The Apollo Alpha has been released! Old news now, but nonetheless the news with which I was planning to start this blog. Due to various unanticipated technical difficulties, the blog entry took somewhat longer to get out the door. (Better this than the other way around.)
A quick word about the alpha: Traditionally, an alpha release has been one which is feature complete but buggy. This terminology derives from the original IBM hardware design process with steps A, B, and C. [1]
The Apollo alpha is not an alpha in this sense. We are actually using an iterative development process. The alpha release is our fourth iteration. As the first to go public, marketing decided the "alpha" label was most appropriate.
So our alpha is not feature complete, and you can expect to see more features before 1.0 is done. On other hand, some of the features in the alpha have been through several iterations, should be fairly solid, and won't get too much more attention before 1.0. The filesystem API comes to mind.
Trivia note: The namespace in the application descriptor file is based on our internal iterations. You can tell that the alpha is our fourth iteration by noting that the namespace ends in "M3"--yes, we started at zero.
[1] Lohr, Steve. Go To. Basic Books, 2001. p 53.
Hi, just a comment for the Apollo team ...
While having API's to access desktop level functionality is very cool, I would like to propose that some mechanism is available for extensions, possibly 'plugins' ala Director. If this isn't the case, whatever limitations Apollo has cannot be worked around, and other solutions that have extensions may become the standard. Some examples of possible extensions: process management, native window manipulation, CD/DVD burning, etc.