Apollo has landed

Adobe has just released the alpha version of Apollo 1.0 which is a cross operating system runtime that lets you easily install web enabled apps on your desktop that take advantage of HTML, CSS, AJAX, FLASH, FLEX and PDFs. The apps can be easily installed (and updated) on PC and Mac (and I'm guessing Linux pretty soon).

This is Macromedia's third attempt to get a runtime working that allows access to the local file system. Macromedia (prior to Adobe) had two versions of Central which never really got much adoption, they basically only allowed flash support.

One of the cool things about Apollo is the ability to allow apps to continue to work in an offline state pretty easily as there is good network state detection in Apollo.

I guess it is up to us now to build some killer desktop apps that take can now take advantage of the full web developer arsenal.

Time will tell if there are enough benefits to build apps based on the Apollo runtime or whether developers will rather build offline apps using the new features being built into Firefox 3. I don't think the fact that Apollo has access to the local filesystem is a big enough benefit on its own as how much data do you need to cache locally now that mobile broadband has become affordable.

Update - just read the Apollo for Flex Pocket Guide - bloody good overview of Apollo. The one thing that stood out is that Apollo is not a replacement (in a lot of cases) but a complement for your web based apps. I think its pretty cool from the few demos I've seen and can quite easily see that 2.0 versions of traditional office apps will take advantage of the ability to install into your startmenu or dock and get updates.