neurofuzzy, flash game development, rich internet applications, free source code - *alt.neurotica.fuzzy*

I may be excited about Apollo for different reasons than most Flash developers out there. Bringing Flash to the desktop opens up a lot of possibilities, but it’s nothing new. Tools like SWF Studio, Zinc, and mProjector have been doing it for years. What I’m really excited about is being able to build applications using HTML and Ajax.

I may be biased because I’m not a Flex developer, but for complex application interfaces it’s much easier for me to build them in HTML than Flash. At least from my experience, HTML is much more flexible. It’s faster to render, more responsive and flexible for varying and large amounts of content, and much better for working with text. When I am tasked to build complex user interfaces or dynamically-generated content in Flash, I find myself building systems to do what browsers do automatically when they render HTML. Again, Flex addresses some of these issues, but I personally have not had the need to use Flex.

Also, there are so many free toolkits out there to make HTML and Javascript-based applications look and work like real desktop applications. Great tools like TinyMCE, qForms, and MochiKit can really help a developer to make robust, feature-rich web applications very quickly. I’m not sure how these would behave in the Apollo space, but I hope they could be leveraged there.

Personally, I wonder whether applications that are built on Flex are reaching the full potential that could be reached visually within Flash. For instance, and I realize that this is just a sample, but the Fresh application on Adobe labs is an example of what I am saying. Such an application could just as easily have been built in dot NET or Visual Basic. Since Flash is such an incredible, almost limitless platform for creating beautiful, rich, dynamic interfaces, I wonder why applications like this don’t break free of the old conventions.

I’m hoping that the Webkit portion of the Apollo runtime will allow us to create the more traditional complex user-interfaces for the more utilitarian applications, and the Flash portion could be explored more for new, unconventional interfaces and rich data visualization.