I don’t think there is a number that goes high enough to describe how pumped I am for Trillian Astra. As a long time Trillian user, what they’re doing with RIAs makes me proud to have been a paying subscriber of Trillian Pro.

Today they posted some of their thoughts on Apollo. In order to do some of the OS-layer parts, they’ve created their own runtime (if you can call it that) because they didn’t know Apollo was out there. It’s an excellent glimpse of what actual software companies are thinking about Apollo; the good *and* the bad. Thanks to the ApolloApps twitter for the heads up.

[tags]Trillian,Apollo,Astra[/tags]

Stuff like this pisses me off. Valleywag is talking about how Scoble’s sudden interest in Adobe corresponds to Adobe’s spending with PodTech.

Here’s the thing that no one seems to get: Adobe is on fire. Flash has been steadily gaining prominence and companies are stating to do awesome things with it (yourminis anyone?). Flex has hit a sweet spot with developers to the point that there are companies who are contacting me and Adobe has never heard of them (this happened with Picnik). Then on top of that you have Apollo, which even with all the hype, is pretty cool and when 1.0 comes out, it’s going to very much change how people develop software.

So Valleywag, why don’t you check other stats about the growth in people talking about Adobe? Frankly, I think it’s a disservice to those of us who have been following Flash for a long time and are seeing great traction to describe Scoble as “the Adobe blogger” and assume it is only due to advertising. We’ve been following the space for too long for you to say that the only reason an influential blogger is taking notice is because of cash.

Rich Internet Applications are blowing up and Adobe is a big part of it. Just because Scoble notices doesn’t mean he’s been paid.

[tags]Valleywag, Adobe, Flash, Scoble[/tags]

Interesting news out of AJAXWorld today, Microsoft is joining the OpenAJAX alliance, an industry group that works to expad and develop the Ajax community.

It’s been surprising to me to watch Microsoft’s Ajax strategy. They’ve always been derided as a company that doesn’t care about standards or openness, and some of that critisizm is justified. But with their ASP.NET AJAX framework, they appear to be going in a good direction.

Now supporting Ajax still goes back to Microsoft’s tools, but it seems aparent that the company execs are willing to take whatever “hit” exists from being cross platform. I hope this means good things for “WPF/E”. I’ve believed all along that Microsoft was a changed company, and was willing to support cross platform. They’ve had a bad track record (see: Office, Microsoft on Mac; Media Player, Mac version), but I think this is yet another signal that Microsoft is getting the web and knows the value of cross platform for its web products.

Andre Charland, whom I’ve been hanging out with here at the con, has some of the news and a good perspective as someone who is part of the Ajax Alliance.

[tags]Microsot, Ajax, OpenAjax Alliance, “WPF/E”[/tags]

My flight to New York is delayed so I’m catching up on email (finally), following Twitters and preparing for my trip. To do that, I’m using Yelp. If you haven’t seen Yelp, you should check it out. It’s a local review site that adds a Web 2.0 social twist and comes out much better off for it. Since I’ve become a member, I’ve had no trouble finding interesting restaurants or cafes where I’m going.

I’m going to be checking out Subtle Tea while I’m in New York thanks to Yelp, and I had the address sent to my mobile so I can find it whenever I need to. If you’re in the area, let me know! And if you have some favorite NYC spots, Yelp them to me.

TechCrunch has Yelp-related news for those of you interested in the business side.

[tags]Yelp, Local Reviews[/tags]

Update: I’m an idiot. Lee said they mentioned this at the keynote and that it’s just an icon so people can test custom icons in the applications. Sorry!
Whew, it’s been a crazy weekend. Apollo Camp was great, and you’ve seen all the stuff we got (Adobe spared no expense). But one thing you may not have seen was that Apollo might be getting a new logo. Digging around the CD, I found this:

So it sure looks to me like Apollo is getting a new icon, and I think it’s pretty cool. There was also talk about Apollo’s new name with Kevin Lynch describing it as “really cool”. I’ve gotten tired of the people who are complaining about the fact that “Apollo” is just a code name. That’s part of what makes it cool in my mind: the code names all tie back to Central. So my advice to you? Stop complaining, stop running silly polls and wait it out. If the name sucks, THEN start complaining, but don’t complain about a name that Adobe has no legal hope of being able to defend.

I’m off to Ajax World tonight but I’ve been trying to catch the link blog up today, so keep an eye on it if you’re looking for good posts about RIAs. I’ll be in New York until Thursday, so feel free to give me a ring (267.250.9422) or Twitter me if you want to meet up.

