Adobe's Apollo

Adobe Systems wants more with your desktop than just Photoshop.

Its Apollo, released to alpha late last Friday, is a runtime designed to support applications that bridge the worlds of the desktop and Web browser. The applications will run on HTML, plus they'll be able to access the local file system, work when users are offline, and operate in the background. OK. So what, exactly, does that mean?

One test Apollo application, Maptacular, serves as a useful example. Maptacular mashes stored contact information with Google Maps. When the user drags digital business cards from the desktop to the application, it automatically maps the location of a contact. It could also, say, drag home address information and work address information to the map and automatically create a driving directions map between home and work. Users can then save the map for future offline reference.

Since Apollo apps will run on HTML, technologies such as Ajax, Flash, JavaScript, and PDF will all be in play, giving Web developers a chance to build applications that can interact with information stored on a user's computer. "We're enabling Web developers to create desktop apps for the first time," said Michele Turner, the VP of Adobe's platform business unit. "I think we're going to see a lot of innovation."

Even in these early stages -- Apollo won't be out in final form until the fourth quarter, according to Turner -- there already are signs she could be right. Companies such as eBay already are creating branded applications based on the technology that let customers access their services without a browser, and Adobe's working with a number of large corporations to create custom applications like dashboards for financial information. "I've often had the corporate intranet as my home page; now I can have a module that runs on Apollo that's constantly feeding me the information I need to know," Turner said.However, since these "rich Internet applications" on the desktop are an emerging model, it's going to take some time for developers to decide which applications and what functions work better in the blended world rather than fully on the desktop, the Internet, or a server somewhere. "We're going to be in a very evolutionary period with Apollo for the next few years," Turner admits, adding that there will surely be fits and stops where some applications are developed for Apollo that would work better from a browser or as a desktop app.

Another place where Apollo-type applications could play a big role is in the mobile world, where connectivity is far from assured and devices typically carry less memory and computing power. If the device goes offline, it could update the application or complete a transaction the next time it's connected to the Internet. Though the first version of Apollo won't have full support for mobile devices, future versions will. "You have those persistent clients," Turner said, "but you're freeing up the data by enabling it to live in the cloud."It could appear simply as a way to extend the marketplace for Adobe technologies like Flash and PDF, but Apollo is clearly part of an emerging software trend that takes some parts desktop app, some parts Web app, and blends them together into a whole that equals more than the isolated pieces. "A lot of the vision of Adobe relative to software is to extend the Web," Turner said. "This is really where Adobe wants to go."

Apollo's been a long time coming for Adobe, which bought Macromedia and its Web-development assets in 2005. With Macromedia Central, developers can create desktop applications that use Flash technology, but there has never been the acceptance the company expected, partially because applications couldn't be branded but instead had to run in a Macromedia sandbox. Apollo builds on those lessons. However, though Central releases have had similar NASA-related code names in Mercury and Gemini, Adobe said Apollo isn't a successor to Central.

Microsoft's software-plus-services strategy is another example of this trend toward applications that obscure the lines between the desktop and the Web. That includes things like the New York Times Reader, which allows subscribers to read the New York Times online in a much richer environment than the Web would allow. The Times Reader is built on Windows Presentation Foundation, a user interface technology built into .Net 3.0.

The Microsoft strategy appears partially geared toward giving users a choice between hosted and on-premise software and partially toward linking resources in the Internet cloud and on servers with resources on the desktop, as the Times Reader app suggests. Just last week, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer spoke of a decade-long transformation of software toward "software and Internet services as one integrated experience." Microsoft has thus far been mum on the subject, but Turner said Adobe is aware of upcoming products from Microsoft that will compete with Apollo.While Adobe's Apollo is a first fruit that's just reaching alpha and Microsoft's strategy has yet to flower extensively in developer's hands, having two of the biggest dogs in software development on the same page strongly suggests that the lines between the Web and the desktop continue to blur.