Much Ado About Adobe Apollo Alpha
The news this week from Adobe about their release of Adobe Labs’ Apollo alpha was very exciting. I quickly downloaded the runtime engine and some sample apps. Unfortunately, nothing worked on my PC, but my PC was running an old OS. Take two, I tried again with my Mac and success! How fun, it worked!
Apollo is the code name for a cross-operating system runtime being developed by Adobe that allows developers to leverage their existing web development skills (Flash, Flex, HTML, JavaScript, Ajax) to build and deploy rich Internet applications (RIAs) to the desktop.
Doing away with the headaches of browsers that won’t run my code sounds terrific! However, when you consider the user experience for someone surfing to your site and then having to download an application to do things is a little odd. A lot of us are trained not to download and install software from the internet as it could contain a virus! Now Adobe wants us to forget all that and learn to trust that downloading these little apps is safe and good? I think it really could be! However, I wish all of these web apps could be housed in.. wait for it.. a.. browser! Isn’t that like just being silly? Well, no not at all. Adobe should also release an Apollo web app browser that just lets all of these apps install without the need to ask the user every time. It would be like.. surfing the web! As an alternative, it could be released as a plugin for your browser. Plugins? Who uses those any more? Well, no doubt your browser has many already installed such as Macromedia’s Adobe’s Flash.
Why not break away from the model of ‘website’ all together?
The Apollo web apps could be traded as tokens on any aggregate website that you come across. Just as YouTube lets you watch your videos in one place, Apollo could be an aggregate site which would host the distribution of all these Apollo apps. Visitors could collect and use Apollo apps for a variety of functions. Obviously, a given app would technically run from a web server, but they could also be stand alone with no server connection required.
Yeah, probably didn’t clear things up much, but the main point is that these Apollo apps could break the website model.