Apollo: Use-case analysis

24 Mar 2007

I have been thinking about different use-case for Adobe Apollo platform.
I analysed Democracy Player, which I use a lot for watching and saving videos from web(internet). I can imagine, how much effort would have gone in making it cross-platform (MacOSX/Windows/Linux)?
With Apollo platform, making such things are lot easier, I can develop once and run it on different platforms (Windows, MacOSX, Linux-in-future) in consistent manner. Ok, I am not just repeating which was said for Java-client-applications, it's totally doable, possible and feasible to do that. There are some cool examples FineTune Desktop, YourMinis Desktop etc. Adobe Flash Player has gained the status of true cross-platform, Apollo would also do. I am confident about that.
Though, there are a few things that I would need in Apollo to implement all features of Democracy Player. Things I can't implement as of today (for Apollo Alpha runtime) are:-

• Play-back different media formats (mov, mpeg, wmv, divx, xvid, mp4 etc)
• Open ports or listen on ports or P2P capabilities. For example, to take complete advantage of Bittorrent protocol, client needs to open ports. Why?.

I am very hopeful, later releases of Apollo would solve these problems.