How Easy is it to Turn a Big Flex Application Into An Apollo App? Really Easy

  • Scrapblog, one of the better Flex 2 applications that I’ve seen, launched today with some high praise. In the conversation, I came across a post by Tara Hunt and I thought it was worth highlighting because I think it shows just how easy it is to take a full, production Flex application and port it to Apollo:

On Tuesday afternoon, Chris and I stopped by the Adobe booth at ETech to chat with Michelle Turner about Apollo. Adrian Ludwig was also there, preparing for the hot Apollo demo they were going to do on Thursday morning. Somewhere in the conversation Scrapblog came up and Adrian said, “You know, if they could get that working in Apollo by Thursday, we really need another great app to demo….”

So, instantly, I called Carlos, who only hesitated because he had been pushing his lead developer, Omar, so hard.

“I’ll see what Omar says.”

Carlos is a super organized guy. He sends us all sorts of timelines and feature roll out plans and has everything planned down to the minute of the day. A radical shift to building Scrapblog as an Apollo app was not in the cards for some time. Within a couple of hours, they confirmed that they would do it and Adrian jumped in with some Adobe resources to help them out.

They demo’d a beautiful Apollo version of Scrapblog this morning to many oooo’s and aaaaa’s.

Now I’m not sure what kind of functionality they built into Apollo, they may have just wrapped some window chrome around it, but it was demoable. Hopefully we’ll see a lot of awesome Flex applications create Apollo versions that break them out of the browser and add features.

[tags]Scrapblog, Apollo, Adobe, Flex[/tags]

Related posts:

  1. Adobe’s First Apollo Application? The Kuler Widget
  2. The New Version of Trillian is a Flash Application with Apollo-like Functionality
  3. Follow Apollo and Flex news with Twitter
  4. Scrapblog and Increasingly Better Flex Apps
  5. Apollo bits being given to Apollo Camp Attendees?
  • http://www.bluespark.co.nz John Ballinger

    This was exactly what I was thinking. But this is where I am worried about Adobe Apollo being fully crippled by the security sandbox that Adobe has previously applied to the flash player. If ScrapBlog was on the desktop with Apollo, their real issue is how can they resize images client side either in Flex/Apollo or with some other programme.

    The problem looks like this photos on a user hard drive are about 2-3mb and growing as camera get more megapixels. So how can we build a rich scrapbook then realise we have 80mb of photo’s that need to be uploaded. Now I tried several versions of the Jpeg/Png encoder and it take approx 30s at 100% cup on a FAST machine with lots of ram. So this is not good.
    I can bundle imagemagic with my install but there is no way I can call imagemagic “currently” from my app.

    This is my only issue with the fantastic Apollo and hope that we will get some more power to address these issues either in via the Flash VM or being able to leverage specific applications in the install.
    John

  • http://blog.scrapblog.com Carlos Garcia

    Ryan, you are right. With the exception of a few tweaks, we did wrap the Flex app into Apollo. Nevertheless, Omar and I are big believers in the power of Apollo and we plan offer both, Flex and Apollo versions. It just makes sense to do so.

    In the meantime, we are going to extend the functionality of the Apollo version that we did for today and we will blog it so that anyone interested can play with it.

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  • http://www.wobum.com Mary

    When will Apollo be launched?

  • Greg

    Actually its available now – http://www.adobe.com/go/getapollo

  • http://www.sennik24.info.pl/ Greg

    Actually its available now – http://www.adobe.com/go/getapollo – you need only to register on Adobe.

  • http://www.avsh.pl Steve Nowakowski

    Thank you very much for your help Greg.

  • http://www.audiolab.de Marc

    I have had a problem to install the AIR beta, but then i saw on http://labs.adobe.com/downloads/air.html – If you are having trouble installing an AIR application and you previously installed the Apollo alpha, the Apollo alpha must be uninstalled before installing the Adobe AIR beta.

    Maybe it´s helpful for someone here…

  • http://www.emlaksahibi.com Emlak

    Thank you very much…

  • http://www.t4tw.info Sebastian Snopek

    I had really serious trouble concerning AIR application. I dont know wyh but Apollo alpha was causing them. The only solution following Adobie hints was to delete Apollo alpha and install Adobe AIR beta. Since it is done everything works perfect.
    Cheers,

  • http://www.moreeuw.com ludo

    Merci beaucoup pour cet artcile d’une grande qualité.

  • http://www.100ct.de Doc

    Thanks a lot, i have also tried to install the Adobe Integrated Runtime from Adobe Labs, i have also installed before the Apollo alpha, after installing the AIR nothing works. Then i have searched for help and found your blog, after deinstalling the old Apollo everything is working correctly… Cheers, Doc

  • http://www.denemochives.com Jim

    I found this blog when I was looking for a solution to the same problem. I also reinstalled my old OS because I thought there is the problem. Never thought of uninstalling the old version..ahh……Thanks

    Visit me

  • http://www.linkiseo24.pl/ Felix

    As well as Benedict I had some problems with Apollo before, however now Adobe AIR works pretty good for me.

  • http://www.rankingplus.de Udo

    Adobe AIR now works, but there are not many sites with
    more Information about coding.
    Is there a good Forum or Community for Air ?

  • http://www.wierszyki24.pl/ Peter

    Unfortunately, official forum is not very good (http://www.adobe.com/cfusion/webforums/forum/categories.cfm?forumid=72&catid=641) but I can advice http://www.codeapollo.com/index.php
    You can find there about 5000 post about AIR and help from almost 400 users

    Regards Peter

  • http://blog.digitalbackcountry.com Ryan Stewart

    Hey Udo, Airapps.net is a good site and there is a lot of activity on the Apollo Coders email list – http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/apollocoders/

    =Ryan
    rstewart@adobe.com

  • http://gsligirl.blogcu.com halkin yildizlari

    very nice