Well, it appears that a lot of people are interested in an Apollo chat via IRC, so I set up a room today if anyone want to chat, or ask questions about Apollo.
Server: irc.prison.net (efnet)
room : #apollochat
I was hoping to get a room on freenet, but was having trouble registering the room, so for today, Ill hang around on efnet.
Ill be in and out, but if anyone wants to hang out and chat, then join up.
There have been a couple of posts over the past couple of days with people talking about using IRC to chat about Flex and Apollo. I think this is an cool idea, and would love to get an room started that stayed pretty active.
I would especially like to do weekly chats with the Flex, Apollo and Player teams. I think that would be a lot of fun, and enable everyone to speak directly with the people building these technologies.
Daniel Dura has just released the Twitter application that we used at Apollo Camp to help coordinate back chanel conversations (it saved us from a beer disaster!).
Anyways, not only can you download the application, but Danny has also open sourced it, and made the source available. So, now you can modify and use it for your own event.
You can grab the download, as well as the source, from here.
Sean Moore has put together a set of free Apollo ActionScript cheat sheets.
You can download them from here.
Well, Ted Patrick and I launched video.onflex.org a little over 3 weeks ago, and we are already nearing our twentieth video on the site. If you haven’t checked it out yet, make sure to glance through some of the videos.
Anyways, we are nearing the end of our backlog of videos, and it looks like I have some time this Thursday and Friday to create some more videos, so:
What Flex and / or Apollo videos you want to see on video.onflex.org? What do you want us to show? Who do you want us to interview?
There has been a lot of excitement, interest and discussion around Apollo, especially since we released the public alpha on labs last week. One thing that has come up a couple of times, is confusion over what Apollo is as well as what value it provides. A lot of the discussion has focused on uncertainty about why would you want to move web applications outside of the browser.
A lot of times when this question gets answered, the answer focuses on specific Apollo features (file I/O API, working offline). While these are things that Apollo can do today, that are difficult if not impossible to do consistently in the browser, a feature based discussion doesn’t address the fundamental question of why would you want to move applications out of the browser.
Most of the docs and examples for the Apollo alpha are Flex / ActionScript focused (next beta will be more focused on HTML / JavaScript). However, you can build Apollo applications using just HTML and JavaScript.
Here is a simple example that shows how to build an HTML / JavaScript Apollo application, and how to access Apollo APIs from JavaScript. The application shows how to launch a file browser from the application, and access information about the selected file (you could then easily read in the contents of the file).
One of the sample apps that we have made available from the Apollo labs site, is an RSS aggregator built entirely in HTML / JavaScript and CSS named Fresh. This is a pretty cool application, and really demonstrates how you can use HTML in Apollo to build desktop applications.
We have been showing this a lot over the past couple of days (at Apollo Camp and webDU), and have been incorrectly saying that the Yahoo UI library was used to create the app. This is incorrect, and was a mistake on the speakers (mostly my) part. It actually is built using the Ext JS JavaScript Library and Components toolkit.
The guys over at Teknision (they built the Finetune Apollo application) have written up some of their thoughts on Apollo, and what they feel its real impact and value will be.
Online applications that are pin point targeted to provide a specific service generate intensely loyal fans. Apollo will give us the ability to extend these applications deeper into the user’s lives by making them part of their operating environment.
You can read the entire article here.
