Well, the Flash bloggers have been going mental over Adobe’s announcement of Apollo… so much so that many of the notable blogs have gone silent since then - no doubt they’re all working on their first examples and will wow us very soon.
I’m a little busy with freelance projects at the moment to get into it… what I can tell you is that Flash developers now have the tools to make cross-platform desktop applications using nothing but HTML, Javascript and Flash. I guess it’s like a super-charged version of Zinc or mProjector.
As you’ve probably already guessed, I’m excited about how this will empower casual game developers. One of the biggest hurdles in online game development is that the Flash Player (up to version 8, anyway) is still rather slow when run from within the browser. ActionScript 3 and FP9 are out to change all that, but as CS3 is yet to be released, many of us are holding out until then so we can develop with some friendlier tools.
It’s now reasonable to predict that a large number of casual games will be taken to the desktop and still maintain the facility to communicate with online accounts and high score tables etc. Conceivably, it will also mean that many sites will develop offline skins so that the brand experience is taken one step closer to the customer.
Make sure you check out Mike Downey’s demonstration of the new Ebay Desktop application [Via: Colin Moock : Moockblog]
Exciting times ahead, indeed! Just got to get cracking on a few little projects so that I can slot in some R&D.
If you’ve got some insights into how you see Apollo changing our work or play, or if you’ve built something using it… please let us all know!
