In further helping to middle the line between desktop and web, Adobe held an event this week to showcase the promise of the Apollo platform. For those that don't know, Apollo seems to be the Flash runtime bundled with an HTML renderer and Javascript VM in a desktop application harness. It's supposed to allow developers to write hybrid web/desktop applications that can run offline and take advantage of local services.

Then just yesterday, Adobe's CEO announced that they are going to launch a hosted web-based version of Photoshop for those "light-weight" photo editing tasks.

I continue to scratch my head over the Apollo platform mostly because it seems so incredibly ambitious and because I really do have a hard time understanding whether it is going to do anything meaningful for adoption (the real problem that rich client software which does not ship on the platform has these days).

My guess would be that the devil will be in the details— after all, the JVM could have owned this layer on the client 10 years ago if a) it wasn't a 10MB download, b) it didn't take 45 seconds to boot, and c) it didn't run and look like a pig. Instead Flash beat it to the punch because it was less that 1MB and much less ambitious. Less is more— which is what is also something that is weird about Apollo. Why dial the ambition back up when they could do so much by just continuing to extend Flash?

As I think about a site like Tabblo, I realize that we would just love to see Apollo deployed on every computer— our users constantly have to struggle with the pain of crossing the desktop-web membrane with their big photos, our engineering team is well-trained in the ways of the browser frame and ECMAscript/Javascript, and there is tons we'd love to see done with the local CPU that we could completely offload from our image front-ends. At the same time I have a hard time believing that if this was going to such a huge win for us, we wouldn't find other clever ways of putting a footprint down on the desktop (see this clever OSX-specific way to run a browser frame as a full flown application).

And while I am on the devil in the details, one huge win from Adobe betting on Apollo internally could be a properly instrumented version of Online Photoshop that sites like Tabblo could easily embed into our experience. We've had tons of inbound interest to partner with the myriad of "online photo editors," that are out and while the promise is always there, for the most part, startups are like mosquitoes looking to sting: not all that likely to work for all when done in groups. On the other hand, easily being able to integrate with the 800-lb gorilla is a tide that would truly lift all boats.