I’m working on an Apollo application that provides uploading capabilities for multiple photo sharing sites. This is my initial mock-up of how the application will look. Please feel free to leave feedback in the comments.

Anyone who knows me well knows that I’m a huge photography geek. Well, today a friend of mine forwarded a link to a very cool new site that Canon put together to compliment an upcoming TV show called “Travels to the Edge with Art Wolfe” (Canon is a sponsor of the show). I’m a Canon shooter so I’m finding the site to be particularly interesting and I’m really looking forward to watching the show. I’m also encouraged to see Canon finally step up their marketing efforts. I personally think Canon makes the best photography equipment available, but Nikon is eating their lunch on the marketing front (Nikon also makes great equipment).

On the site you’ll find information about each episode, shooting tips from Art Wolfe and Canon, a collection of amazing photos taken during the filming of the show, one of my favorites - “what’s in Art’s bag?”, and a variety of other good resources.

Check out the site to find out if/when the show will air in your part of the world. I hope they make the episodes available online after the series airs.

We’ve just released three new videos on the Adobe Developer Center, focusing on Apollo. The videos were shot during the first Apollo Camp, held back in March of this year.

• Lee Brimelow (frog design): “Companies can enhance their brand by taking it out of the browser and onto the desktop.” (2:17)
• Chris Korhonen (blog): “Apollo bridges the gap between web and desktop application development.” (2:09)
• David Bliss (Odopod): “Apollo makes desktop application development more accessible to creative technologists.” (2:06)

View the videos here.

It’s currently 9:30am in Munich and I’m sitting at the “San Francisco Coffee Company” cafe, enjoying some amazing weather, and looking across the street at a Mexican restaurant called “Sausalitos”. It’s almost like being at home.

Today I’ll be dropping in on our Adobe office in Munich to train our local staff on Apollo and our overall Platform messaging. Tomorrow evening I’m headed up (down? over?) to Cologne to speak at the Adobe Live event that takes place on Wednesday and Thursday. On Friday I’ll be speaking at Multi-Mania in Belgium. From there I’ll be headed over to Paris to speak at the Web Flash Festival on Sunday. After that brief stay in Paris I’ll be headed back over to Amsterdam for Adobe Live on Wednesday and Thursday. Then it’s back home on Friday for some rest.

If you happen to be in the same city as I am during this trip, please drop me a line (mdowney -at- adobe.com). I’m always looking for an excuse to expense a few beers with customers.

While at FiTC 2007 I had a chance to sit down with world-renowned Flash developer and author of the highly anticipated book Essential ActionScript 3.0, Colin Moock. In the interview, Colin talks about how he almost completely rewrote this edition of the EAS series to make it more approachable to people who are new to programming. He also decided to use more real-world examples throughout the book, instead of more abstract concepts like a “box” class. Check it out on video.onflex.org.

Order Colin’s book on Amazon.

Hehe - this is so cool. I’m on the cover of this month’s ComputerWorld Canada Magazine. While at this year’s FiTC Conference in Toronto I had the chance to interview with ComputerWorld Canada’s Shane Schick and talk about Adobe’s Apollo project. In the interview, “The rich get richer: RIAs for the enterprise”, I explained how the growth of web-based applications has led to a premium value being placed on rich user interfaces resulting in the explosion of Rich Internet Applications (RIAs). We talked about how RIAs are becoming more and more sophisticated and developers are starting to realize the limitations of the browser. While developers require the benefits of the browser (wide reach, approachable development tools and languages, community resources, etc) they are also interested in leveraging a richer set of capabilities not currently available to them in the browser (local file system access, offline capability, highly branded interfaces, desktop integration, etc). I explained that this is where Apollo fits in. It allows web developers to use their existing skills, tools, and technologies to deliver RIAs to the desktop to provide richer user experiences.

Shane and I also talked about some of the great applications that are already being built with Apollo such as Ebay’s San Dimas project, which provides Ebay users with a rich desktop application for accessing Ebay’s services, including the ability to create new auctions while running offline. I mentioned to Shane that Ebay was also very interested in leveraging Apollo’s capabilities for issuing system notifications, a feature they can use to notify an Ebay user when they have been outbid on an auction, whether they’re currently using the application or not. I also showed Shane the Finetune Desktop player, created by online music site Finetune.com. Finetune’s desktop player is a great example of the power of Apollo in that it leverages existing code already deployed on their website and blends your local music with your streaming music - a perfect combination of web and desktop. Of course all of this can be delivered to either Mac or Windows users, and sometime early next year, Linux users as well.

You can read the full interview here.

Flex is hot! Tim O’Reilly points out that the newly released Programming Flex 2, written by Chafic Kazoun and Joey Lott, is his company’s strongest product release on Amazon in years. The new book, now shipping, provides in-depth coverage of Flex 2 and ActionScript 3.0. Programming Flex 2 offers you plenty of practical and useful examples that reveal how and why to use a particular feature of Flex 2, and when and when not to.

Topics include:

• Managing Layout
• Working with Components
• Working with Media
• Managing State
• Using Transitions and Effects
• Working with Data
• Customizing Application Appearance
• Client Data Communication and Remote Data Communication
• Debugging Flex Framework Applications
• Creating Custom Components

Get the book on Amazon.