Apollo Skeptic
I might be taking another seemingly contrarian view on things (me hating Macs would be another), but I’m not sold on Apollo, or any of the other psuedo browser platforms like Microsoft’s competing WPF. Even though my whole career has revolved around Macromedia and Flash.
The browser is so entrenched and Flash is so notoriously bad at handling data heavy content and text heavy content that it seems like a long shot. Ages ago we were lobbying Macromedia to support full HTML rendering in Director, at a time when the browser and the even the web itself was still an exotic concept. That’s the time when a rich media application could have potentially captured serious marketshare as a means to accessing and interacting with the web. Now, I think it’s too little, too late. The browser is the clear and obvious winner.
Macromedia has had previous attempts at this same strategy. Some people might remember all the hype and enthusiasm around Central. I’m actually somewhat stunned to see that Central still exists.
Do I think that a browser and some other ‘rich’ platform couldn’t live together in symbiotic harmony? I tend to think that’s quite unlikely. Especially with browsers adopting an offline strategy. The browser is simply a better platform. As far as I can tell it can do everything Apollo does (Flash, AJAX) but better and easier to develop (CSS, HTML). Based on past experiences with Flash components I’m not convinced that Flex or Apollo based components are superior to standard browser interfaces enhanced with some javascript. In addition, browsers have a rich extension architecture that is extremely powerful.
I’ve seen the iscrybe demo video. It’s very impressive. I’m still not convinced that a browser isn’t a superior platform.
So what am I not getting?
Posting your comment
Wayne | March 1, 2007 @ 10:45 am
When he goes “Each year I’m waiting for the PS3 or the XBox360 … so I wrote a shell script to watch to see when these items are released.” Doesn’t that indicate to you that we all need to switch to a new browser platform?
Tony Rule | March 13, 2007 @ 10:15 pm
Really good to see Xero has invested in some great designers. Looking forward to seeing what you guys are developing.
Here is a good article just put up on Adobe.com describing some benefits for using Flex.
http://www.adobe.com/devnet/flex/articles/flex_and_java.html
I have posted some thoughts on my blog about the whole AJAX/HTML/CSS vs FLEX
http://darule.blogspot.com/2007/03/separation-of-duties.html
Philip | March 15, 2007 @ 9:39 pm
Hey thanks for the feedback Tony. This is a case where I’m not going to be an early adopter. I’ll wait for somebody else to prove Apollo’s value, and then wait some more until it has some serious traction among users.