Here it is. The holey grail for home networking. Plug this doofer into a power outlet in your home and another somewhere else and you have 200mbs network like that. But I really wonder how this would work in aparments which share power feeds. Would Mr nosey be able to plug in his and with a bit of hacking gain access to your internet. Man a whole nother jar of worms in this one. But still uber cool. Cant wait till I get broadband from my local power supplier.

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.

Yep for peeps out there doing Ruby on Rails with flash there is a new version of Rad Rails. This release fixes the biggest pain in the a$$ bug. It used to be for some random reason rhtml pages wouldnt compile, and each page refresh gave a different error. Well this was related to tab characters being in a strange encoding which crashed the ruby server. This has been fixed in release 0.6.4.

Go get the update now if you want to save your hair. 

Ok so I have been making a new site that is based on Ruby on rails and has some major flash components. You would be thinking cool xml structures passed between the two would be easy. And you would be right. it is. But the site is targeted at a New Zealand market, which with current Broadband providers we should be getting dinner before we get bent over like this. So needless to say alot of the users will be dial-up. Ruby on rails handels a many of something site. In this case a many of images. So the datasets can be huge. Enter AMF. So quick, complete, and already an object collection before you get it. And its small. So with all these considerations AMF was definately the answer.

So now I have to contend with another piece to the pie. AMFPHP is the greatest! but I really wish is that there was a ruby alternative. Now Im no expert at ruby but I would like to see some of the specs for AMF.

So a public call for help…If anyone has any information on AMF, specs etc could you please comment. I have a few sources but any help would be greatly apreciated. Im not promising anything here but am very interested to see whats involved.

P.S. Anyone want to help? 

If you have never seen these they are very good. 10 points for cinematic effects…..plus a story line and some of the great skits……even if yournot a gamer ….its a good time waster.

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=7327816737865053376 

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=5733044300866646599 

I just love the take off of the seagulls from finding nemo.