FlashLit.

The simplest Apollo web browser

It's official. Apollo Alpha 1 has launched!

Before you jump too far into Apollo coding, have a scan through the online Apollo docs and avail yourself of the freely downloadable PDF of the Apollo for Adobe Flex Developers Pocket Guide.

One of the coolest Apollo features is the new HTML rendering control and its Flex framework sibling, the HTML component. This post would feel naked without some kind of code snippet, so here's a super-simple but functional web browser in just three lines of code (or a few more if you count line breaks and closing tags :) ).

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<mx:ApolloApplication xmlns:mx="http://www.adobe.com/2006/mxml" 
   layout="vertical">

   <mx:TextInput id="urlTxt" 
      width="100%" 
      enter="html.location=urlTxt.text;"
      text="http://www.adobe.com/go/apollo" />

   <mx:HTML id="html" 
      width="100%" height="100%"
      location="http://www.adobe.com/go/apollo" />

</mx:ApolloApplication>

That example creates a single text field for entering a URL and an HTML component for loading the HTML and JavaScript content. When you press the Enter key in the text field, it sets the location property of the HTML control to the value of the text field, and then web page loads and displays.

You'll notice that most of the buttons and controls you expect to see in a real web browser -- Back and Next buttons, and so on -- don't come pre-packaged with the HTML component. We'll deal with that issue in the next post.

Apollo Camp in progress

We're midway through the Apollo Camp event here at the Adobe office in San Francisco. The level of customer interest is high. It's a very high-energy event, in spite of the late hour on a (mostly) work day.

It's great to see real-time blog posts popping up during the event. Ryan Stewart, Renaun Erickson, Josh Tynjala, Lee Brimelow, Mims Wright and others have already published posted great descriptions of the lead up to the event, the early talks (including Kevin Lynch's keynote), and of course the schwag. (It's great to see the the Apollo for Adobe Flex Developers Pocket Guide was part of the goodie bag. That way at least a few people will read it. :) )

New Apollo Pocket Guide

As Mike Chambers just announced on his blog, the new Apollo book that Mike, Jeff Swartz and I wrote is already up for preordering on Amazon.com. The tentative title is Apollo for Adobe Flex Developers Pocket Guide but that could change by the time it's published.

The book should come out at the same time as the public alpha for Apollo.

It's rare for an alpha release to be supported by published books, but we felt this release warranted it. Among other topics the book goes into some depth about Apollo's file access and HTML rendering capabilities. Mike has listed the table of contents in his blog post. He mentions that the book should also be available online shortly after the public alpha release date.