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.

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.

It’s been almost six months since I joined the Apollo team at Adobe. In that six months I’ve seen the excitement around Apollo grow from ‘huge’ to ‘overwhelming’. I’ve traveled over 50,000 miles since January meeting with customers, press, and analysts from all over the world. My fellow Apollo product manager, Luis Polanco, and I have been pulled in dozens of different directions dealing with everything from product definition to press interviews. In that time, I tended to focus on more of the external facing activities while Luis focused more in internal facing activities. With the growing interest in Apollo and the impending release scheduled for later this year, we finally decided that we needed more help.

So we decided to put together a new team at Adobe called the Platform Evangelism team, which I was asked to build and manage. The team will be a component of the Apollo product management and product marketing organization and will focus primarily on all of the external facing activities revolving around Apollo. Over time we will also focus on evangelizing the Flash Player, but our primary focus over the next year will be Apollo (and all of the tools, servers, frameworks, and services that revolve around it).

I’m in the process of building out the team with evangelists in North America and a few other key regions around the world (job listings here). These evangelists will be a unique bread of savvy technical experts who have great presentation and communication skills.

The most exciting news is that I’ve already found two of the best and brightest evangelists that I know. Starting next week, Danny Dura and Kevin Hoyt will be joining the Platform Evangelism team. These two guys will be vital to making Apollo successful and I’m really happy that they’re coming on board.

We have a pretty full schedule of events and customer engagements over the next few months but the team will be very active in the community and will regularly be updating everyone on what we’re doing and where we’re doing it.

We’re also bringing on another product manager for Apollo to backfill my old position. We’re still finalizing this so I will do another post whenever it is confirmed.

While I’m on the subject of growing the Apollo team, I’ll also point out two other open positions:
- Sr. Product Manager, Platform Monetization for Apollo
- Director of Platform Product Management

This is the most exciting time yet to be working in this industry. Flex has been gaining momentum like crazy, Flash CS3 just shipped and is getting rave reviews, and I really think Apollo has the potential to change everything. We have a lot of work to do before we get it out the door, but I can’t imagine anything that I’d rather be doing right now.

If you’re at Microsoft’s MIX conference in Las Vegas next week keep an eye out for myself and Mike Chambers. We’ll be there scoping out the competition and ‘mixing’ with Microsoft developers. Make sure you grab us and say ‘hi.’ If you’re interested in joining the Platform Evangelism team, send me an email and a resume (mdowney@adobe.com).

Mike Downey | Group Manager, Platform Evangelism

Grant Skinner and his company have been working on a really kick-ass Apollo app for tracking time. He has a great write up of why they built it, how they built it, as well as some screenshots of what the app looks like. He’s planning on making it a commercial offering and based on my experience in playing around with it (he gave me a beta build) I think he’s on to something big. In fact, I was meeting with some VC guys a week or two ago and demonstrated the app simply as a great example of what Apollo can do – and they went nuts over it. (Grant – I gave them your contact info… ;-)

Go check out Grant’s post on “gTimer” (codename) and visit his placeholder product page regularly to check of updates.

Apollo is a featured sponsor on this week’s episode of Diggnation, the weekly tech/web culture show based on the top digg.com social bookmarking news stories. In the show, hosted by digg.com co-founder Kevin Rose and his former TechTV co-star Alex Albrecht, Kevin explains Apollo and mentions that we are working with them on some cool Apollo projects for Digg.com. At the end of the episode, Kevin interviews Adobe’s Chief Software Architect, Kevin Lynch.

This began with a visit to Digg’s offices, which are walking distance from Adobe’s San Francisco office, a few weeks ago in which Danny Dura, Christian Cantrell and a couple of others from the Apollo team gave Kevin and the Digg team a quick demonstration of Apollo. We were a bit surprised to hear that Kevin had not only heard a lot about Apollo, but he had watched Christian’s Apollo demo on Google video. After spending some time explaining Apollo we started talking about some projects that our two companies can work on together. You’ll be hearing more about that in the coming months.

View this week’s episode here. If you want to see it now you may need to become a Revision3 member. If not, you can wait a couple of days until they release the freely-available version.

As you’ve probably heard, we’ve released the first public alpha of the Apollo runtime. Woo-hoo!

If you’re not familiar, Apollo is the code name for a cross-operating system runtime being developed by Adobe that allows developers to leverage their existing web development skills (Flash, Flex, HTML, JavaScript, Ajax) to build and deploy rich Internet applications (RIAs) to the desktop. I joined the Apollo team in mid-December of 2006 after working as the Sr. Product Manager for Flash for the last three years.

The resulting coverage of our first public release of Apollo has been overwhelming. I thought I would take a minute to list some links to interesting resources, interviews, demos, and press coverage.

Learning more about Apollo

First of all, if you’d like to know what Apollo is, start by watching the video of Adobe’s Chief Software Architect Kevin Lynch giving his Apollo overview at our Apollo Camp event last week.

