A new version of the Adobe Flash Player 9, MovieStar, for Mac just touched down on Adobe Labs today. The new version is 9.0.98.0, so go get it now…
Apollo, the Adobe desktop runtime environment currently still in development, will most likely not have a special form of right-click context menu functionality.Apollo applications are, in essence, a collection of your traditional web technologies bundled into an installable application. Examples of exisiting technologies you will be able to leverage are HTML, Flash, CSS and PDF. On top of that, you have Apollo specific functionalities that will allow you for example to access the file system or automatically search for updates.When a user right-clicks inside an Apollo application, they will see the context menu of the type of technology they are currently interacting with. If, for example, the application is built in Flash (and it seems most early Apollo examples are) they will see the Flash context menu. Right-click on an html link and you will see the context menu of the Apollo html rendering engine, a choice Adobe have yet to publicly announce. UPDATE: This functionality has since been added to AIR and allows completely customisable context menus. It’s a pity Apollo won’t have an across-the-board right-click context menu, even if it may be difficult to achieve. I think it will confuse some users and diminish the application-ness of the Apollo experience. Things are looking bright though. Apollo will usher in completely different types of applications and programs.
I always thought it was a pretty smart of Macromedia to reserve certain keywords and phrases in the right click context menu of Flash movies such as save, load, copy and paste. It now dawns on me that might see these reserved words put to good use in Apollo.
Maybe I’m wrong as Apollo seems to be a complete runtime in which the Flash Player may be running independently of the core Apollo engine. However, Adobe could really have an opportuniy here by making the transition between xhtml, Flash and Apollo content less abrupt and seamless in the experience of the user.
On the other hand Adobe may specifically opt to let users know that are interacting with an Apollo app, and provide some sort of feedback to the user as to what type of environment they find themselves in. With Flash that could be achieved by right-clicking the content to reveal the context menu.
If we do finally get access to the reserved words, lets just hope we get a standard way in which to implement them, as leaving that to developers could be risky business and confusing for users.
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