Technology, Books and Other Neat Stuff

I used to work with the chap who wrote that classic headline for the infamous Sunday Sport.

Over lunch in a Shepton Mallet pub one day he told me the story behind that (and other headlines). They spent all Thursday, after the rest of the paper had been put together, sitting in various pubs around Hull coming up with more and more insane ideas, before writing up the most weird. Sober, he was a great writer, able to churn out news stories quicker than most people I know. Drunk, well, he could out-weird Charlie Stross after 3 cans of Jolt.

I don't think Chris could have realised that we were just a handful of years away from putting a satellite in lunar orbit that would have the camera resolution to see devices smaller than that World War II bomber his art guys cut and pasted onto an old NASA picture.

But here we are a day away from the 40^th anniversary of Apollo 11's landing - and the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter is sending back pictures of the various Apollo landing sites, including Apollo 11's. That shadow there, between those two craters? That's Eagle's descent stage.



You know, that doesn't look like a movie studio to me.

Tranquillity Base? We can see you from here.

Now to look for that bomber.

Last week I met up with Adobe's Mike Downey to talk about Apollo. Here's the result of our conversation, a piece now up on the Developer Register.

Adobe's senior product manager for Apollo, Mike Downey was in London last week. We met him at Adobe's Regents Park offices, and in a wide ranging conversation we talked about the past, the present and the future of Apollo.

Downey worked with some of the most senior engineers in the company to develop Apollo: “It's the highest profile project in the company”, he says.

Read more - and get my scoop on some of Adobe's plans for the next release...

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?

Here's my latest piece for El Reg, looking at Adobe's Apollo by actually installing and working with the development tools. A quick summary: it's definitely early beta, with lots of pieces missing, but rather promising.

There was a bit of a buzz in the air on Monday when Adobe rolled out the first public alpha release of its Apollo desktop internet application client – along with a whole truckload of developer tools and documentation.

Apollo is an interesting proposition, a platform that mixes Flash (though you do need to use code that's written to use ActionScript 3.0 and the new AVM 2.0 virtual machine), PDF, and HTML. The Apollo runtime is a host for .air applications and is built on code that mixes Adobe's Acrobat Reader, the Flash 9 Player, and a standards-compliant HTML rendering engine based on Apple's WebKit.

The main difference between the Apollo runtime and all these components running in, say, WebKit browsers like Safari or Swift, is that there's no browser window and that the application gets direct access to your hard disk. It can read and write files, as well as using persistent storage. It even gets access to some of your hardware – so you can use Apollo to work with images from a web cam. In fact, there's already a demonstration application that mimics Apple's Photo Booth webcam tool.

So what's the developer experience like?

The good news is that Adobe has learnt the lesson of Macromedia's Central, and has given developers several different routes to building applications – without locking you into someone else's business model.

Read More.