Adobe Apollo VS. Dekoh Desktop: The Gloves Come Off
Read/Write Web has a write up comparing Apollo and Dekoh Desktop. While the writeup was interesting, the comments proved much more entertaining as Adobe's Mike Chambers & John Dowdell chimed in to clear up some misconceptions about Apollo and put the feature comparison into proper perspective. One of the biggest arguments mentioned in favor of Dekoh was the fact that its open source and honestly I don't buy that argument. Just because a product is open source doesn't give it an edge. If that were the case, Gimp would be the preferred photo editing tool and Linux would be the de facto standard for the desktop. I think open source definitely has its merits but its not without its drawbacks. And I think Adobe has done a fine job of managing Flash and I think Apollo will do just fine even though its proprietary. Either way, it looks like Dekoh is ready to go toe-to-toe with Adobe in the desktop/web apps space and its going to be interesting to see who takes the lead. You can check it out here: Dekoh Challenges Apollo As Desktop/Web Platform
I'm also looking forward to see where XUL goes. There is a tremendous amount of support behind Firefox (look at all the extensions).
And what I'd really like to see is a USEFUL application. Music player - got one already. Photo album - got one already. Desktop widgets - wheres the airsickness bag... Someone needs to come up with something really clever that shows off the benefits of using this technology.
I do agree that it's going to be interesting to see how this all plays out. :)
Let's see what happens! :)
As far as usefulness of a desktop app, do you have a thin client for easy managment and maintenance of wordpress? vBulletin? {insert your web app of choice here}?
Don't take a small company for granted or dismiss them. I've seen the David & Goliath scenario too many times over the years to dismiss a small player. Ryan Stewart felt they were important enough to blog about here: http://blogs.zdnet.com/Stewart/?p=275 and according to him, the company has been in business since 1998 and profitable the last 3 years.
Anyone remember a little company called "Google" :)
@Joel - in regards to using a desktop application to maintain blogs, etc - I've tried a few and they all had various shortcomings for my use anyway.
I meant Dekwho in the literal sense. I'd never heard even a whimper of its existance prior to Apollo's release. I'm sure it is a neat technology that does almost the same thing as Apollo/Flex, without the Adobe CS integration and 95% pre-install coverage of the player. Good luck with that.
The book catalog app looked neat. I am working on a similar Flex project. I don't feel compelled in the slightest to even look at Dekoh and see if for some marginal reason it might be a valid platform. Call me a biased fan boi, but Adobe has won me over. Maybe when the Dekoh team gets those "coming soon" pages finished off I will understand what you are talking about.
The above is just my rash first blush judgment on a technology I know nothing about. My money is on Adobe (literally in many respects) if the gloves are off. They've pushed in a very positive direction and have the benefit of hiring top industry talent at competitive wages to continue this push. Does anybody else notice Adobe hoovering talent?
I don't think it's fair to compare these two frameworks. If Flex/Apollo wasn't free, then I could see the point, but since it is, not so much. I don't mean this to disparage the people working on the project, or to try and convince people not to use it. I just have my doubts as to whether I will ever be running a Dekoh Personal Server.