A few cool things

I came across Parallels for Mac Desktop a while back. They have just included a new feature called "coherence mode" which allows you to run PC apps in the "dock" without the windows desktop showing (of course the full windows os is running under the virtual machine). This is really cool, I guess these guys will do ok for a while during the transition to web based apps that run on any platform.

Now on to future winners....Adobe is about to launch Apollo which is basically Flash 9 apps with offline functionality. We know that Firefox is going to include offline functionality in the future but my guess is that Apollo will be quite distruptive for a while - it should be launching pretty soon.

Virtual Ubiquity have been lucky enough to get their hands on Apollo and are building a "Word" killer. The word on the street is this is awesome, definately well above the writely/google docs bar.

Done well, flash apps can improve the user experience alot. With the underlying flex presentation layer and simple access to data services a talented developer that gets UI design could easily have fun picking off all the traditional desktop apps one at a time and move them into the future.