We are using it because we have to, there is no other 2d engines available for the browser.

“Hi Marc, labels aside, what are you afraid might happen?”

Marc, why would we give *you guys the power to decide about it?

Here I wrote more about it:
http://ivko999.blogspot.com/2007/03/response-on-adobes-apollo.html

How I Spent My Apollo Camp Vacation

OK, I get your points Marc.
You know, people asked me some of your very questions when I started developing for Director {nay, VideoWorks Interactive} lo’ those many many moons ago. But I agree the worry going forward for developers is another abandoned effort like Central that leaves our good efforts in ruins. So, ‘this one-time at band-camp’ I arrived skeptical but intrigued and left feeling a real shift in the playing field at hand. Adobe buying Macromedia means tendrils reach into almost every home and office desktop in the world. Flash is like a magnificent worm now snaking it’s way through the vast majority of the world’s connected computers and Adobe is going to swallow the internet browser from the inside out.
Brilliant stratagem. I salute Adobe. Really.

To me developing for Apollo means to switch platforms like swapping sun-glasses w/o a dropped tag or font substituted & miss-aligned layout. A refocus on the designer, focus & simplicity, ease of development is in order - or else Adobe should just stick to the expensive corporate in-house model and those eager techno-preisthoods ready to invoice. With Apollo and the current momentum of Flex+Flash I can imagine a true author-once cross-platform web/RIA development system with an intrinsic graphical finesse that brings to mind high-touch glossy magazine aesthetics. Design & produce just once to deploy your services across the world from laptop to mobile phone without browser support hassles and platform agnostic in creation or playback. Heady stuff. I’m not getting locked in any more than Director locked me in. I can take my logic & systemic understanding, graphic resources, the business models in motion, and head full of product ideas and deploy them under other environments if Apollo should be burdensome instead of liberating, If your worried about lock-out/lock-in gatekeepers, consider MicroSoft {shudder} to understand biz doesn’t care if you make an ornate Walled Garden as long as it actually works. This has been true of any manner of business arrangements throughout the rise of modern financial markets and commerce for several hundred years. We don’t have to like it, it just is.

Just as Apple “Black-Boxed” the Macintosh toolbox, Adobe is abstracting both browser and OS in a bid to win the web today and ever greater media landscapes of tomorrow. I usually don’t get in the habit of cheering for the big-guy on the playground or the marketplace, but I do now. Making my html/css compatible with the variety of browsers is a huge time-suck and frustration-peaking process - most especially with standards-based mutants like IExplorer. I demand relief. To author just once is a real ray of hopeful light on a bloody battlefield at the bottom of Sisyphus Hill. My main concern is that the authoring be as clean and designer-oriented a process as possible {as opposed to nerdy} and with the ActionScript 3 looking ever-more verbose this is a worry.

Caveat: As an old Director hand I have viewed the rise of Flash with annoyance. When Buzz Kettles showed me a prerelease version over a decade ago I could see the value of interactive vector-based media… but I was underwhelmed by the severely limited scripting control: Flash initially struck me as something that should have been an export option for Director. I’ll leave the awfulness of the Flash interface to other screeds - too easy a target. Anyway, Form and Function had some real accomplishments under our belt deploying Director technology and the notion of stepping backwards {remains} unappealing.
So… here we are, a decade later Flash + Flex is technically about where Director was when Flash 1.0 appeared. Sure, the Flex and ActionScript3 information-engines are better tuned for our streaming world of the XXIst, but the coding tolerances more finicky. Flash compiling has always struck me as a backwards direction w/ActionScript 1+2 kinda-sorta half-baked and far too geeky for easy-entry or pleasurable development. Declaring variables is more work than in previous versions, for example. I’m a designer primarily, although I can sort my way through scripts and even code - but the win here is to make that go away and focus on the task at hand: making eBay flyers, Shopping Carts, Wanted Ads and myriad mundane commercial things the great unwashed do daily. Otherwise this effort should rightfully be dismissed as expensive coffee-talk thought bubbles. This should get easier and higher-level as time marches on and not more brittle and harder to master for the designer. Blame it on residual sour grapes, but whatever it’s limits Lingo was forgiving and helped a fault-prone new technology keep it’s best foot forward. I really think Adobe has the logic side down and they need to open up to the creative direction and be sure the UI is focused on the creative professional until easy development is polished smooth and not gearhead-centric. Certainly better than anything from a certain Northwest technology cartel.

I’m not so sure the guiding hands at Adobe will allow more half-baked measures like Central that all-too often littered the MacroMedia landscape. And very importantly they appear to be enforcing a level of quality control discipline that has been long overdue… and I dare say this was something of the legacy you left at MacroMind. I’ve worked under you directly as an independent developer and I will testify you can be demanding and exacting in the best sense of visionary activist entrepreneur terms, but MacroMind/Media was always too ready to ship before Prime Time. My daily struggles with DreamWeaver are the latest case in point. Compare the {so-called} WYSIWYG efforts of the last DW -vs- MicroSoft’s FrontPage : I listen to co-workers bitch vehemently over these differences daily.

If Adobe can just keep focused on the designer and not the geek, then Adobe scores a quick landslide victory before the other players can respond. They’ve got this year to hone the front end authoring. So, I’m holding my breath and jumping off the cliff into these waters. The risk is justified and upside enormous for breaking down technical barriers as they are doing and I have more confidence in Adobe staying power than anything else on the horizon. I do feel naked booting without QuickTime, but I know it’ll be a heckuva ride all the way down whatever temperature the water ends up. And it looks like I’ll have some company.

Viva, la revolucion!

PS - as an aside, the bulk of this commentary was posted to Apollo architect Kevin Lynch’s corporate-sponsored “personal” blog-thang [”Apollo alpha” http://www.klynch.com/archives/000086.html a week ago and he has not seen fit to pass it long to the public. If you look at the comments he’s allowed it’s all cheerleading and back-slapping. I think I can safely say that particular outlet is more PR than anything resembling the scientific method or an open-community and I am disappointed as I extend bull-shite detectors aquiver.

Could it also be because he liked to build his own team in a bureaucratic-free environment?

Other than that, I call disingenuous on what you say. If Apollo takes off, its pieces will be reverse-engineered left and right, tools will be created and from that point on Adobe will not be able to cut the air supply like you said. You talk more like a disgruntled ex-MACR than anything else.

Ephemeral, fragile interfaces built on a house of cards are the junky work of shortsighted fools.

I’ve never been a fan of Flash. ColdFusion was an over-priced under-performing beast and Flex was slightly less fun developing in than banging my head against a wall and hoping to get code out. But I know it’s got its advocates so I’ll let ‘em slug it out while I get on with real work

DEVELOPERS DEVELOPERS DEVELOPERS DEVELOPERS!