Christophe Herreman

Yesterday we had a very cool user group meeting where Mike Chambers and Mike Downey talked about Apollo and Flash CS3. I won’t go into much detail because Koen De Weggheleire already did. You can read his extended review about Mike Chambers on Apollo and Mike Downey on Flash CS3.

Since we are creating a lot of cross-platform (e-learning) applications, I was especially interested in Apollo. All the features we were shown looked awesome. The fact that you can render HTML inside a SWF and then actually have access to the HTML’s DOM is a killer feature (Flash SCORM player anyone?). Also, the ease of distributing Apollo apps and being able to create OS specific installers is very nice.

The only thing that is still missing in my opinion is database support. Although Apollo apps are Internet enabled, it would still be great (even necessary) if you could work offline and have an offline database. To accomplish this in our current apps, we need to create a Zinc version with an MS Access database and a Director version with a V12 database. This is too much work and leads to too much errors. If Apollo would solve this problem, I would be a very happy man. Besides my own happiness, I feel like it is a necessary feature in order for Apollo to be taken serious, especially by desktop developers.