Launching Apollo: Mike Downey

Adobe’s Apollo project is an ambitious undertaking: A rich application platform that combines the ubiquity and power of Adobe’s Flash and PDF formats with the user experience standards set by modern Ajax applications. With the release of today’s alpha test version of the platform, the team has reached an important milestone. But for the product to succeed, it’s going to take a lot of conversations with the developers, businesses, and eventually the actual users of Apollo for the platform.

With the success of such a huge project relying on a strong dialogue between Adobe and its community, we had to mark the release of the Apollo alpha by making Mike Downey’s blog our Movable Type Featured Blog. Mike is the Senior Product Manager for Apollo at Adobe, and he’s been blogging on Movable Type as part of the Adobe Blogs community for years, including back in the Macromedia days before the companies merged. And the same is true for other Apollo team members — folks like Mike Chambers are must-subscribe bloggers for any fan of Adobe technology.

So if you want to see what’s coming down the road from Adobe, be sure to take a look at blogs like Mike’s, and then head over to the Adobe Labs site to grab the code and start hacking. But don’t be shy about feedback — the Adobe team has distinguished themselves from day one by really listening to the comments and blog posts that people write about their products.