The first public alpha version of Adobe's Apollo is out, the company announced today. Apollo allowed developers to create "rich Internet applications" that run on the desktop, leveraging HTML, JavaScript, Ajax and Flash.

Arrington is excited:

I honestly believe that entirely new classes of companies can be built on this platform, which takes Flash, HTML and javascript completely outside of the browser and interacts with the file system on a PC. Photos, music, email and many other everyday tasks make a lot of sense in a single environment that is both local and in the cloud simultaneously. There is going to be a lot of creativity coming off of this platform over the near term.

Early developer feedback is decidedly underwhelmed, however. Posting on The Ajaxian, András Bártházi writes:

rogramming in Flash what I’m not really interested in. It needs a quite different setup that I have now for web development, the tools are not free and are just a few of them, they’re not really platform independent, too. As I see, more or less running Flash applications natively was possible earlier, too, it’s nothing really new. The interesting thing would be writing desktop programs with HTML or other ML, JavaScript, without compiling. If it will be possible, and won’t be hard, I’ll be interested in this environment.

And a reader names Shuan writes (sic is default):

in apollo, u have the runtime layer, and the html/flex application built on top. everything runs within that window… like a normal browser. sure, it’s called a desktop application, but really, it just takes the place of a browser.
along with wat andras said, i would like to see more integration into the desktop environment, similar to what google desktop has. taskbar icons, system popups.. something more natural to the OS.

Ryan Stewart hasn't given impressions yet, but was positive based on people he was talking to at Apollo Camp.

there’s a lot of excitement. When the bits go public, I can’t wait for the cascade of blog posts from people looking at the platform for the first time. The vibe here is very much that Apollo is charting a new course in software development. Now it’s up to the developers to help map that course.