I’ve been looking at Apollo, Adobe’s new technology for the development and deployment of Rich Internet Applications, and I can say I’m pretty excited about the possibilities - and honestly, it’s good to see Adobe isn’t screwing up with Apollo as much as with the Creative Suite icons (which I talked about yesterday).

According to the people at Adobe themselves on their wiki, “Apollo is a cross-OS runtime that allows developers to leverage their existing web development skills (Flash, Flex, HTML, Ajax) to build and deploy desktop RIA’s”.

There’s already a few companies working on Apollo based applications, bringing the connectivity of the web and the richness of the desktop together. One of such companies is eBay, who’s working on a client for their service using Apollo (read about it here). We’ll most likely think about doing something similar for some of our own projects.

Fact is, RIAs are going to be all the rage next year, and Adobe seems to be pushing things in the right direction with this innitiative. I guess we’ll see just how much when I can get my hands on it, but I have grown high expectations since I built a client for Goplan’s ticket management system in under one hour using our API and Adobe’s Flex - oh, if only Flex Builder wasn’t that expensive.

Some Apollo resources

Looking around for some information on the technology, I found a few good resources. First, a video with Christian Cantrell of Adobe, demonstrating what Apollo is, and showing some of the applications built with it. There’s also a breeze demo with Luis Polanco and Mike Chambers that provides some background information on the platform.

And finally, Mike did a podcast with Kevin Lynch over at Talkcrunch that highlights the new capabilities Apollo brings to RIA developers, as well as some background information as to where Adobe wants to go with the Apollo effort.

John Nack, Senior Product Manager for Adobe Photoshop, unveiled the new icons for the upcoming series of Adobe Products - and boy, can I be any more disappointed. The new icon for photoshop is below - Yup, it’s the ugly blue square.

The planned set of icons for Adobe’s CS3 is confusing and maybe overly minimalist (and I’m the minimalist type). Thinking about it, it may be the huge difference that’s shocking me, but I don’t really see a reason for the huge change from the old set of icons to this new one, whose differences are based on lettering and background color alone.

It seems like Jason agrees with my opinion, and Veerle seems to side with the new design and includes an interview with Ryan Hicks, Sr. Experience Designer at Adobe with some insight into the process.

I’m just wondering about the creative process behind the decision to use these new icons. Can two letters and color substitute iconography? I personally don’t think so, but in this case, taste prevails. Have an opinion? Leave it in the comments.

We had a few problems with one of our servers during the weekend which caused the blog (and a couple of our other web proprieties) to be down for about 48 hours. On top of that last week was really odd in terms of email, so if you’ve sent us an email and did get a word back, please send it again - thanks everyone! Now back to the regular program.

Related Link: RAID Data Recovery Even the best-configured RAID system can fail due to intermittent drive failure resulting in RAID degradation or RAID array configuration lost.

I’ve been reading and thinking about the gaming industry these days. EA Game’s CEO said in an interview (lost the link, I’m sorry!) that current game development costs make it impossible for new companies to get to market. And I wonder whether the gaming industry needs its “2.0″.

Now before you curse me for “attempted use of buzzword”, think about it. Web 2.0 exists because platforms were created that allow for bootstrapping companies and quickly creating web-based services and applications. If the gaming industry had such a movement, anyone could get in and put their ideas into games.

XNA - half-assed solution

Coincidentally, a couple of days ago Microsoft launched XNA and the XNA Game Studio Express, which is, and I quote “a new game development solution targeted primarily at students, hobbyists, and independent game developers”.

It allows anyone to create their own games for PC and the 360. But you still have to pay the subscription price ($99/yr or $49/ 4 months), and even then other people won’t be able to play your games without an XNA subscription for themselves.

So Microsoft gives you the cake, but not the knife to cut it. Which is a shame because the potential of anyone creating their own games and generating revenue from them is mind boggling.

User generated games, mashups

We won’t see a “games youtube” listing games created by the community soon, because the only platform you can actually “download and play” on is the PC, and people are moving towards consoles (no wonder, with stuff like the Wii out there).

Now, the ball is in the hands of gaming console makers. Indie developers can’t afford the development systems, or want to pay for services that don’t allow anyone to experience their creations. We need better platforms for game creation, and we need them now.

Most people (like myself), don’t entertain the thought of creating games - despite having ideas - because the necessary monetary investment is hard to come by. Allowing this kind of people to create games (easily and cheaply) is an untapped money source that could benefit console makers, indie developers and everyone who plays games.

Screenshots above from Assassins Creed (coming 2007 from Ubisoft) and Gears of War (from Epic Games, already released)