I had dinner and beers with Hans Omli up in Snoqualmie and had a great time (and Hans, I realized I owe you extra money for dinner). We talked a lot about Flex, Enterprise Services, ColdFusion, Seattle, and a bit about Apollo.

Hans is doing some awesome things with Flex, and I’m excited to be a part of the Flex/Flash community in Seattle. There?s a lot going on here and a lot of brainpower. If Adobe ever wanted to move the Flex team up here to Seattle, I’d be available to help pack the moving vans .

After talking to him about Apollo and how he sees the evolution of the Flash Platform, I’m excited about it and I can see why you hear whispers (and sometimes shouts) from Adobe about how great Apollo is. Before talking to Hans, I was skeptical and now I’m entirely sold.

The real power behind Flash is its ubiquity. You can take it almost anywhere, on any platform, and it will look basically the same. But it’s always been limited by not being able to take advantage of some of the extra power/features of the desktop. Jesse Warden talked about this in some comments earlier this week. What Apollo can do is provide the ability for Flash to take advantage of some of that power, which I kind of understood. But (and this is the revelation Hans gave me) not just on the desktop. Imagine being able to use Flash to take advantage of all the APIs and features of a pocket PC, a Mac, or a Media Center.

If Apollo can bridge Flash and the core strengths of the individual platforms, there’s a lot of potential. If you’ve looked at the LiveCycle documents you know the kind of things that PDF is capable of. If Apollo allows us to synchronize and take our data offline and then view it with any of our devices, there’s a lot of promise there.

I’m not sure if that’s the ultimate plan for Apollo, but I am beginning to see how my idea of Apollo fits very well within the Flash platform. Once I got over the mental hump of thinking about Apollo as a combination Flash Plugin-PDF Reader, the idea of Apollo became very exciting.