Adobe Labs has released an alpha version of its upcoming development environment, Apollo. (It replaces a higher-performance technology, Starbuck, which ran into stability problems. And that’ll be it for the cheap Battlestar Galactica references… at least in this post.)
(Alpha software is notorious for causing computers to burst into flames and run around the office while holding scissors, so download and use with caution.)
The promise is a technology to create applications that run on your desktop, but integrate your computer’s locally-stored data with content from the online world. And those applications can have interfaces that look nothing at all like the usual Windows or Macintosh application (heh- I just flashed on Kai’s Power Tools), drawing on technology such as Flash.
So just as applications traditionally associated with the desktop are migrating to the web (hello, Office 2.0), the web is putting down roots on your hard drive. And as web sites look more and more like applications, the boundary between your computer and the outside world is getting harder and harder to define.
