Straight after I got home from WebDU my family and I left for a holiday in a quite northern New South Wales seaside town for about a week.

It was great to get away away and have a "disconnected" experience. I actually really enjoyed being offline and just hanging with my family and catching some waves. I took my laptop and tinkered with my first Apollo application.

"Application" is pushing it as its an Apollo version of the Daily Grind widget that I use on my Mac to track time spent on various jobs. My wife is on a PC so I thought I'd see if this Apollo stuff really is "Cross Platform".

My creation gets even more modest when compared with the gTimer application demoed at WebDU and announced by Grant Skinner today

I think the coolest part of the experiment was Serialising and Deserialising ActionScript objects to a file on the local computer. I pretty much lifted the example from the Apollo for Adobe Flex Developers Pocket Guide and I'm feeling that Adobe couldn't have made it any easier.

I just serialize the part of my model that I want to persist, in this case an ArrayCollection of TimerVO's, to the file system on close of the app and look for it on creation. Too easy.

I used the ModelLocator from Cairngorm and am curious as to if/where/how people may tweak the framework to add a layer ala ServiceLocator to allow an Event - Command - Delegate - Local File System scenario.

Enjoy it here.