So here I am at Adobe‘s office at 601 Townsend in SF. The room is packed. Everyone has a beer, and Kevin Lynch is getting ready to speak. Twitter conversations about Apollo Camp are live and running on the big screens. Renaun and Doug are right next to me. I’m loaded up with more Adobe schwag than I can carry. I’m glad I brought my backpack. Let me tell you, this is the place to be in the Flash and Flex world tonight.

Earlier today, I was showing off the cool instant messenger client that I built with Apollo to fellow early arrivers. Don’t worry, source code and a build you can try out yourself will be available for download not long after the Apollo bits are live on Adobe Labs. I’m excited to share toys from my Apollo playground soon.

Mike Chambers says “one minute”… and we’re starting! There’s a ton of stuff here: Q&A rooms, free coffee and drinks, chill-out rooms. I see big cameras near my seat. I guess they’re recording all the sessions so everyone can see the festivities and learn about Apollo. Everyone from the Apollo, Flex framework, and Flex Builder teams are here, and we gave them a big round of applause. We’ll have a chance to chat with anyone.

Kevin Lynch is beginning the keynote to introduce Apollo, and he’s starting with the required marketing-speak. Adobe software has touched almost every product we see everyday. Flash is all over the place (PCs, mobile, video game consoles, etc). The usual stuff. Now we’re getting to the motivations for Apollo. Kevin has a graphic on-screen that shows how web applications are moving out to the desktop after 2006. Mobile MXML in the move to 2007-2008… What’s that? 🙂 He makes fun of Microsoft in a tiny corner of the visualization.

As we’ve heard before, Apollo runs SWF, HTML, and PDF. The browser is the open source WebKit. It has two basic modes. An Apollo application can run on a SWF with a web browser or PDF inside, or HTML with SWF and PDF. Features include file system access, offline mode, drag-and-drop across applications, clipboard access, apps without windows in the background, multiple windows, and custom window chrome. Let’s have a look at some examples!

Demos

Kevin is showing an Amazon Item Watcher application. It can tell you when something changes about an item for sale on Amazon changes. Something like price or availability. They actually built a Greasemonkey script to integrate with a browser. Next he shows a feed reader. It uses Flex’s runtime CSS loading for themes. Very slick appearance. I guess the UI was actually built with HTML. Interesting.

Now Kevin is showing BuzzWord by Virtual Ubiquity. It’s a full-featured word processor written in Flex for Apollo. Multiple pages, images floating in the document with text flowing around them in real time as he types. Very cool toolbars slide in and out as he needs new features. It looks like they’re context-sensitive. The table editing interface looks great and useful.

Last, he’s showing a prototype application that supports PDF. He says that we won’t have PDF support in Alpha 1, but it’ll definitely be available for 1.0. Adobe Reader must be installed for Apollo apps to be able to use it. It won’t be part of the Apollo download. I guess it will prompt the user to install Reader if they don’t have it installed. I don’t know what I think about that. It’s probably a good choice since Reader is a big download. Hopefully, they’ll make the workflow easy for users that need to install it.

Some Q&A

Will QuickTime be supported? No, plugins won’t be available at this time. Of course, Flash Video will be present.

What is different between Java Web Start and Apollo? Java doesn’t have a consistent runtime. Backwards compatibility is extremely important for Apollo, just like it is for Flash Player. Apollo apps will be installed directly to the start menu, dock, etc so that the user can find their apps again.

What will Apollo be called? Adobe loves the name, but they might have trouble getting the rights. Kevin says an alternate name is in the works, and “it’s really cool”.

How will Apollo be distributed? They’re learning from their experiences with Flash Player distribution. The Flash Player is able to install Apollo, and the process has been available for a few years already! Partnerships will be important too, but the biggest way to get Apollo to the people will be with cool apps that people want to use. Kevin is telling a funny story about how they paid millions to Netscape to get Flash Player distributed with the browser. A couple weeks later, Microsoft called up Macromedia, and they asked to bundle it for free. Haha.

Extensibility? They’re working to add more and more over time. This will be driven by feedback from developers. Native code is a “problem” for security and cross-platform support. They learned from Shockwave, and they’re wary because most people will only support Windows. They’re working to figure it out, and they’re not against native code support.

Can Apollo apps be compiled to a native executable? No, the big goal is cross-platform support so that the same bits will run on all supported operating systems.

Database support? They’re looking into it, but only file-system writing is available right now.

Now he’s done, and Mike is going to get us all started with Apollo. I’ll try to share more later. I can’t be typing all night! It’s time to have some fun.