Allison Randal’s blog - O’Reilly Radar - about how email doesn’t work, got me to thinking about how Adobe Apollo might influence the application market. Sure, there’s the cross platform capabilities and the ability to work with data both on and off line. But I think one of the aspects that might be getting overlooked is how it will help build an ecosystem of application development.

Currently to develop applications you need a host of programmers, system analysts, etc. It’s a lot to bit off and a big commitment. But with Apollo you can pretty much leverage you’re current employee assets. Any serious design firm has a few Actionscript coders around. You’re pretty much set. Well, these people are going to have to get up to speed on Actionscript 3 and the Apollo environment, when it comes out, but that’s what developers do. Just give them some time and space.

The upshot of all this is we are likely to see a bevy of new applications in the next few years developed with Apollo. Needless to say email applications will be one of the more popular Apollo apps. Maybe a few of them will come up with some improvements on the current crop standard email apps and we’ll see an evolution of those into a few apps that really hit a home run with features and usability.

Just for funzies I went to RottenTomatos.com to look for the worst movies and read the blurb reviews. Here are some of my favorites:

Alone in the Dark (2005) - Christian Slater, Tara Reid

“As video game adaptations go, even Pong: The Movie would have a lot more personality.”

How Uwe Boll manages to scrape together enough investment money to give wing to this type of overblown, amateurish gibberish is truly a mystery of the cosmos…

The three stars have seen better days, but I’d like to think they could still do something classier and more dignified than this. Like gay porn.

Saying Uwe Boll’s Alone in the Dark is better than his 2003 American debut House of the Dead is akin to praising syphilis for not being HIV.

Alone in the Dark co-stars perpetual party-girl Tara Reid as an archeologist. That alone should give you some clue as to how bad this movie is.

If nothing else, Alone in the Dark proves that it’s possible to ‘dumb down’ a video game.

The Covenant (2006) - Steven Strait, Sebastian
This sort of thing might work as a desperation rental — like if you’ve been injected with poison and must keep watching incredibly lame movies or die …

Anyone with half a brain is not this movie’s target audience.

Movies like this are why we have eyelids.

To properly convey the jaw-dropping shoddiness of this videogame-based ‘horror’ ‘movie,’ one must approach what scientists call Absolute Stupid.

House of the Dead (2003) - Sonya Salomma, Jürgen

If you want to see what a cinematic piece of dog barf looks like, go see House of the Dead, otherwise do yourself a favour and play the video game, it’s far more entertaining.

House Of The Dead is laugh-out-loud funny. I should add, however, that it is not a comedy.

Ultraviolet (2006) - Milla Jovovich, Cameron Bright

If you want to break up with your significant other, take him/her to this turd.

Anyway, we went to Ultraviolet so you won’t have to. It was awful. Next time you go, okay?

The adventures of Catwoman, Elektra, Lara Croft and Aeon Flux were positively Homeric compared to this simple-minded Hi-Def tedium…

Ultraviolet will be studied with great interest in the future - not for its quality or its artistic merit, but rather to discover how a turd like this was made.

Ultraviolet wants desperately to be a provocative, high-concept action thriller. It is apparently trying to say something about fear and terrorism, paranoia and racism. But it looks more like a shampoo commercial.

Not Even The Lovely And Seductive Milla Can Save This One. It Is Truly Excrement On Celluloid.

The bad guys stride through spotless corriders in buildings where weirdly calm disembodied female voices say things like “Switching to emergency backup lighting system.” If only I could have found the button for the emergency back-up better movie system.

Crank your brain to its lowest possible idle and you’ll still overthink Ultraviolet.

This is the first movie I ever saw that was so bad the audience was compelled to aplaud at the ending.

The concept of “infinity” is beyond the grasp of the human brain. Sure we have a word for it but that doesn’t mean that a person can truly get their mind around it. It’s the same thing with this movie. I can’t get my mind around just how bad it was. When I try to focus on it my mind just sort of slips and I go catatonic.