KrisWillis.com

Apollo is the code name for a cross-operating system runtime being developed by Adobe that allows web developers to use their existing skills to build and deploy Internet applications to the desktop that combine the benefits of web applications – network and user connectivity, rich media content, ease of development, and broad reach – with the strengths of desktop applications – application interactions, local resource access, personal settings, powerful functionality, and rich interactive experiences.

Apollo is currently in alpha with support for HTML, JavaScript and Flash – There is basic support for AJAX with more coming in v1.0 no doubt. The alpha currently is only supported on Windows and OS X although Linux will be supported shortly after the release of 1.0, this has something to do with the latest Flash player not being finished for Linux, or something.

So I guess this works in a similar way to Java in that it’s machine-independent, although less powerful no doubt but with a smaller resource footprint one would hope. This looks like one to keep an eye on. Check it out here.

For those of us that are developing web projects on a Linux box that are fed up with jumping over onto a Windows machine to test their code in Internet Explorer there is a nice and easy script called IEs4Linux that makes the process of installing MSIE 5, 5.5 and 6 onto a Linux box a breeze.

Although IEs4Linux doesn’t fully support IE7 yet, there is enough support in their latest beta for testing code on – It pretty much loads up the IE7 rendering engine into an IE6 GUI, although there are still bugs, it should work well enough for testing.

Check out IEs4Linux here.