Rey Bango

Flash developer Sean Moore has created a very nice Adobe Air cheat sheet. Be sure to get a copy here:

AIR Cheatsheets! FREE 7 Page PDF Download!

Adobe has announce their new Ajax Technology Center which introduces new technologies that make building rich internet applications easier and scalable. I've mentioned Adobe Air, their SDK & runtime to take your web apps to the desktop, a number of times and this is a great place to learn about it. You can also learn about their LiveCycle Data Services which allows Ajax applications to share data between various data stores and systems.

Props goes out to Adobe & O'Reilly for releasing the book Adobe Integrated Runtime (AIR) for JavaScript Developers Pocket Guide under a creative commons license.

Ajaxian's got the scoop here and the download link is here.

Thanks guys!

TechCrunch reported today about the Digg API Visualization Contestwhich was held to celebrate the release of the Digg API.

As TechCrunch stated (and I couldn't have worded it any better:
“Four of the ten finalists are Adobe Apollo based applications, remarkable for a platform launched just over 2 months ago.”

To be fair to TechCrunch, I don't want to cut and paste everything in the article but I will say that it certainly shows the viability of Apollo for providing desktop applications using tried and true web technologies. I don't see Apollo supplanting traditional desktop platforms such Microsoft's .Net coupled with Visual Studio/C#/VB etc but it is good to see an alternative to bring web apps to the desktop.

Read more about this here:
Digg API Visualization Contest Delivers Apollo Powered Applications

Mashable is reporting on 10 of the coolest Apollo apps out at the moment.
Apollo seems to be getting some traction which is a great thing. I'm looking forward to seeing how I'm going to leverage it in the future.

Mashable had a very cool posting about 7 new services built with the week-old Digg API. One of them really stuck out, at least for me, because of its use of Adobe Apollo.

DiggTop is a very cool application that lets you check out Digg articles via the desktop as opposed to sparking up a web browser. While I don't think its revolutionary, I do think its a good example of an Apollo app that *I* would find extremely useful. Digg is a monster to navigate at times and the DiggTop UI just makes it so much nicer to navigate.

Also, if you're into building RIAs and Web 2.0-style web apps, you should really be checking out Mashable. It truly is an up and coming social network news site and I've been finding the content much more timely, focused, and precise than TechCrunch, Read/Write Web or ValleyWag. Also Pete Cashmore, owner of Mashable, is *VERY* active with his users and actually responds to emails. Considering that his inbox must be swamped, I find the latter to be very refreshing and indicative of a person that understands how important his community is. Great job Pete.

Read/Write Web has a write up comparing Apollo and Dekoh Desktop. While the writeup was interesting, the comments proved much more entertaining as Adobe's Mike Chambers & John Dowdell chimed in to clear up some misconceptions about Apollo and put the feature comparison into proper perspective.
One of the biggest arguments mentioned in favor of Dekoh was the fact that its open source and honestly I don't buy that argument. Just because a product is open source doesn't give it an edge. If that were the case, Gimp would be the preferred photo editing tool and Linux would be the de facto standard for the desktop. I think open source definitely has its merits but its not without its drawbacks. And I think Adobe has done a fine job of managing Flash and I think Apollo will do just fine even though its proprietary.
Either way, it looks like Dekoh is ready to go toe-to-toe with Adobe in the desktop/web apps space and its going to be interesting to see who takes the lead.
You can check it out here:

Dekoh Challenges Apollo As Desktop/Web Platform