[tags]Apollo, Apollo Camp, Ajax World[/tags]

I feel a little bit bad blogging about Apollo Camp because it’s been a ridiculously fun event, and we’re only 2.5 hours in. A lot of other bloggers covered the keynote better than I could, so I’ll just talk about what I’ve been up to.

I’ve been busy trying to get a feel for what people think about Apollo. The response has been overwhelmingly positive. I’ve gotten to meet and talk with a lot of people and gauge their interest. The first person I got to chat with was Andrew Spaulding, but he works for Adobe so his opinion isn’t unbiased, but it was great to get to chat with him. I also sat down and hung out with Lee Brimelow and some other guys from Frog Design. I think they’re intrigued with Apollo, but the big question is if clients will pay them to build Apollo apps. I think the future looks good. I also talked to Carson Hager of Cynergy for a long time about the ecosystem of Flex and how Apollo potentially fits into their business. And lastly I tracked down Niall Kennedy to get his thoughts. He was already using Flex for charting, but as I chatted with him he was into the Apollo bits and working to build an app.

So there’s a lot of excitement. When the bits go public, I can’t wait for the cascade of blog posts from people looking at the platform for the first time. The vibe here is very much that Apollo is charting a new course in software development. Now it’s up to the developers to help map that course.

[tags]Adobe, apollocamp[/tags]

I got in this morning at around 10:00 and ambled over to the Adobe office to get my Flex on and hang out with some of the other early attendees. We’re hanging out in what seems like the basement just drinking soda, talking about Flex/Apollo and meeting each other. Already the star power is in full force. I’ve gotten to hang out with Josh Tynjala, Lord Alex, Clint Modien, Renaun Erickson, Abdul Qabiz, Chuck Freedman, Doug McCune and Anthony Franco.

And the conference hasn’t even started yet. The full festivities start in about an hour and a half but already I’ve seen some cool Flex stuff and had some great conversations.

[tags]LordAlex,Clint-Modien,Renaun-Erickson,Abdul-Qabiz,Chuck-Freedman,Doug-McCune,Josh-Tynjala,Anthony-Franco,apollocamp[/tags]

In about 6 hours I’m going to be jumping on a plane headed for Apollo Camp. I’m really looking forward to it, there are supposed to be some good surprises in store, there are a lot of very talented people going, and we’re stocked with Beer and Red Bull.

If you’re not going to be able to make it, I turned the Apollo Camp Twitter account over to Mike Chambers so you’ll get an “official” view of the conference from Twitter. Then again, if you want to good gossip, feel free to follow my Twitter as I make comments throughout the day.

After that, I’m off to Ajax World in New York City to try and figure out what actually possess people to use Ajax (kidding!). I’m looking forward to checking out that side of things and spend some time in the city.

All the while I’ll be Twittering and trying to update the link blog. I’ve been bad about the link blog this week because of development requirements, but I’ll be checking news more regularly from the road trying to highlight the most interesting RIA stuff on the web.

[tags]apollocamp, Apollo, Twitter, Ajax[/tags]

The news of the day is Cisco’s purchase of WebEx, the videoconferencing and collaboration application for $3.2 billion. That’s a lot of clams, and TechCrunch has a good wrapup of startups that are hot on the heals of WebEx in terms of features (if not mind share).

But one alternative Mike Arrington didn’t list was Acrobat Connect, which is probably the WebEx competitor that is furthest along. For one thing, while WebEx is Windows only, Acrobat Connect is cross platform (because it uses mostly Flash) and seems to keep up very well feature-wise with WebEx. I know Mike Kollen spends a lot of time in both of these, and I think he thinks WebEx is a bit better. But if it’s only a bit better at a value of $3.2 billion, how much is Connect worth?

Hopefully someone went down and bought the Connect team some drinks today or something, because their major competitor has a value of 15% the entire market cap of Adobe. You guys should ask for raises.

What do you all think, is Acrobat Connect by itself worth anywhere near that figure? How does Connect compare to WebEx?

[tags]Adobe, Acrobat Connect, WebEx[/tags]

Mark Finkle highlighted the fact that offline cache support was added to the Firefox trunk last night marking a significant milestone in offline web applications. This means all the nightly builds going forward will have support for offline applications. As most people know, I’m not sold on the Firefox model for offline applications, but this was worth mentioning. He also says there are still ongoing discussions about how to give developers access to the offline capability.

I’ve been enjoying Mark’s blog a lot because I’ve been trying to learn more about XUL and how Mozilla plans to support RIAs. If you’re looking for a different take on things, subscribe to his feed.

[tags]Mozilla, Firefox, Mark Finkle[/tags]