ara pehlivanian

PDAs unshackled us from our desktops and brought the convenience of email and text messaging to our palms. But on the desktop itself there has been a barrier of sorts between desktop applications and web applications. Short of a few specifically built desktop apps that have been written to connect to the web, we have yet to see a “one size fits all” platform that bridges the two. Until now.

Adobe Apollo frees the web from the web browser and opens it up to interact with the desktop like nothing you’ve seen before. Christian Cantrell demonstrates the power of what Apollo can do in a video posted on Google Video.

Now, the skeptic may point out that Java Applets tried to do this a few years back and was unsuccessful. But the skeptic would be missing one crucial difference between Java’s Applets and Apollo. Adobe has a mature development suite, allowing authors to quickly and easily build compelling and very useful components for use in Apollo with little more than a few clicks and some scripting knowledge. What’s more, the ubiquity of Flash and success of Flash adds that much more credibility to Apollo, not to mention greasing the wheels to adoption in the development community. Macromed… err… Adobe has “street cred”.

And a warning to all the nay sayers in the web development community who immediately balk at the thought of Flash. Apollo isn’t Flash. Apollo is a cross-OS runtime that allows developers to leverage their existing web development skills (Flash, Flex, HTML, Ajax) to build and deploy desktop RIA’s.

Keep an eye on this up and comer, lest you be left in the dust of “the next big thing” on the web.