apollo

The Flickr API has opened up a lot of fun tools over the years. This morning we got a tip about Image Mosaic Generator, a free service that creates neat-looking picture mosaics of uploaded images. The service uses Flickr images to make up each mosaic and lets users save the end result to their hard drive. Images have a fair bit of variation, although you're likely to see a few repeats close up. The service doesn't link back to the original Flickr images, which is a bit disappointing, but as a result, handles the conversion from image to … Read more

SAN FRANCISCO--When Sun announced its new JavaFX scripting language Tuesday at the JavaOne trade show here, it looked to some like the company was trying to re-create what's already being done more widely with Adobe Systems' Flash and that Microsoft hopes to accomplish with its Silverlight software.

But JavaFX, which is geared to make it easier to build flashy Web sites and Java desktop applications but which isn't yet released as a final product, stands out from those competitors, Sun Chief Executive Jonathan Schwartz argued at a news conference.

Java is already used on the servers that power … Read more

Google is renaming its personal home page iGoogle tonight. Google is also adding a new tool called Gadget Maker that helps people create their own widgets for use on their iGoogle page. The Gadget Maker comes with seven templates, including two media gadgets to pull in content from YouTube and online and offline photo collections. Users will also be able to organize their personal space with a countdown timer and a simple 10 item to-do list. There's also a free-form widget that lets a user mix together various media such as text and pictures.

This is a step in … Read more

[Note: This post has been updated with a video taken from today's keynote from the Web 2.0 Expo, to see it click the 'read more' link at the bottom of the post]

Today Adobe announced their new Media Player, a multi-platform, online-enabled application that runs on Adobe's Apollo framework. Along with a full featured desktop media player for Flash files, Adobe plans on including a themed online music store like Microsoft's XBOX Live Marketplace where people can purchase music and movies.

Adobe Media Player will join the bevy of online music and media stores like iTunes, Napster, Urge, Rhapsody and others. Like the competition, Adobe is using DRM, both for downloads and streaming media to secure purchased content.

There's no word when the service will be available, but expect details and partnerships to emerge as Apollo develops.

From their keynote presentation today, we also got a sneak peak of Buzznote, a collaborative word processor that runs off the Apollo framework.

Our early hands-on with Apollo can be found here. And to see a video of the app in action, keep reading.… Read more

Here's a new Web app that will knock you flat: Scrapblog. In development since last year, the site finally went public on Monday, April 2. It's a service for creating online multimedia packages, in particular, collections of photos and videos. As you might gather from the name, its designers want to deliver a level of flexibility that's similar to what you get when you're building a real-world scrapbook.

With Scrapblog, it's easy to place photos anywhere on a page, rotate them, crop them, and so on. The same for videos--but so far, you can get … Read more

I just got a preview of the new version of Joyent Connector, the slick work-group app I covered last year. The interface has been cleaned up a bit (not that it was bad to begin with), but the big news is that Joyent is announcing an offline version of its service. By the end of April, Joyent users will be able to get a downloadable client for the service that lets them access their work-group data even when their PC is disconnected.

Joyent's client app uses the company's new platform, which it calls Slingshot. This tool provides a … Read more

YourMinis, the popular single page aggregator service, has launched desktop integration with its library of over 14 million widgets, using Adobe's Apollo technology. After installing the Apollo runtime and the YourMinis Apollo plug-in on your PC or Mac, you can simply click on any widget in the YourMinis library and click "Add to Desktop." Likewise, there's the option to send any widget to the Web if you'd prefer it to stay on one of your YourMinis pages. It's really well-done.

Once they're on your desktop, you can drag them around, change colors, transparency … Read more

Adobe announced on Sunday night that it was releasing the first public alpha version of the Apollo runtime, which will allow end users to run Apollo applications. A few hours later, the downloads--the runtime Apollo client as well as a developer's kit--appeared on the company's site.

Apollo is the new framework that allows developers to build rich applications that run without a browser, yet still take advantage of the Adobe Flash expertise that they've been using for the past few years to create cool Web-based apps. Like many other industry watchers, I've written very enthusiastic stories … Read more

Demo 07 is over. Erica Ogg and I scoped out almost all of the 68 introductions at the show, and it was hard to pick out the best. But we did it anyway. Here are our favorite products from Demo:

Vuvox: Gorgeous multimedia presentation creation tool, designed for the MySpace and MTV crowd. Best demo of a Web app I've ever seen.

Jaman: Indie film site. What makes this service so good? Is it the HD quality, or the community? Nope. It's the content. The team is jetting to all the good film festivals and buying up the … Read more