Advanced Apollo Application Development

Brent Rosenquist and Ethan Malasky talked a good deal about some of the features and APIs that are available in the yet to be released Apollo framework.

They started off the talk with a disclaimer that basically said Apollo is still in early development, and items are subject to change, but you wouldn't have known that based not only on how well the framework seems to be working, but also a lot of the applications that have been shown off so far this conference.

They went over what Apollo is, basically a cross-platform (Mac and PC) runtime environment for building desktop applications. Next they went over what makes up an Apollo file (.ar) including:

• Content files - swfs, html, pdfs


• Data Files - xml, txt


• Meta Data - XML (defines the properties of the application)

And these files are zipped up into a single deployment file. And when installed, these applications act no different that any other application running on the system. They have their own process and can use the systems default window settings and look.

They went on to talk about some of the capabilities in the window API including controlling the minimize, maximize and restore controls as well as going completely chromeless and not using the systems windows at all. Then they showed you can "blur" your application in and resize it while still maintaining the correct aspect ratio.

Finally they showed off the html embedding capabilities of Apollo including loading in the Adobe homepage and then manipulating the entire html sections alpha and rotation as well as blurring it, and the html scroll bars still worked as well as the links, even after being rotated nearly up side down. Here you can find more about how this is done.

All in all, it was a great session on some of the cool stuff you can easily do with Apollo.

More on html in Apollo tomorrow.

About Jens C Brynildsen

Jens has been working with Flash since version 3 came out. Since then, he's been an active member of the Flash community. He's created more than a hundred Flash games (thus the name of his blog) but he also creates web/standalone applications, does workshops and other consulting. He loves playing with new technology and he is convinced that the moment you stop learning you die (creatively speaking). Jens is also the Editor of this website.

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