Xylem Interactive combined with Creation Chamber to produce this launch party. In fact, between the time Apollo Ranch was launched and the actual event, Xylem and Creation Chamber merged to form an even larger interactive agency. The new entity, Xylem CCI, rented the planetarium on the campus of CU and brought in key Adobe talent and other interactive developers to showcase Adobe's new development platform called Apollo.

Apollo was originally launched at Apollo Camp, this Rocky Mountain version was named Apollo Ranch. So, what is Apollo? Apollo seems to be an evolution of Macromedia's 2002 vision for rich Internet applications (RIA). At it's very base, Apollo is a runtime that includes the new Flash Player 9 along with the open source Webkit browser platform (Webkit powers Apple's Safari and Konqueror). Essentially, Apollo is a virtual machine for developers that focus on interactivity. This is not the first time this approach has been tried - JVM originally smelled a lot like Apollo. Even Macromedia tried this under the banner "Central" which were standalone web applications that ran against the Flash runtime. This time around, there are more development tools including Flex, and a lot of promises of "moving to the desktop".

These technologies have evolved fairly quickly and with Microsoft and Mozilla joining or heading towards this space, Apollo will not be alone. This seeming instability seems well suited for the interactive developer. The interactive developer is charged with being creative and providing unique customer experiences. A mature development platform would likely mean more convergence of the creative effort, so I got the feeling that Adobe acknowledges this and doesn't have to deliver a product that stands still.

Apollo's goal is to break out of the security and creative restrictions of the browser by accessing local files and even being able to work offline.

I was struck by an observation that Microsoft built an enormous developer community based almost completely on the desktop and tools like VB. Over the last few years, they have been trying to move these developers towards internet standards. Meanwhile, Macromedia made much of their efforts strictly towards online efforts. Now, under the Adobe banner, the Flash platform is moving from Internet to desktop.