Adobe Systems is planning to offer more details later this month on its Apollo project, designed to run rich Internet applications
offline on PCs, its president said in an interview on Thursday.
The Apollo cross-operating system run time will provide a way for developers to build applications drawing on Adobe technologies
including PDF (Portable Document Format), Flash and Flex, or with JavaScript, Ajax (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) and HTML
(Hypertext Markup Language), in a single environment. It will be released for Windows and Mac OS X. Until now such applications
have typically relied on Internet resources and had limited access to local files but Apollo could change that, said Shantanu
Narayen, president and chief operating officer of Adobe.
Adobe expects to release Apollo next year, and will give details of the project at its Adobe Max conference in Las Vegas between
Oct. 23 and Oct. 26, he said.
"Max is coming up in a couple of weeks, which is our annual developer conference and we'll be unveiling more progress about
Apollo at that time," said Narayen. "We've been making good progress internally."
"We're not yet laying out the complete roadmap but what we are doing is working with a set of developers to make sure it's
right," he said. "Our goal is when it's available in the marketplace as an early beta for people to play with and develop
applications, we want to make sure we've already incorporated as much feedback as we can."
Narayen said the early beta release should be available to a limited set of developers this year.