The Perfect name for Apollo
March 11th, 2007 . by polyGeekAt 360Flex there was a lot of talk about Adobe’s Apollo program. We found out that to create Apollo apps you’ll use Flex 3. That was great news since I was going to update anyway. Adobe kept hinting that the Apollo beta would be out soon. “How soon?” we would ask. “Very soon,” they would say. So everyone’s taking it for granted that it will be released to Labs during the Apollo Camp in San Francisco on March 16th. What many people wanted to know is what will Apollo’s final name be. Adobe reminded us developers at every opportunity that the name Apollo is just a code name for the project and not the final name. Many in the community have suggested that it would be nice to keep the name as it is.
I would like to lend some support to that proposition. First, it doesn’t conflict with any other products out there. Of course there was NASA’s Apollo program. So named because Apollo is the Greek god of archery and his arrows never miss the mark. An important attribute when you’re aiming for the moon.
More importantly is the trivial fact that the Greek god Apollo is one of the few gods that the Romans didn’t rename in their pantheon. Most people know that Zeus is Jupiter, Aphrodite is Venus, Hephaestus is Vulcan and so on. But Apollo kept his name. He bridged the two cultures as one god.
Similarly Adobe’s Apollo bridges operating systems - Windows, Mac, Linux. Another of its major features is the ease with which it bridges the online and offline world. And perhaps most importantly, it bridges the environments between application development and web development.
Apollo was also the leader of the muses, which any designer will appreciate, and developers should go for that matter. He was a prophetic deity which speaks to Adobe’s foresight in creating this product in the first place. He also had a huge cult following and I’m sure Adobe is hoping for the same thing.
To be fair, I should also mention that he was the bringer of plague but hey, no god is perfect.
I can say from experience, having worked at Xbox during the production of the Zune player, sometimes people wish they had stuck with the code name.
So Adobe, why mess with success? You’re not going to come up with a better name than Apollo. The best you can hope for is to break even and you likely won’t do that good.
Like the saying goes, “If it ain’t broke. Don’t fix it.”
I think the issue is probably not that it isn’t a great name for the product, but an issue of coming up with a name that can be used globally without legal issues?
I believe you’ll be able to use Flex 2.0.1 initially and definitely Flash CS3 too. Could probably even use Flash 9 preview edition too.
I’ll second Philip’s comments about Flex 2.0.1, Ted Patrick blogged about it 4 days before the release, claiming it was ready for Apollo.
Sadly, he really meant ready, not that you’ll be able to use Flex 2.0.1 to build anything yet. Just that it’s ready for the Apollo plugin.
That’s plugin in an Eclipse sense btw ;-)
You know, I was a little surprised about Apollo being an add on to Flex and Flash. All along I figured there would be some charge for the Eclipse plugin or something like that. It seems like it’s just going to be a value addition to what we already have which is great.
It will still make Adobe a ton of money because there will be a lot of developers who will get into Flex just so that they can deploy desktop applications.
I must admit I quite like the name Apollo too, out of curiosity what was the codename for Zune?
Ohhhh, you know, I’m not sure if that’s something I can divulge. You know how companies are about their code names.
Well it’s 9 o’clock and the temperature is -30. I’m going to go out and look at the stars.
I also like the name Apollo. But you forgot to add the BSG connection. Lee Adama is damn cute.
Well if we’re going to go with BSG connections then I think they should call it Caprica or Boomer. I’m good with either one. Hell, both, at the same time, would be even better. :-)
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