• http://video.onflex.org/2007/03/19/apollo-camp-keynote-from-kevin-lynch/

Read Mike Chambers’ LoggedIn article on the Adobe Developer Center

• http://www.adobe.com/devnet/logged_in/mchambers_apollo.html

Read Kevin Lynch’s thoughts on the Apollo alpha

• http://www.klynch.com/archives/000086.html

Read Kevin Lynch’s article about Apollo in the Adobe Edge newsletter

• http://www.adobe.com/newsletters/edge/march2007/articles/article1/index.html

Check out the “Apollo for Flex Developers” Pocket Guide by O’Reilly in PDF form on the Adobe Developer Center

• http://www.adobe.com/go/apolloflexpocketguide

Apollo Demos

Watch the video of my 6-minute Apollo demo at the DEMO 07 conference in Palm Springs

• http://www.adobe.com/devnet/videos/apollo_demo07/index.html

Watch Mike Chambers and Christian Cantrell demonstrate two Apollo apps that Christian built in the Edge newsletter

• http://www.adobe.com/newsletters/edge/march2007/video/index.html

Get Started with Apollo

Download Apollo and the SDK

• http://www.adobe.com/go/getapollo

Build your first Apollo app by watching this free training video from Lynda.com, presented by Mike Chambers

• http://movielibrary.lynda.com/html/modPage.asp?id=378

Read the Apollo Alpha release notes

• http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/apollo/releasenotes.html

Read the Apollo Developer FAQ

• http://labs.adobe.com/wiki/index.php/Apollo:DeveloperFAQ

Review the Apollo documentation

• http://labs.adobe.com/wiki/index.php/Apollo:Documentation

Watch Mike Chambers “Introduction to Apollo” presentation on Apollo at Apollo Camp

• http://video.onflex.org/2007/03/19/apollo-camp-introduction-to-apollo-mike-chambers/

Join the Community

Join the Apollo Coders mailing list to ask questions and learn from others in the community – we participate in this as well

• http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/apollocoders/

Monitor the Apollo support forum on adobe.com

• http://www.adobe.com/cfusion/webforums/forum/categories.cfm?forumid=72&catid=641

Track what the community is saying on MXNA using the Apollo smart category

Also track community discussion around Apollo on Technorati

• http://www.technorati.com/search/adobe+apollo|Adobe

Apollo Examples

Apollo sample applications on Adobe Labs

• http://labs.adobe.com/wiki/index.php/Apollo:Applications

FineTune Desktop – Teknision

• http://blog.teknision.com/?p=8

FotoBooth example – EverythingFlex.com

• http://blog.everythingflex.com/2007/03/19/fotobooth-apollo-edition/

Grabit HTML example – EverythingFlex.com

• http://blog.everythingflex.com/2007/03/19/grabit-html-within-apollo/

Fullscreen Papervision with Transparency example – theflexblog.com, Lee Brimelow

• http://theflexblog.com/?p=18

3D Web Apollo Application – theflexblog.com, Lee Brimelow

• http://theflexblog.com/?p=15

Press coverage

Anil Dash of MovableType goes first because he gave Mike Chambers and I a shout-out :)

• http://www.sixapart.com/movabletype/news/2007/03/adobe-apollo.html
• Ryan Stewart on ZDNet
• Michael Arrington on Techcrunch
• Robert Scoble on scobleizer.com
• Ajaxian >> Adobe Apollo Alpha release
• Readwriteweb >> Adobe launches Apollo, alpha version
• CNET News.com >> Test flight for Adobe’s Apollo
• blogs.wired.com MonkeyBites >> Adobe Launches Apollo
• GigaOM >> The Coming Apollo vs. Firefox Battle
• SiliconValley.com >> Adobe introduces Apollo
• Adobe targets developers with Apollo | Channel Register
• Apollo Alpha to be released to the public | 901am.com
• StartupSquad >> Adobe launches Apollo alpha
• Apollo Lands | Mashable.com
• MacNN >> Adobe releases Apollo Alpha
• ITWorld.com >> Adobe releases first Apollo code to developers
• SYS-CON >> Adobe Announces Apollo at AJAXWORLD
• Plenty of haters on Slashdot :)

You can also track press via Google News or Techmeme

And I’ve also been tagging press coverage via del.icio.us with “apollopress” – follow it here.

Kevin Rose interviewing Kevin Lynch at Apollo Camp

Several people have uploaded a bunch of photos to Flickr taken at Apollo Camp last Friday. Check them out here.

Our team has posted the recording of my recent demonstration of Apollo and the Ebay desktop application (San Dimas Project) at the DEMO 07 conference in Palm Springs, CA.

If you haven’t had a chance to see this demo yet, you might want to check it out. It’s a quick, six minute demo of a very cool Apollo application being developed by Ebay and Effective UI.

Watch it here.

At about 5pm on Tuesday I got a phone call from someone on my team. “Mike, Kevin is really sick and he wants you to do the demo tomorrow morning!”

And the fun began…

If you’re not familiar with it, the DEMO conference is the premier launch venue for new products and technologies. Adobe Chief Software Architect, Kevin Lynch, had been invited to come show Apollo at the conference. We were to give a 6 minute presentation on what it is and what it can do. It’s a pretty big deal so, of course, we practiced with Kevin for the last couple of weeks getting everything set up perfectly. The team (mostly Christian Cantrell) worked with eBay and EffectiveUI to get the eBay desktop application well-prepared for the demo that Kevin wanted to give.

I was just coming down to the conference to help out with the tech setup and answering questions at the booth.

So here’s how everything ended up. I’ve got to say, it was so cool to be giving a demo at DEMO!

http://www.demo.com/demonstrators/demo2007/91259.php

Michael Arrington over at Techcrunch just posted a good article about Apollo. He has included a few screenshots of some of the early demo apps that Mike Chambers has built. Also, be sure to check out Michael’s 37-minute podcast featuring Adobe SVP and Chief Software Architect, Kevin Lynch, talking about Apollo.

[Techcrunch] We’re excited about Apollo because it has the potential to be the launchpad for entirely new classes of startups. It could be the technology to watch for 2007. And Adobe is certainly counting on it to drive future revenue.