Adobe Discloses New Details About Apollo

At Adobe’s Max developer conference in Las Vegas yesterday, Adobe revealed additional details about its Apollo software “player,” which will run Web applications online and offline without a browser, allowing them to function just like desktop applications.

Apollo will run on Windows, Macintosh, and Linux machines, and it will be capable of interacting with locally stored files. Adobe released a preview version of Apollo at the conference and it announced that it would support its new software by allocating funding to third-party start-ups in allocations during the next three to five years.

Scheduled for a version 1.0 release in the first half of next year, Apollo’s runtime software will consume between five and nine megabytes and will have to be downloaded or pre-installed on users’ machines.

Apollo applications can be written using Flex Builder, Adobe’s Flash-application development tool, but Apollo also will run Web applications written in JavaScript and HTML, meaning means AJAX applications will work with Apollo.

Tariq Ahmed took in the Apollo presentation at Adobe Max yesterday, and he was excited about Apollo’s capabilities and potential. Other developers are likely to share his enthusiasm for a software environment that makes Web-based applications richer, more flexible, and more compelling alternatives to some of the complex bloatware that passes for today’s desktop applications.