At the end of 2006, I wrote a bit looking forward to Apollo – the newest concern from the people at Adobe.

For those who haven’t heard of it, Apollo is a new runtime environment (based on the Flash player and the PDF plugin) that allows for the creation of desktop applications that can be run cross-platform.  So essentially, a developer can make desktop applications that run on both MAC and PC with ease (and soon Linux).

Why do I think this is going to have a major impact on how we do things? To illustrate, imagine you could go back in time and put your branding on iTunes….the “Dodge” iTunes, “dTunes” if you will.

How much of a value would that be to a client?

Teknison, creators of the FineTune application make a similar comparison – what if Kodak had created Flickr?

While Apollo is still in alpha, it is definitely within our reach to
start working on such offerings.  One of the nicest things about Apollo
is that it allows anyone to use their existing skillsets for developing
in Flash and Flex (and soon HTML) thus opening up a wide array of
opportunities.

Some have ambitiously called Apollo the death of the browser…not too
likely, but what we might see a lot more of is specific one-off
browsers that are geared to offer the user a particular value.  For
instance, we might see a browser-like application made specifically for
people checking out the autoshow, that streamlines their experience in
retrieving information.

Ebay, Amazon, Google are already all over this technology.

Times are a’changin.  This looks to be pretty big.

Tim Willison