Adobe today took the wraps off their cross platform desktop application runtime called Apollo. The alpha is now available for download on Adobe labs.What the heck does this 'runtime' do? It allows web developers to create desktop applications that run on both the Mac and PC using HTML, AJAX, and Flash. This is all well and good, I imagine you saying, but why the heck is this on TUAW? It would seem that Apollo is using WebKit as its HTML rendering engine. You might recall that WebKit is Apple's variant of the Konqueror HTML engine, which powers Safari and is baked right into OS X.
Adobe is using the open source version of WebKit, which is slightly different than the one found in OS X, but they plan on contributing code back to the project. This can only be good for Mac users. The more people that are using WebKit the more pressure companies will feel to support it (I'm looking at you, banks!).
[via Daring Fireball]
Before we dive into the actual story, lets just take a minute to sit back and appreciate just how fantastically bizarre that title is.
