« Sneak Peeks at Flashforward | Main | Got Flex? »
February 20, 2007
Apollo Buzz at FoWA
I'm in London this week where I'll be speaking at the Future of Web Applications conference on Wed morning. My talk is going to be about some of the key things Adobe has been doing to improve the web application platform for apps running in the browser and how we're enabling developers to apply their existing skills to building desktop apps with Apollo.I'll be highlighting our work on the EcmaScript committee to improve JavaScript, our collaboration with Mozilla on the Tamarin project to improve the virtual machine technology in both Firefox and the Flash Player, and of course what we've done with Flex to make Flash development comprehensible to developers coming from a client or web dev background.
Since I'm speaking on day 2, I was able to experience some of the Apollo buzz, and it's pretty huge. In his talk this morning, which opened the conference, Michael Arrington from TechCrunch said that Apollo is one of the great opportunities for those seeking to start new web businesses, and predicted that there would be a number of new companies founded based on Apollo! I was pretty blown away by how strongly he came out in favor of it.
I also hung around the Adobe booth and talked to a ton of people who were really interested in learning more about Apollo, so there's definitely a lot of excitement about what we're doing.
The only downer about the show for me is an erroneous assumption I seem to have made. When I present, I love to give demos, rather than just going through a set of slides. Since this was a conference about "Web Applications", I assumed that there would be internet access, at least for presenters! Well, I was wrong.
It turns out that British Telecom mistakenly disconnected the phone lines that were installed for the show a couple of days before it began and there's no way to turn them on again. Oooppsss! The publically available (and very expensive) BT wireless was unbelievably slow today, but I'm keeping my fingers crossed that it will work better tomorrow. We've have cobbled together a bit of a backup plan, but hopefully the wireless Gods will be on my side tomorrow so I can continue building the Apollo buzz with some great demos!
Posted by Mark Anders at February 20, 2007 03:09 PM