Hopefully you saw the announcement of an online developer conference that Adobe is putting in on June. Looks to be very interesting and a great way to introduce people to some of the technologies. One session in particular caught my eye – Building Killer Desktop RIAs: Adobe’s Next Generation Technology. Hmmm. Then the description piqued my interest even more:

Join us to learn how to take advantage of Adobe?s next generation technologies for building Rich Internet Applications targeted to the desktop environment. Imagine building rich and compelling RIAs targeted to the desktop that leveraged Flash, HTML, and PDF with the same development and deployment costs of traditional web applications.

That sounds an awful lot like Apollo. The date of the session is June 13th. I’m sure we won’t be able to actually play with Apollo, but it seems like we might se some very early builds as a part of the presentation and also get some insight into how Apollo will be implemented.

For those of you here in Seattle checking the blogs before you go home I wanted to post a quick reminder about the Seattle Flash User Group meeting tonight. The topic is Flash Video, which should be interesting. It’s from 7:00 – 9:00 at the Adobe campus here in Seattle. Directions are available here on the Seattle Flash User Group site. If you want to tap me on the shoulder and say ‘hey’ I’ll be wearing a bright, sky blue shirt so I should be pretty easy to spot. I think there also may be some post-meeting beers to be drunk.

Things have been jumping and I know I’m missing a lot of cool things with this review. Part of it is just that I haven’t been able to keep up with the news as well, but I’m working on that. If you see something I’ve missed, just send me an email or leave me a comment and I’ll make sure to mention it next week. I want to cover as many cool Flash items as possible.

First, Ben Stucki has been doing some awesome things with Flex 2. He’s got a sweet visualization component as well as a host of other cool, free components.

For our friends in the Netherlands, Waldo Smeets mentioned a Flex 2 seminar as well as a Dutch Flex Developer derby. Details are still sketchy, but this may indicate that Adobe is planning to do some derbies in other countries.

Stacy over at BitchWhoCodes has a Flash themed podcast which was quite good. Some parts of the podcast I disagree with, but it’s entertaining and informative.

Matt Chotin was promoted. Very cool to see Matt take a step up and it’s going to be a very good thing for all of us who are building applications with Flex. Congratulations Matt.

Marco Casario blogged about a PSP Flash Demo contest which looks really interesting. Unfortunately PSP only runs Flash 6, but I’ll be curious to see what kinds of apps come out of this contest.

There is a huge article in the Java Developer’s Journal which talks about building RIAs with Java and Flex 2.

Steven Webster blogged about a patch for Cairngorm that will help migrate Cairngorm 2 apps to Beta 3. He also hinted that we’re going to get an updated version of the Cairngorm store.

I’m not totally sure if Ely Greenfield ever sleeps, because he’s created some amazing components. This week he showed off an Animtaed DragTile Component which is makes for an awesome effect. Great job Ely.

Dirk had an interesting post on using FlashType in Flex 2 Beta 3 that I wanted to point out. Great usability technique.

I think I saved the best for last. The guys over at Adobe Consulting have created a Mac OS X theme for Flex 2. You can download the CSS and the source to check it out. It’s the perfect example of how powerfully you can brand your Flex 2 apps.

After the news.com article went up, MXNA lit up with posts on Apollo. Mailing lists are talking about Apollo, and even people who would normally not give Flash a second thought started talking about Apollo. I’m also very curious to see what the ZDNet readers have to say.

I think it’s going to be huge and I think the excitement between now and the release is just going to get bigger. There is a level of skepticism out there because of the failings with Central, but this is going to be a much different product. It may sound like marketing babble, but Apollo really has the potential to change the way people interact with Rich Internet Applications. Breaking them out of the browser gives us a lot of possibilities.

Just a quick note, I updated my Unofficial Apollo FAQ to refelct some news I heard today. Keith Peters noticed that they’re having some Apollo sessions at Flashforward in Austin and then Mike addressed that a bit in his podcast mentioning that the fact there are sessions in September doesn’t mean there will be a version released by then. He did confirm that they’re planning on releasing versions of Apollo on labs.adobe.com which is good news.

I caught this via Feed Squirrel – Adobe is holding a seminar on “The future of the Internet as an Applications Platform”. If you’re going to be in London over May 24th, it sounds like it would be well worth checking out. It’s exciting to see Adobe be so proactive about this. They seem to be doing a great job of getting word out and starting a conversation about what the next generation of applications are going to look like. They’re positioning themselves right in the center of what will become a very big trend, and my only complaint is that they don’t have something like this for us state-siders .

Of course if anyone knows something I don’t….feel free to make me smarter.