Transcript for videoApollo demo at DEMO 07 conference
Mike Downey (January 30, 2007)
I'm Mike Downey from Adobe.
Today I'm going to show you something new that we're working on: a new project, code-named Apollo. Apollo is a cross-operating system runtime that allows you to install desktop applications that are built using web technologies like HTML, JavaScript, and Flash.
Now, these applications can be built by any web developer using tools and skills that they already have. Since Apollo is a runtime, it doesn't really have a user interface that I can show you. So to show you some of the things that Apollo can do, I'm actually going to walk you through an application that is currently being built for Apollo by eBay.
On my desktop here, I'm going to start by browsing to eBay's website. So I'll just switch to my browser and go to eBay. Now a user could find on eBay's website a simple install badge. Here at the top of the page we have: Install eBay Desktop. That will download and kick off the installer for the Apollo application. A few easy clicks, and we've now got a desktop app installed.
First thing we'll do is go ahead and search for an item on eBay. Now, I happen to be in the market for a Nintendo Wii, a gaming system, um... for my little brother. (Laughter) Actually, I think I'll install it and check it out first, just to make sure it works before... (Laughter). Actually, I think I'll just keep it at my house, then he can use it when he comes to visit me.
So... "Wii gaming"... whoops, let's see... "Wii console bundle." All right, so I'll search for that. It brings in all the results. This is all live, pulling right off of eBay's servers.
The first thing I'll do is go ahead and watch one of these auctions. We'll just pick one in here. This one has seven bids on it, so let's take that. It gives me a little detail that I can drill in on. I'm going to drag it down to my watch icon here, let go, and it pulls up my watch list. I'm already watching a few other Wii auctions, but in this watch list I can do some nice things, like sort by price, so I can find the lowest priced auction very easily.
Now Apollo also gives you the ability to build apps that read and write files to the disk. So we can add functionality like eBay is adding to take an icon and drag my watch list, with all its data and just drag it out onto the desktop, and it creates an Excel spreadsheet.
So if I just hide the app in the browser there, you'll see that it actually wrote out an Excel spreadsheet on my desktop. I'll double-click that. You can see it load in all the real data—this is stuff I just added—and now I can repurpose this data. I could maybe run an equation that tells me the average price of everything in my watch list. So, that's just one example of what we could do with this information.
Now, switching back to the eBay Desktop, the next thing we'll do is bid on an item. Luckily, I'm actually logged in with my boss's account right now, including his real credit card. So, anybody else want a Wii? (Laughter)
I'll go ahead and place a bid on one of these. Let's see, this one... Well, let's take this first one. We'll bid $195. Now, after I place my bid, if somebody outbids me, it's going to actually give me a notification of that. So, as we're going, if somebody goes in and outbids me, we'll see a bubble pop up and tell me that I've been outbid. Apollo fully supports both application-level and system-level notifications, so we can create some really good functionality for a desktop app.
So we've placed our bid. We've browsed, placed a bid, and now the next step we're going to do—which happens to be my favorite—is to sell an item. So, to sell an item, I'm going to actually live dangerously—I like living dangerously when I do demos—I'm going to pull the network connection. I'm now offline.
If we switch back to my machine, we'll see that it says eBay Desktop is now disconnected. You can continue working offline. Now this is really important about Apollo: It lets you build offline applications and there's a full API for synchronizing data whenever you are actually online.
So we'll switch to "Sell Item" and we're actually going to sell a real item today. We're going to put a real live auction up. I'd like all of you to participate if you're interested. We're going to auction off an Apollo T-shirt. I have it right here… signed by [DEMO Conference Executive Producer] Chris Shipley. And we're going to donate the proceeds to Chris' favorite foundation, the Summer Search Foundation for Disadvantaged Youth. So we're going to put a live auction up, a three-day auction.
Let's start by creating an item. I'll click on "Create Item." If I didn't want to go through the hassle of getting out my digital camera and taking shots, Apollo apps can leverage things like the webcam, so let's go ahead and use our webcam to create an image. Let's hold that up and say... capture that one. Then let's add another one. Maybe you want to see the T-shirt sideways; maybe you want to zoom in on the autograph there, to capture that.
When I've captured a couple of images—since this particular Apollo application is built using Flash technology, mixing in some HTML—it can do cool effects like this [shows photos flipping], so we can sort through our images. All right.
To speed this up, so I don't actually have to fill in all the rest of these details, I've actually created a saved version of this that I've already populated a lot. I'm going to go ahead and add one more image file, to show that you can do that also. So I have one other image that we've taken. That's in there.
Now remember that I'm still offline. But I'm going to go ahead and post my auction anyway. So I click "Post." It's telling me it's not posted yet, but it's all there in the queue.
So now I'll go ahead and plug this back in. And in a few seconds—Apollo has its own API for detecting when we're online and offline—it'll notify the application that we're back online again. You'll see there in the lower left corner that eBay Desktop is now reconnected. It's uploading that auction live, so it synchronized all of that. And now it tells me that it's posted.
Before I switch over and show you that all of this stuff works exactly the same on multiple operating systems, we'll switch to Windows in just a second. First I want to show you another cool thing, an advantage of Apollo.
Since this is all built using web technologies, developers have the option to do something kind of unique for a desktop app: You can right-click and say "View Source." Here's the source code for this application.
As you can see, eBay is working with a great development agency called effectiveUI. They've integrated all of this, much like iJot was, it is built using Flex technology for building Flash-based applications.
Last quick one here: Let's switch over to Windows. Apollo apps install just like any other desktop app. So we end up with desktop icons. I can double-click on this. We're going to go ahead and search for that item we just posted. So... "Apollo T-shirt signed by Chris Shipley." Search for that. And there it is! It's live. This came right off of eBay's server. So I hope you guys will participate in that.
Again, just to quickly summarize: Apollo is a cross-operating system runtime that allows you to install desktop applications built using web technologies, such as HTML, JavaScript, and Flash. We're planning to ship a developer release within the next couple of months. If you want any more information about what we're working on here, we'd love to hear from you. We're at Booth 23 [at DEMO 07]. Come by and see us.
Thank you everyone!
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