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I'm currently on a business trip visiting customers that will have me in Finland, Denmark, Norway and England. For the most part, this trip won't allow for much sightseeing. However, I did manage to enjoy an early morning Sunday stroll in Helsinki.

Though the weather wasn't necessarily warm at three degrees Celsius, it was sunny which is a rarity this time of year. I have been to Helsinki once before on business, but it was fairly dark, cold and miserable. The parts of the city I saw today were very charming and beautiful. Given that I'll spend the next five days on planes or in conference rooms, I treasured the chance to catch some sunrays which should also have the added benefit of helping minimize jet lag. I've posted some additional photos on Flickr. There you can also view a slideshow.

Posted by Rob at 4:41 AM | Permalink

As a follow-up to my last post, an alpha version of the Apollo runtime is now available for download on Adobe Labs. Apollo meet world. World meet Apollo.

Posted by Rob at 9:24 AM | Permalink

Note: The Adobe Labs site appears to be down right now so those links are broken for the moment. I suspect they will be returning soon.

Adobe has been working on a very exciting technology known as Apollo that may have a significant impact on how people build rich internet applications for the desktop. Essentially it's a cross operating system run-time built on top of Flash, HTML and PDF. Though it will be possible to build applications completely using HTML/AJAX, most people will likely use Flex and ActionScript 3.

If you're interested in learning more, I recommend checking out the just released Apollo for Adobe Flex Developers Pocket Guide (free download). Tonight at our San Francisco office a special event took place targeting potential early adopters called Apollo Camp. If you're curious to seeing what took place at the event, attendees have been posting their photographs on Flickr. Those in attendance were also apparently presented with an early alpha build which is very exciting. Though I've been running early builds of Apollo at work, this is the first time I've seen an external .air file posted to a public site. The extension .air, by the way, is an Apollo installer application that will run on Windows, Mac and eventually Linux. The Apollo team has made it very easy to convert your existing Flex applications (web-based) to Apollo (desktop). Some developers are reporting that it takes less than five minutes. I'm looking forward to seeing what people start building with this new framework.

Posted by Rob at 11:54 PM | Permalink