| My friend Paul Newman (yes, that’s really his name, and no, not that Paul Newman) called me a year ago to ask if I’d like to help write a book about Apollo, which was the codename for Adobe AIR at that time. I was already overworked, but I hesitantly agreed. Although I’d known of Apollo in a general way prior to that, it was only at that point that I started to seriously take a look at the technology. Paul later had to bow out of the project due to other demands on his time, but I continued to look at Apollo and prepare to write this book.
Previously, I’d held a few prejudices in regard to Apollo. I’ve worked with Flash and Flex for a decade, and the idea of using Flash or Flex to build desktop applications was hardly a new one. I’d been building executables from Flash for nearly as long as I’d worked with it. I’ve used programs such as FlashJester, Northcode SWF Studio, and Multidmedia Zinc with varying degrees of success to enable enhanced features for desktop applications built using Flash, and I’d previously seen Apollo as merely another alternative to these programs. Frankly, I felt a bit of resentment that Adobe, a huge corporation, would try to swoop in and crush these existing companies with a competing product. However, after working with Apollo, I saw that it was really quite different from these other products. |
