Getting started with Apollo

Apollo has been a buzzword for quite sometime now. Couple of mails were exchanged regarding Apollo in the Flex India user group recently. I was not really interested to even know what it really was untill it was released and folks were talking about it in their blogs.

From adobe.com:
"Apollo is the code name for a cross-operating system runtime being developed by Adobe that allows developers to leverage their existing web development skills (Flash, Flex, HTML, JavaScript, Ajax) to build and deploy rich Internet applications (RIAs) to the desktop."

If you want to know what Apollo is all about, grab a free copy of Apollo for Adobe Flex Developers from O'REILLY. It's a good read to know what features Apollo is bundled with. I got hold of the book couple of days back and I'm finding it pretty interesting. Features like user system directory listing, communication with Javascript etc are prettly cool.

I cannot write much about Apollo right now cause I'm just getting started with it :-). Will be posting about it whenever I try out or find something interesting. I highly recommend you to read the first two chapters of the book, if you want to know what Apollo is all about.

You can download the Apollo runtime/ SDK here and a free copy of Apollo for Adobe Flex Developers is available here.

P.S. I've not been able to post blog entries recently because there was (still is) some problem with my browser, whenever i tried to publish a blog it would post a blank entry :-(

picnik: very cool RIA

While browsing through Manish's blog, I came across this neat looking RIA called picnik. It's an online photo-editor with a twist! It's pretty impresive how you can quickly edit a picture [from your system, or providers like flickr] and save it back. Due to my proxy setting i was not able to upload & edit images from my system. But you can allow picnik to access your flickr account and walla... all your flickr images are loaded neatly inside it. Then you can do pretty cool stuffs with all your images - the interface is very neat, easy to use. A very good example of how Flex is shaping up the future of kickass RIA applications.

Looking at this, I got reminded of another flickr browser entirely in Flex done by Alessandro.