Apollo: Break out of the browser
On Sunday night Adobe released (launched…) an alpha version of Apollo.
So what, I hear, what the hell is Apollo any how? Well apollo might just change the way you use the internet.
As an example imagine that you like shopping on amazon, and amazon like you shopping on amazon. I bet amazon have loads of cool features they would love to implement that would help separate you from your money, but not all of them can be done. This is down to cross browser issues and JavaScript support.
Well then just imagine a little more and instead of loading up amazon.com in a browser you double click an application icon on your local machine and have a little amazon app on your own system.
It could communicate with amazon.com servers so all the data available on there would be available to you but what it would not rely on is your browser. It would also allow for a really rich GUI curtsey of Flash.
In a way we already have the basic version of this, think OS X widgets and Vista gadgets. Now imagine this on steroids. This really could be the dawn of the end of the browser.
I think the main problem is going to be explaining to people so they can see the big picture and that this is more than simply another browser platform, but that in a few years you could have an ebay or amazon icon in your start menu or dock rather than a bookmark in your browser.
In reality all Apollo is, is a way of running flash applications on your desktop. The advantages are that it can read and write to the local disk as well as be multi platform. It does away with the downside of flash. Currently Flash based web sites are pretty but annoying. You have to wait ages for it to download and then you cant even bookmark the part of the site you want because it is in the middle of a flash app. This would all go with Apollo because the Flash would be stored locally so no downloading and it would be more like a native app so no need for bookmarking.
As you may be able to tell I am just a little bit excited as to what this is going to be capable of.
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