Apollo Alpha is out, the WOW comes later

There’s a ton of buzz being tossed on the alpha release of Adobe’s new Apollo platform. And reasonably so, as ZDNet blogger Ryan Stewart points out, in a world of Web 2.0 internet-goodness, this is the desktop rearing its head again in the form powerful RIAs.

I’ll leave the coverage to other folks, but in the meantime, I installed the runtime libraries and ran the sample apps included — grabbing a bunch of screenshots along the way that you should take a look at.

I also set up a Flickr group for other screenshots and a Ma.gnolia group for collecting news and other Apollo-related links.

I’m particularly excited about Apollo given its advance of the state of web tech… and the best is yet to come (though Finetune gives a taste of where we’re starting from). At the same time, I’d prefer a slightly lest costly and more open — but equally intuitive and capable — solution. OpenLaszlo, where y’at?