Sorry about the terrible play on words there (I’ve been taking too many literary cues from the Adelaide Advertiser ;-) but I am pretty excited about travelling to the UK next week and attending the London onAIR conference. Obviously it’s a long way to travel from Adelaide, Australia to the UK for a free conference - so I better get my money’s worth! hehe, no seriously I’m moving over there to play some cricket and try and spruce up my Flash portfolio (if there’s any Flash developer work going around Cambridge, I’d love to hear about it)
So if you’re an Aussie travelling across or already in London planning on attending the conference or for that matter anyone interested in making another acquaintance just leave me a comment. I shouldn’t be hard to miss… I’ll be the bloke with his life’s possessions on his back having come straight from Heathrow to attend the London Tour, and probably a Red Bull in each hand trying to shake off the 16,000 odd kilometres of drowsiness. So apologies in advance if I nod off during one of the presentations having found a nice comfy spot on your shoulder ;-)
I’m a flash developer.
Though I’ve always taken the claims that 98% of internet enabled desktops have the Flash plug-in. I’ve seen this marketing babble get run a few times now in regards to Apollo vs. Silverlight and in general when talking about the ubiquity of the Flash family of products (Flash, Flash Lite, Flex and now Apollo).
Regarding Apollo, how does “98%” of the internet having Flash installed make any difference to the (at this point in time) 0% of the general public that have the Apollo runtime installed… I just don’t see the connection.
What is interesting me about Apollo is not so much the ability to create something for the web (ie. Flex) and be able to deploy it to the desktop (at least on Mac and Windows XP and Vista) but how Adobe intend on getting the install base of Apollo up to make it a viable solution to recommend to customers and clients. Time will tell what strategy they have, but considering Vista doesn’t come with Flash (or the Apollo runtime for that matter) coupled with the distinct possibility of Microsoft making Silverlight (et al) some form of necessary Windows update, I think Adobe has it’s work cut out for it.
For the record, I’m rooting for Adobe.
I’ve been quite interested to see how Apollo handles the rendering of HTML, which got me thinking about what user-agent string it would actually present to a site that it is browsing. So, here ’tis:
AppleWebKit/420+ (KHTML, like Gecko) Safari/419.3 Apollo/1.0.Alpha1
I haven’t seen this mentioned much before, but when visiting sites that detect for Flash using the swfobject code, the alternative content ends up being displayed in Apollo. I’m assuming this is because the swfobject can’t detect whether the flash plugin is installed within the Apollo browser. Has anyone else noticed this, or have any pointers as to how to circumvent this?
