Ok so we have seen the screenshots from Ryan showing Apollo transparency. I only hope that the Apollo controls the blitting to screen. I checked out how screenweaver (opensource projector) does it a while ago. It renders off screen the flash movie with a black background….then with a white background, measureing the colour values for each pixel. It then takes those values, finds the alpha from the diference then renders that frame to screen.Quite resource intensive as you can imagine. So I really hope that Apollo does it better. If so I can see it now. Full screen flash video with transparency through too the desktop.

I can imagine reading MXNA where Grant Skinner has created an apollo app which takes your webcam, projects you over the desktop fullscreen, and using chroma keying to place you over the background, then using edge detection you can swipe your desktop icons around the dektop like hitting tennis balls. KEWL! Of course much much much more will be possible.

This would of course only be possible if Adobe allows deep system level hooks or some sort of plugin interface for c++ (or my fav c#) dlls. Which brings me to my next point. Will there be some sort of plugin architecture for Apollo. Or will it simply be a new browser with a little more system intergration. I have made many desktop applications which utilised flash in some way. Not one was like the last. They all needed very diferent features. I think the key to success for Apollo will be allowing it to play with the big boys. Providing custom libraries to achieve things like direct database access, image maniptulation through standard crossplatform libraries, 3d capabilities to keep annoying people like me happy using OpenGL libraries ;o) hope your taking note Mike. Alot of people have been asking when will there be 3d in flash…..

I hope never. At least directly. 800k of plugin to download is enough. But I really think Apollo could be the platform to introduce it. Heckthe last company I worked for RightHemisphere has already created a 3d player for the pdf platform. Though it is early days for it, it handels many many file formats.

So bring on the public beta… I noticed in one screenshot of an application that Mike Chambers made that it hade a copyright then "(b2)". I hope that doesnt mean beta 2. Because that would mean that there could be a feature lock, and I would really really like to see a plugin architecture. Flash is good at what it does, and c is good at what it does, why not keep the separation for extreme processing.