What would you do with Apollo?
23 02 2007
I’d be interested to hear what people have in mind when they get their hands on Apollo — over the last few weeks and months have been planning out some things I would like to do with it.
Roughly speaking I see Apollo apps break down into one of the following three categories.
1. moving an existing Flex application from the web to the desktop
The idea here being to have a standalone version of the same app working on the users desktop. For example my little AmazonExplorer Flex example could easily be converted into one of these Apollo apps.2. set up an Apollo app from a web based service for doing synchronization
Here we’d have a way to use a web based app in a way that makes sense for occassionally connected devices. Any work you do offline gets queued until you have connectivity again. Examples here are a blogger app (write your blog posts on the train and have them pushed online when you reach the office), an Apollo interface to any CMS system etc.3. creating a desktop app by leveraging Flash Player features
I’m not a traditional desktop developer and I like the idea of being able to easily code apps with functionality I get from the Flash Player (webcam, sound spectrum, E4X, binary data handling) across platforms. What I’m thinking here are an Apollo version of Photobooth, an MP3 player, RSS client, file organizer, whiteboard app,…
When you think about it Apollo is much more than just a fancy way of doing Flash projectors, however we end up using it, the ability to bring web technologies seemlessly over to the desktop is a very exciting prospect.
My prediction would be that within a maximum of two or three years all major e-commerce businesses will have something along the lines of a “take our site offline” feature which pushes out their custom branded Apollo app to the end user.
How do you see Apollo being adopted and what type of application would you be building?
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I am going to port my flash based vj app over to Apollo. Looking forward to created one runtime for win/mac and linux.
http://www.mutevj.com
I’ll try porting my Garden Planner app to Apollo.
Cross-platform is the main reason - but it offers some nice possibilities for building community stuff around the app (sharing designs,tips and that sort of thing).
Take my current desktop RIAs (built with Flash/Flex and wrapped in Zinc) and port them to Apollo.
An application for organization, review, and approval of PDF files for an old school printing business. They’ve moved from mass emailing and footwork for the approval processes to a website based system which saves a lot of manpower, and Apollo will let me take it even further for a fully integrated and more flexible solution.
I’ve also wondered if we’ll see a variety of shell/portal type programs for Apollo apps. Something to organize access to the (potentially) many Apollo apps youre using, since I dont think Apollo features anything like that by default like the old central chrome did.
And although I’m sure a lot of people will cringe when you mention a web browser in Apollo, but hey it can open, rotate and blur Slashdot with working links this early in the game, so It’s possible. I think we’ll see some things that are sorta like onfolio/browser hybrids that directly blend browsing and gathering of media and data with powerful and flexible organization and visualization features.
Currently developing a Flex app for desktop making simple use of FileIO. My initial release will use MDM Zinc. Future releases and a road-map including collaboration are likely to make use of Apollo. Hoping that Apollo will provide a more solid cross-platform solution, or that the competition will push MDM into improving their Mac OS X offering.
I’m not too interested in porting old stuff, but rather using the new possibilities? I’ll use HTML for what it’s good at (can anyone say WYSIWYG) and Flash for what it’s good at. Just imagine for once being able to use actual CSS for styling and not the “sort-of-css-but-not-quite” stuff that we’ve gotten used to in Flash. Positioning, text flow around images (!), properly styled links and so on and then Mix and match this with Flash’s unique capabilities.
Bringing these worlds together will be the biggest Apollo feature to me. It’s just so many Flash apps that could do with a little HTML mixed in.
J
Wow, Peter. Spooky. I just finished off a post that deals exactly with this question. Writing the answer before you read the question is a bit weird, but its great to see others are thinking along similar lines.
Cheers,
Marcus.
an off-line content player and manager.
content would be Flash, vid, audio, HTML, etc. When connected, head office will ensure that everyone subscribed to that particular project has these assets up to date, pushing new versions or additions to the subscribed user. each user can be subscribed to multiple projects (so assets have to be managed per project)
additionally, documents and assetts can be managed and uploaded from the users Apollo app back to the project managers server space when connected (currently email attachments or file upload - messy and due to bandwidth woes, needs to be async with receipts)
wish list: user collaboration of producing documents and assets with peers on the same project.
we’ve already identified the need and workflows. There’s a product already that does some of this for our systems but it’s
- hideously expensive (per seat licencing: we have thousands of users)
- windows only (a good % of users are Mac or Linux/KDE)
- crap and limited functionality
but this is all speculation, since I haven’t access to Apollo (via labs) to experiment on this….
I think I’ll just try to make a simple desktop newsreader Rss,Atom etc.
there is not much new to that I know but I think that is what I’ll start off with, small and simple but a nice way of getting started.