Developers say that if Adobe can overcome some of the possible obstacles—such as the challenge of cross-platform compatibility, and potential file bloat if a freestanding Apollo application will need some sort of embedded player—they can envision niches where the technology could become quite useful.

Show organizer Chris Smith said Adobe stands to improve the reach of Flash and PDF beyond their current boundaries. Without the current browser constraints of Flash, he said, Apollo media will be able to hit more devices.

"It's a huge advantage, being able to reach into Mac users, Windows users, Unix users, regardless of the operating system," he said, giving the example that a media company publishing magazines via Apollo would be able to tell advertisers that they truly can reach every potential reader out there, without skipping over a particular platform as they might currently have to.

Bob Connolly's Canadian firm, PDF Pictures, has been creating Apollo-like documents for years by pushing the PDF format's multimedia capabilities to the bleeding edge, operating under a government grant to port the country's television programming to PDF for Webcasting.

Connolly said the potential for incorporating Web pages into Apollo files without the browser, plus Flash's communication with Web-based databases, could be the perfect combination he's been seeking for years.

He added that the merger between Adobe and Macromedia has already paid dividends in his work: Before, the integration of Flash files into PDF was sometimes difficult or impossible, depending on what you wanted to do, such as interacting with ColdFusion servers. But once the two companies got together, Adobe solved most of the problems he'd experienced with the first update (Acrobat Pro 7.0.7) after the merger.

Potentially, Connolly said, one could create continually updated news, video and RSS feeds in Apollo documents that users can double-click from the desktop and consume without Explorer, Firefox or Safari. The content providers will be happy, because they'll control advertising placement and appearance, updating them as they wish, while users will like the experience, he said.

"I think [that in Acrobat 8 and Apollo, Adobe] will let you link to an HTML file and it will just flow into a page, so that part of the page will be dynamic," Connolly said. "So you'll download, for example, Popular Mechanics, in the Apollo format; it will launch full-screen, outside the browser … and PDF will be the container."

Acrobat 8 remains conspicuously absent at the AGI Acrobat & PDF Conference. Click here to read more.

If they can make Apollo applications as simple to create as PDFs, not just in former Macromedia apps, but also in Acrobat and InDesign—and keep the resultant files thin—that might lead to widespread adoption, other developers opined. At first, though, it probably will be more accessible to the Flash crowd, and people coming from the PDF realm will have a steep learning curve.

"There's quite a lot of advanced stuff you can do with Flash," said Karl de Abrew, CEO of ARTS PDF, in Pleasanton, Calif. "It's pretty impressive compared to what you can do with PDF. You can do similar things with PDF, but it's an awful lot of work."

The cynics among the Orlando crowd suggested that if Microsoft thought of Apollo applications as a threat—and it should—Redmond might make changes to Windows that complicated clean playback of Flash, therefore rendering Apollo buggy.

Leading PDF consultant and former Acrobat team member Leonard Rosenthol of PDF Sages, based in Huntingdon Valley, Pa., said he doesn't see Apollo catching on to the point where the user on the street will someday be able to crank out desktop apps, but said he does see its usefulness.

"I think there's a current class of applications that currently are Web-hosted—anything from Google Maps to Yahoo Finance to a totally Flash-based e-mail client I've seen, with all the functionality of Outlook—those are all hosted in your Web browser, and they are restricted by it," Rosenthol said. "But if you could take all those same capabilities and have it act just like the real Outlook and make it double-clickable on the desktop, it's a better end-user experience. But it [appeals] only to a certain class of developers."

FormRouter Chief Technology Officer and founder Jim Healy—whose company stands to benefit every time Adobe increases PDF's browser independence, but also remains heavily invested in HTML forms technology—said he thinks Apollo is an interesting Adobe play to control the interface.

In other words, if a PDF document can interact with the Web without the Internet Explorer "chrome" surrounding it, that gives Adobe leverage over Microsoft it didn't have before.

"Whoever controls the interface wins," Healy said. "Microsoft controls the interface for the desktop, therefore they win when it comes to providing solutions ... Apollo is an attempt to reach closer and deliver full apps that are going to allow them to compete directly against companies like Microsoft by controlling the front end."

Thom Parker, owner of WindJack Solutions, in Portland, Ore., said that if Adobe can get around the bandwidth issues that run-time files often have if they require an embedded player, Apollo could be an exciting development for people who use forms and other interactive documents.

"It's really interesting, I see there's a need for it," Parker said, adding that at this point, anything anyone says about Apollo outside of Adobe is pure speculation. Developers will know much more about it once they get to play around with Apollo later this year when Adobe releases a public version.

But if the files aren't thin enough, he said, "Unfortunately, everybody does have a browser, everybody does have Flash."

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