April 10th, 2007
5 questions with Mike Chambers: '110,00 downloads of the Apollo runtime'
I had the chance to do a quick interview with Mike Chambers, the Senior Product Manager for Developer relations on the Apollo team. We chatted about the recent public release of Apollo, what the response has been like, and when we can expect the next public version of Apollo.
How many downloads have you had of the runtime and the SDK?
We have had over 110,000 downloads of the Apollo runtime since we released the alpha.
That’s a big jump over the numbers released a couple of weeks ago, what caused the boost?
Actually, there wasn't that big of a jump. We originally reported 40,000 downloads in the first week or so, but it turned out that number was wrong. We had some technical issues with our reporting infrastructure, which led to us under counting the downloads for the first week.
The first week downloads were actually around 85,000 downloads, and not the 40,000 that we originally reported.
What kind of feedback has the team been getting from those that download the alpha?
The overall feedback has been very positive. Most of feedback has been in the form of requests for features around things that we are already planning on doing, but which did not make it into the Alpha.
I think the biggest thing (aside from individual feature requests), is that a lot of people are trying to understand where Apollo fits in, and what its impact will be. Given that Apollo is in this new hybrid space between the browser and desktop, that is understandable. What we have seen, at least among developers, is that once they begin to actually start playing around with Apollo, they seem to get it pretty quickly.
Will we see any more public pre-releases on labs before the 1.0 release?
Yes. We are planning a beta release for the early summer.
Is there a "most surprising" application that the team has seen since Apollo has been publicly available?
Yeah, that would probably have to be Scrapblog. We were really blown away about how quickly they were able to turn their existing web based application into an Apollo application.
I also have to mention the FineTune Apollo application (Ryan's note: This was officially released today). I can't tell you how many people I have heard people say they basically got rid of iTunes because of FineTune on the desktop. It is a great application that really shows how an Apollo application can compliment an existing web application.
Ryan Stewart, a Rich Internet Application developer and industry analyst, recently joined Adobe's Platform Team as a Rich Internet Application Evangelist. full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
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