Traditionally tight-lipped about products in development, Adobe offered PDFzone new information about its upcoming Apollo technology, which has been shown in bits and pieces at a few Flash developer conferences in the last year.

"This is the natural evolution of what [Adobe and Macromedia] have been promoting for a long time," said Todd Hay, Adobe director of platform marketing and developer relations. "A lot of our core community really sees PDF not as a portable document format but rather a portable application container."

The idea behind Apollo, Hay said, is to enable apps currently made from Flash and PDF to "move beyond the browser" by assigning Flash-based apps a desktop icon that can be launched like traditional apps and utilities.

"It's incorporating the skills that people are using with HTML and adding to that much tighter integration with the desktop," Hay said. "So it's kind of a bridging the worlds of the in-browser Flash experience and the desktop client Reader experience—but focused on the delivery of a new form of rich-media applications."

Apollo will also bridge the print and software world, traditionally Adobe's bailiwick, with the exuberance of the third-party developer market, which was Macromedia's bread-and-butter.

Flash developers probably will have a head start in creating Apollo apps, but Hay said his team is working hard so PDF developers and those who work in HTML and AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript with XML) can start building apps in their familiar environments and then also enrich their productions with Flash.

One part of the Apollo team is working on giving Apollo application-like attributes such as wizard-style guides, and another part of the team is working to make Apollo integrate with forms created in Adobe Designer and Acrobat as Apollo apps.

Another interesting wrinkle Apollo promises to offer: Some Apollo apps could be built to save information offline such as, for example, a plane ticket reservation, and later automatically sync up with the server once the computer reconnects to the Web.

It's part of a long-term Adobe strategy to integrate PDF, Flash and HTML into a single "universal client," according to Adobe's Web site. In a News.com story, Kevin Lynch, chief software architect and senior vice president of Adobe's platform business unit, indicated that Adobe seeks to expand its network of third-party Acrobat and Flash developers to create Apollo apps.

"Apollo aims to create a cross-platform run-time that will allow you to develop desktop applications using traditional Web development," said Mike Chambers, an Adobe senior product manager who works on developer relations for the Apollo team, in his semi-regular podcast hosted on the Adobe site last month.

Chambers also dispelled rumors in the blogosphere that Adobe plans to merge the Flash Player and Adobe Reader into one fat browser plug-in.

For the Flash Forward show in Austin, Texas, this coming September, Chambers confirmed in his podcast that he's speaking at two sessions, one an overview of Apollo and another more instructional session on building your first Apollo application. That doesn't mean, however, that a version will be available to coincide with the show.

Hay added that Adobe plans to get a free Apollo public alpha download into developers' hands as quickly as possible on the Adobe Labs site so they can experiment with creating their own apps, but it won't be until much later this year. The idea, he said is to get developers experimenting with the services they already know how to engage and expand their use through Apollo.

When the technology finally gets released to the public, end users will likely be unaware of Apollo, as it will be an updated Reader and Flash Player download. Or, in the case of run-time apps, the Apollo components will be self-contained.

One thing Apollo will do, if it catches on: Help bury the myth once and for all that PDF is just a static, electronic photocopy of a paper document. Tossing in more rich, dynamic content into the PDF wrapper hitherto available only through a browser will help unlock its pent-up potential.

"I think the really compelling features of Apollo for the PDF developer is being able to expand beyond the document metaphor for those parts of the application that require that," Hay said, such as forms.

"Apollo may not be a significant value-add for them at first. But as they begin to add some of the additional capabilities—application UI or run-time, dynamic charting, financial information, taking better advantage of offline business logic and offline data—Apollo becomes a pretty compelling addition to the tools that they have in Reader and PDF."

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