If you missed it, over the weekend Mike Arrington posted a podcast with Kevin Lynch in which they talked about Apollo. He followed that up with an Apollo post on TechCrunch and that got a lot of people talking. For me, the flash of public sentiment that posts like his provide is interesting because of the comments they bubble up. There are 44 comments (as of this writing) over on TechCrunch, and a lot of them are positive. What also struck me was that people are digging into these technologies and seem excited. Here are some that caught my eye:

DannyT

December 17th, 2006 at 2:11 am

The key advantage Apollo has over WPF is that it will be cross platform (Windows, Linux and Mac). Design for one platform deploy to all. And the difference between Apollo and Java is that Apollo apps can be built using Flash, HTML, Javascript, XML (”AJAX”) and any combination therein, this allows the already massive web app development community to be able to jump straight in. As you can probably tell, I think this approach is going to work well for Adobe and for us as developers.

Judah

December 17th, 2006 at 1:50 pm

So it begins…

(i’ve been waiting for someone to say that)

@Derek - I see a lot of apps moving online but at the same time there are advantages to a desktop app. For example, files system access. There are certain apps, for example, image manipulation apps, where there is a disadvantage to having it online, as you mentioned. You would have to upload the image, use bandwidth while making changes, share the cpu of the server with other users, etc.

The reason I originally, as developer, chose to work with Flex is that whatever application I wrote, would look the same and run the same across platform (including linux), cross browser. Now with Apollo my apps can be cross-connected â„¢ all rights reserved blah blah blah jk. Your app works online or offline.

And so far since I’ve been working with it, its fast to develop and it makes sense (html is a hack remember) and I don’t have to worry about anything but the app.

“Apollo - now with browser begone!”

#13 Lemon - There is a real language in it and a new engine. I don’t know the intricate details of the engine but it is 20 times faster than Flash 8. The same test in Flash 8 that takes 20 seconds before now takes 250ms. Apollo will be at least this fast. But regardless of what I say, I’d like to see the same app created in WPF/e (windows page fault / error) next to the same app in Flex / Apollo. (Man this is like the console wars all over again).

But what do I know. It will be interesting to see how it goes.

The TechCrunch post also ended up on Digg. Now, I’m of the opinion that the commentary on digg is only slightly more useful than hitting yourself in the face with a hammer, but it does mean exposure and this particular thread brought out some thoughts on WPF/E as well as Apollo:

industrealis 18 hours ago

I was under the impression that Apollo was a sort of wrapper around web technologies like AJAX, Flash, and Flex. It’s supposed to allow the typical web application to run on the desktop as a desktop application would. This would allow you to use gmail like thunderbird as long as Google (or whoever provides the app), giving it the ability to run offline and perhaps have access to some of the desktop that web apps have traditionally been barred from (disk I/O, network interfaces, etc). Vaporware marketing bullshit? If that’s marketing, then maybe I should be studying that instead of computer science.

Soulhuntre 15 hours ago

WPF/e is a seriously kick ass technology. it looks great, it can interoperate with other technologies and the developemnt is pretty easy AND the tools to develop with are all free.
You can see a Flash / WPF/e integrated app below.
http://www.thewpfblog.com/examples/wpfe/microbe/Default.html

MySchizoBuddy 21 hours ago

Flash already has a huge existing market. ur acting like its going to go puff when WPF/E is released. C# is for desktop applications. Developers are going to write code that was meant for desktops not online, resulting in crappy online products coming from C# developers.
Just imagine all those C# developers with desktop mentality now making web apps. Disaster.

How valueable is any of this? Debateable, but at the very least it’s a snapshot of one small section of the tech world and they seem excited about Apollo.

[tags]Adobe, Apollo, digg, TechCrunch, Kevin Lynch[/tags]