Saas firms will simply love Firefox 3 for its offline feature Monday, February 12, 2007

I wrote the other day about Adobe's Apollo which will enable online applications to run offline. Read/Write web have a report that emerged from FooCamp New Zealand that Firefox v3 will deliver support for offline applications.

If they weren't doing so already, this will galvanise Saas providers into pushing Firefox as the browser of choice, since it will hugely advance their cause by tackling one of the issues surrounding Saas apps, namely loss of connection to the service. Whilst some may be concerned about offending Microsoft, the benefits to the customer that it promises surely outweigh the upside of neutrality.

Given that both Adobe and Mozilla are addressing this issue, I imagine some resources are being marshalled over at Microsoft HQ to figure out how to do the same.

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posted by John Wilson @ 10:45 AM Permanent Link ,

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Adobe's Apollo looks set to transform online/offline divide Sunday, February 04, 2007

I'm going through the demo videos from Demo 07 which are available on the site, starting with the letter "A".

Adobe trailed their forthcoming Apollo product which looks set to transform the development of some applications. According to Adobe

It's a cross-operating system runtime that allows developers to leverage their existing Web development skills in HTML, JavaScript, AJAX, Flash and Flex in order to build and deploy rich Internet applications (RIAs) to the desktop. Apollo applications can engage audiences anywhere, anytime, allowing users to interact with RIAs, to experience interactive media and to collaborate on information and documents outside the constraints of the browser.

So, you can build applications for the web using familiar tools, and then create a desktop version. Better yet, the online and offline instances of the resultant applications can be operated in a synchronised manner. At a practical level, this means that something like Google docs, which relies on an online connection, could continue to operate if the connection was lost and "catch up" when the connection was restored. As someone that tends to use online applications almost exclusively, it is a frustration whenever I don't have a connection - this presents an excellent solution to that problem.

The Demo 07 video for this can be found here. The Adobe Labs write up is here

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posted by John Wilson @ 9:22 PM Permanent Link ,

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