JD on EP

Pullquotes from varied objections: "My mind says wait and see, my heart says Adobe is Evil... No Linux support, who are they kidding? Grow a pair and learn to program... the extreme hostility Adobe has displayed towards non-win/mac/linux users... There are probably 2-3 times as many linux users are macintosh... Considering Adobe's past hostility to FreeBSD... Most people who are idealistic about the GPL and Free Software know enough to stay away from closed source if they want to avoid being hypocritical... I don't think Apollo will find much success, because, like Flash things in web pages, developers will probably have to reinvent widgets and behavior, and will do so badly... I will take notice of this technology when Adobe gets their own cash-cows (Photoshop et al) run on this platform. That is perhaps the only way Linux is going to get these Adobe applications running natively... I most certainly am not touching this thing until it has been proven to have zero vulnerabilities... I feel that Adobe ruins all software over time... the only place you can install it is on a web server... Sending the FBI after Dmitry Sklyarov was a low blow."

Individual citations:

"It's less 'open' than we would like, but not by any means 'closed.'" [link]

"Best part of it is now all clients will have to hit are my data via web services... no long do they have to get the images and entire presentation layer anytime they want to use my app. Very cool stuff." [link]

"I run a small business and have the following rules for software: Company must not be a member of the BSA; License must not have an audit clause; Software must not phone home." [link]

"Anyone who has ever had to make a cross platform GUI application that works identically on Linux, Mac, and Windows, can tell you what a nightmare it is. Even if you use a good cross platform toolkit like Qt or wxWidgets, the apps are still not *identical*. And you have to build them and test them for every platform. And you have to account for the myrid of possible library combinations the users my have installed. Etc etc. This is why so many companies are embracing web applications - but web applications can't do it all. Some things you just *need* to do client side. This Apollo thing could be a really great way to do it. And what may make it even more killer, would be the fact that you could perhapse share GUI code between your web applications and your client applications - so a user could run his UI over the web *OR* locally. Excellent." [link]

"... this will eventually end with them complaining that it doesn't run on the VIC-20." [link]

"The existence of acceptible apps makes great apps dwindle and die. Firefox is an excellent: Although it has many great features, its cross-platform UI isn't one of them. It adopts my GTK+ and the standard Windows themes badly. Just about every user interface feature of GTK+ that has led me to choose to run a GTK+ desktop over a Windows, KDE or Cocoa one is missing. In general, it feels like a Windows app ported to Linux (less so now than in the past, but it's still there). But the existence of Firefox means that we don't get great a web browser for Gnome." (ie, "the good is the enemy of the best".) [link]

"What the Apollo software will allow is people accustomed to writing rich web-based applications, using various technologies such as AJAX, flash, and plain ole HTML to port those applications to the desktop. No need for internet connectivity, no need to have a web server or internet browser. All the user will need is the runtime environment. I believe this will open up the applications that are available for users across windows, linux, and osx." [link]

"Didn't Adobe have something like a open source cross-platform gui library that they used for Photoshop/CS?" (I think he may be referring to Adam & Eve.) [link]

A discussion, with many followup comments, of how the investment in usability affects the experiences of using Photoshop and GIMP. [link]

"Surely an architecture like this can't function without duct tape." (Made me laugh.) [link]

"Actually, I quite like the Adobe Creative Suite. Did you ever try the real Acrobat, i.e. the full version, not the reader? It's an amazing tool...." (more) [link]

"The interesting thing is that there is basically no backwards compatibility of anything beyond basic document display. For example, we have a fill-in form created in Acrobat 8 Pro. If you open it and fill it out in an earlier version, it seems to be filled in fine. You can close it, reopen it, and view its contents. But then I mailed that file (yes, I'm sure it was the right one) to the purchasing department and when they opened it in Acrobat 8 Pro, it was not filled in." (I'm not sure which software filled in the form... there are older versions of Adobe Reader which could not save form data, eg.) [link]

"The Apollo runtime is created by the team formerly known as Macromedia. These guys focus really hard on reducing bloat as much as possible." [link]

"Flash is possibly one of the most important technologies out there. It is available in *almost any* web browser, and allows you to do non-trivial things without jumping through mind numbing browser-compatibility hoops, and does them at a speed that a browser cannot even dream about. Neither Microsoft, due to it's insecurities about becoming irrelevant, nor Mozilla and Apple with their limited market shares have been able to archive this holy grail of cross platform, install-free computing." [link]

"My problem is that it still sounds like they've built a perfect spyware API, and they're not mentioning anything about the security model. " (The FAQ and docs say that the security model is still being finalized... it's a new type of environment, and security needs to be handled correctly.) [link]

"They are not saying Adobe will call home, they are saying the people writing apps ontop of the framework can update stuff from the web, yet still run when not connected." [link]

"I wrote my first Apollo app at about 12:30 AM Saturday morning, 20 minutes after I got out of the cab returning from the Adobe event. If you're already a Flex developer (and I wasn't), then you're an Apollo developer now too! If you have a web-based app that already runs in Safari, chances are very good it will just run on the Apollo runtime too. Oh, and if you were a web developer, now you're a desktop developer too." [link]

"Oh God why is /. so conservative and predictable? ...I never drank the Flex Kool-Aid (no big benefits over AJAX IMO), but Apollo really has quite a lot going for it...." [link]

Discussion of adoption costs for Flex 1.5 developers, Flex 2.0 developers, Flash Professional developers, HTML/JS/CSS developers. [link]