Apollo, why so much excitement?

In these 2 days I read only Apollo related news, post and video tutorials! I dont think there is still someone who dont know about the public alpha of Apollo 🙂
I see much more excitement than for a new Flash player release.

I’m sure Apollo will be a great product, I’m just testing it right now (even if I sill have  no idea about what to create with it… but it’s another story), but to be honest I can see anything so revolutionary there.
Unfortunately I dont have so much experience with desktop flash suff (just a couple of little projects using mdm and some experiments with XUL)
What’s the difference and innovation compared with MDM Zinc, Screenweaver, Xul Runner, and all the other flash desktop integration kits?
I just hope I can find the time to use it much more in the future to give me an answer…

From A to Web memories

Yesterday I attended the Italian Adobe conference, From A to Web, in Milan.
I like expecially the Mike Downey presentation, in which he showm us a sneak peak of the new Adobe project, codename “Apollo”.
A PDF+Flash+HTML plugin viewer for creating desktop applications (so, goodbye Zinc and similar?). Someone asked him which html engine was used in apollo, but without a precis answer, I think he was referring to Geko…
Also interesting the Mike’s explanation about the reason of the name “Apollo”.
That’s because the first Central codename was “Mercury” (early American program for launching humans into space) the second beta codename was “Gemini” (the second US manned spaceflight program), and Apollo was the first ship to land the Moon

Then he introduced also a preview of the new Flash9 IDE (currently in beta process, codename “Blaze”) and he shown some of the new IDE features. First of all the IDE has changed (like in almost new releases) and there are very cool workspace management cool features indeed.
A completely integrated Photoshop PSD import process. You can select which element of the psd file to be imported and how to do it, select one of the layers and import as movieclip, etc.. very nice for designers (There was a long applause).
Another features he presented was the Robert Penner export as ActionScript3 of timeline tweens. This should be for developers who need to transform the timeline motion tweens created by designer into code (Another long applause). For what I understand it creates an xml code which can be put into the timeline and which reproduce the original tween. But I also understand that the produced code can only be used into the same timeline (a timeline with the same number of frames)..,

MDM “Designer Vs Developer” Contest

MDM has lauched a flash contest for both Designers and Developers.
The prize is a Flash Goodie Bag with $1000 of Flash Software for each winner.

Check out the Designer Brief and the Developer Brief.
The two Contest winners (one from each category) will each receive a Flash Goodie Bag which includes over $1000 worth of Flash software including:

One Runner up from each contest will also receive a prize of MDM Zinc v2.5.

Launch Date: Monday 24 July 2006
Closing Date: Thursday 31 August 2006