTML, JS, CSS, Ajax, and PDF. These technologies are combined.
• HTML engine is WebKit (used in Safari and KHTML)
• The intent is to make Apollo to mobile devices eventually. WebKit is small enough to run on mobiles which is part of why it was used.
• Apollo obscures the desktop from the developer so you can focus on the app without worrying about the OS.
• Apollo features common desktop integrations like drag-drop, clipboard, notifications, installer, &c.
• “Complete access to Flash Player and HTML DOMs and APIs”
• Apollo applications run on top of the Apollo runtime not on top of the OS.
• We’re looking at Apollo now and Mike is showing us how building an Apollo application works.
• Apollo basically runs on an ApolloApplication.mxml file and an application config XML file. Both are required for an Apollo App.
• You can set the chrome of your app using system chrome or transparent (for custom or no chrome).
• Oh no he didn’t – MC just made a hello world app.
• BTW, I’m sitting between Roger Braunstein from Partly Human and Josh Hirsch from Big Spaceship. They’re cool guys.
• Adding an application icon is easy. Just add it as a PNG in your application XML file.
• Mike screwed up his demo. We’re all helping him fix it. :)
• Hello World launched. YAY. Time for more pizza and beer. bbl.

• Christian Cantrell is talking about JS and HTML but since I don’t care, I’m going to continue to schmooze instead.
• Actually, he just demoed a Mac Dashboard emulator in Apollo. This lets you run dashboard widgets in Windows. Cool! He’s going to post source on his blog soon.

• I’m back. We’re listening to Teknision. These guys build branded applications to help bring marketing from interruption to interaction.
• They’re showing off Finetune which is a “great big jukebox in the sky”
• Finetune allows you to share your playlists with your friends on blogs and myspace.
• Demoing how finetune works.

• We are all very tired and decided to leave early. I hope this isn’t a disappointment for you, my readers, but you should be able to find some more coverage on some of the other blogs on MXNA. Thanks to Adobe for doing this event!