Google Gears notwithstanding, I see what Adobe is doing with AIR as well as approaches like the way Curl leverages the power of the client PC and the currency of data in the cloud to create a different paradigm for accessing, manipulating, and presenting visualizations of data to be the real reason for excitement.

It’s not that online/offline isn’t important for many people – it obviously is. It’s simply not the most important aspect of the emergent RIA space.

There’s a three very big announcements from Adobe today that have really moved the needle forward for RIA developers.
First, a new version of Flex has been released, Flex 3. You can find Flex Builder 3 and the Flex 3 SDK online for donwload. Remembe…

Being a first-class citizen, I can access files on the desktop, make net requests to any site I want, among other things. One of the best side-effects is that it opens the doors to massive integration potential between apps. After all, your OS is the ultimate broker of your data, so now that web apps can talk directly to it, it makes it much easier to get data from one web app talking to another, without the annoying browser single-file downloading/uploading process. The desktop file formats we already use are pretty much standardized in reality anyway and most web apps can export and import between them, so it’s the connection between apps that’s missing.

I haven’t talked enough about the *good* security implications of Apollo and not having to worry about a cross-domain.xml file. That’s a powerful feature for developers.

Kevin, yup, Finetune is one of my favorite examples. And their new version is going to rule.

I’ve posted a series of “Apollo Beta Sneaks” this past week, as has Danny Dura and Mike Chambers. Not one involved an offline example. System icons, custom chrome and native windowing, clipboard and native drag-and-drop and sound. We didn’t even touch file extensions, native menus, and others (more sneaks for you). Offline is just a part of what’s enabled by Apollo. Even further, how offline is Finetune?

To Sam’s idea,

The Apollo native drag-and-drop feature is all about this type of functionality. To extend your thought however, how about from an Apollo-based Flickr app into Word? How about “cutting” a picture from Word and “pasting” into Buzzword?

Apollo applications, as desktop applications, should have first-class desktop functionality. There’s no need to differentiate. At the end of the day, the fact that an application is running on Apollo should actually be transparent to the user. How cool is that?

Regards,
Kevin

Being a first-class citizen, I can access files on the desktop, make net requests to any site I want, among other things. One of the best side-effects is that it opens the doors to massive integration potential between apps. After all, your OS is the ultimate broker of your data, so now that web apps can talk directly to it, it makes it much easier to get data from one web app talking to another, without the annoying browser single-file downloading/uploading process. The desktop file formats we already use are pretty much standardized in reality anyway and most web apps can export and import between them, so it’s the connection between apps that’s missing.

I’m not sure how Apollo’s going, but a great example would be if I could drag multiple pictures from the flickr Apollo app or my digital camera’s SD card, directly into the Buzzword Apollo app and have it work as if I just dragged a bunch of pics from a folder into Microsoft Word.

This is stuff that people won’t realise is great until they actually use it and can’t go back to working the way they do now, which is why I suppose, there’s so much confusion and misinformation out there about Apollo – people are only understanding the concepts that they’re familiar with, not the others and how they fit into the big picture.