Earlier this week the eBay desktop was downloaded for the 1 millionth time. That's a great accomplishment for one of the first AIR apps that's been developed.

That application was originally built by a summer intern of mine, Charles Bihis, who is now working at Adobe in Seattle. He developed the initial AS 3 APIs and a very earlly alpha version of eBay Desktop. The team at effectiveUI took the project on after a conversation I had with them in a bus in San Francisco after the first Adobe component developer summit run by Ted Patrick. They're the ones who have made it look so great and added most of the functionality that it has today.

Congrats Alan on the great success. The project would be dead without your great support.

eBay opened up submissions for their eBay widget contest yesterday. The contest is open until February 22nd, 2008. If you're a Flex developer and interested in building out an eBay widget, you'll want to check this contest out.

Widgets will be judged by the following criteria: 40% for user interface and presentation, 40% for innovative Integration of eBay Shopping Web Services and 20% for widget portability (weight in kb and configurability).

Get more information on the eBay widget contest.

The eBay Desktop was on G4 TV in October. Check out the video if you've never seen or used the eBay Desktop to see what its like.

Business Week has an article about the resurgence of desktop applications, focusing on new platforms like Adobe AIR and Google Gears. Nice to see RIAs getting some mainstream press.

eBay has updated their Adobe AIR based San Dimas project to version 0.6. The latest beta, available now to anyone currently enrolled in the beta via the Adobe AIR update mechanism, includes a number of improvements, outlined below. If you haven't signed up for the beta, you can do so on the Project San Dimas website.

If you'd like to know more about eBay's Adobe AIR based San Dimas project, you should come to Adobe MAX. Alan Lewis, project manager for the application, will be hosting an Inspire session at MAX. He'll discuss what eBay has learned in building out a rich Internet application with Adobe Flex and Adobe AIR.

Here is the list of improvements that were sent out in an email to users.

• Improved Speed and System Resource Usage: Searching and loading items is now much faster. Also we fixed a number of issues that were causing high CPU usage.
• My eBay: We revamped the My eBay information based on user feedback - now the watch list and bid list use the same UI as the search results panel, allowing you to quickly scroll through everything you are interested in. We also split out the My eBay sections into "My Items" and "Bid/Buy", providing a logical separation between those things you are tracking vs. those things you are bidding on. Note that "History" has been renamed "Recent Items" and has moved under "My Items". There is also a prototype that lets you leave feedback.
• Alerts and Notes: New sections under "My Items" show all the alerts and notes that you have set on items. There is also an improved interface on the item view for setting notes and alerts.
• My Messages: A new My Messages prototype shows messages from sellers in context. Note that this is an early prototype, and the functionality to ask sellers a question is not functional yet. We would appreciate your feedback (use the handy feedback widget on the Home screen) to let us know what you think of all the My eBay changes.
• Search improvements: We’ve received lots of feedback on the search UI, and we’ve made steps to make it even simpler. The filters are now shown on the main screen, and the interface for selecting filters, keywords, and categories to narrow your results has changed.
• Item improvements: Calculated shipping is now available for those items that use it, and item specifics are shown within the UI. On the Seller tab you now see a summary view of the seller’s feedback and detailed seller ratings, while you can click through to the specific comments, all without leaving the item view.

What's an Apollo application worth? Well, right now its worth at least $154.85. That's the current bid price to be the first one to get the eBay San Dimas Apollo application. San Dimas' project leader, Alan Lewis, has put up the first version of the upcoming beta to eBay in a charity auction. Head over to the eBay auction now to bid. At the very least you can get a few laughs from the item description.

In an email sent to testers, Alan indicated that the project is now feature complete, and they are working on fixing some bugs. They will start sending out invitations to San Dimas "very soon". The auction itself ends on the 4th of June, so don't expect anything before then.

The latest version of the Edge newsletter has an article written by Anthony Franco who discusses the development of the Apollo eBay Desktop.

Mike Downey gives an outstanding presentation showcasing the eBay San Dimas Apollo project, including some new features that haven't ever been seen before: working offline, data synchronization and viewing the source of a desktop based application.

The presentation was done a few days ago at the Demo conference. And its presented to you using Flash video (what else!).

I don't know if this is going to become a regular Friday thing or what, but I covered Apollo a few weeks ago, and thought I'd link to a few new articles that I found this week about Apollo.

First, Ryan Stewart has an interview with Alan Lewis from eBay about the eBay Apollo project, code named San Dimas. I worked with Alan, Charles Bihis (from Adobe), other Adobe employees, and the team from Effective UI (sweet website!) to build the Apollo application. The ActionScript source code for the eBay APIs will be open source soon, stay tuned.

To finish off my first week in the RIA blogosphere, I thought I'd add a few thinks to Adobe Apollo. For those of you who don't know, Adobe Apollo will be the next major client application to come from Adobe. It joins the Adobe Reader and Adobe Flash Player family, likely (hopefully?) sometime next year. Ryan Stewart has a link to "Keep an Open Eye", which has an overview of Adobe Apollo.