JD on EP

Almost every question and response:

"How Awesome is Apollo going to be?"
"VERY Awesome."

"a. Media oriented applications are going to be popular. Media companies will be able to create custom branded, desktop presences now."

Do people want custom branded desktop applications with web access on their computer? Or have we already forgotten WebTangent and Bonzi Buddy?

"I think there will be a period early on where there will be some confusion about which web applications should be enhanced with desktop functionality."

As in getting Ad-Aware and Spybot not to recognize Apollo as malware.

"Media oriented applications are going to be popular. Media companies will be able to create custom branded, desktop presences now. Imagine applications rich in video and audio with rich interfaces and a heavy focus on allowing users to contribute and manage their own media."

This issue is a little more complex as Apollo is already entering into a realm of media players with vast amounts of functionality already built into it. WinAmp has an incredibly built in infrastructure already, and Windows Media Player is still the [default] monolith. With respect to rich interfaces, and skinnable programs I refer you to the co-evolution of Sonique and Winamp, while Sonique was indisputably the prettier application, WinAmp won out due to the quality of the music outputted and overall lightweight in terms of CPU. Social applications have a server requirement which stands as a substantial barrier considering media is to be stored and transferred.

"c. Another market is casual games...[which] allow them to interact with the system in the form of saved data and desktop notifications"

Casual games need not use Apollo. Minor saves are already possible [SharedObject] and desktop notifications are annoying. in terms of casual development Apollo should keep in mind Microsoft's XNA initiative to simply DirectX and to make deployment on PC and XBOX360 more streamlined. XNA tools and C# Express are free, but for debugging purposes a 360 premium is required.

"I would ask them if they had a team of C# programmers looking to build high-end Windows software. Apollo is targeted at web application developers."

Opinion. A team of bad C# programmers maybe.

[jd sez: I'm not sure if you're asking me anything, via fisking Mike here.]

"and there's great context here on how the new technology will fit into the overall ecology"

How is there great context? I mean sure the line that struck you was:

"I think the browser really took off because it allowed anyone to access information, regardless of their device or operating system. It allowed people to share content with a very wide audience. I think this value has led to applications being delivered to the browser. However, web developers consistently deal with limitations in this model."

but isn't that just a blank statement? There's limitations to everything, that's the whole point of development in anything. I'm not disagreeing with "stepping out of the browser", I'm simply asking the question "What are we stepping into? Are we stepping off a cliff?"

"I'm employed by Adobe Systems but views are my own"

How true is that statement?