ApolloCamp Impressions: Friendly and Grokking It

Spent the weekend going to Adobe’s Apollo Camp in San Francisco, never ceases to amaze me that I can walk out my just before dawn and each lunch on the other side of the country. Apollo is small step onto the desktop from the web direction. It means enhancing web technologies (Flash and HTML Ajax) with desktop capabilities (saving files, printing with PDF, being installed as an application) across operating systems (Mac OS X, Linux, and the several from some company based in Washington).

How does Apollo work? You install a small (less than 10MB) runtime. (Read more and download Apollo’s alpha version from Adobe.) The runtime includes a Flash player, a WebKit based HTML renderer, and APIs to interact with the desktop. With the runtime in place, you can easily install applications built with it. Developing apps is a matter downloading the Apollo SDK.

So what about Apollo camp? Besides just rolling out the alpha with lectures and comestibles, we were able to talk with a bunch of the Apollo developers. They all seemed very excited and friendly. They also appeared to have a very good feel for the both the technical and social challenges of making Apollo a success. I’m very excited to see what comes of this: it feels like Java in the mid-nineties all over again. Except this time, it may really work.

Anything else interesting happen in California? I went to the Apple company store to pick up some hard to find items for a coworker. In the visitor parking lot, I ran across Steve Jobs himself looking up at the building and talking to someone. I saw a bold Apple enthusiast ask if he could get a picture with the man. Job’s response was something close to, “no thanks.” Continuing to my car, I heard the disappointed enthusiast, “and they say he’s a Buddhist.”