Technology, Books and Other Neat Stuff

One of the cool things about my job is getting to meet interesting people and talking about fascinating technologies.

It probably hasn't escaped your attention that one of my favourite technologies of the moment is Adobe's Apollo (read my hefty pieces on it in upcoming issues of Web Designer and PC Plus), and today I spent some time talking to Adobe's Mike Downey about what's happening with Apollo and where Adobe sees it going (his blog is available as adobe_mdowney).

One of the things we talked about was San Dimas*, eBay's Apollo-based client application. It's a cracking piece of code, and you can now sign up to get onto the public beta when it rolls out over the next month or so. I had a play with it, and I have to say it's the most intuitive way of working with eBay I've found. It makes it easy to both sell and bid - and you can even use it with a web cam to quickly upload pictures of an item.

I'm firmly convinced that cross platform development tools like Apollo are the future of desktop applications - especially when you can convert a Flex-based server application into Apollo in less than two days (quicker for pure HTML/AJAX applications), and developers don't need to work with separate installers, windowing solutions and file systems for each OS they work with. Apollo means one code base will work on the web, on OS X, on Windows and on Linux. That's a huge saving in time and money for any development team.

When the Flash and Dreamweaver Apollo plug-ins come out later this year, things are going to get even easier - especially as you'll be able to go straight from a Photoshop illustration to an Apollo application...

Microsoft is going to have to get the .NET Micro Framework into Silverlight sharpish to even start to compete here.

*Are marypcb and I the only people to spot the Bill and Ted reference in the name?