eBay San Dimas and Adobe Apollo

After a year of planning, I am proud to finally announce ‘San Dimas‘.

San Dimas is the code name for our new unofficial eBay Desktop application built on Adobe Apollo¹.

See San Dimas in action - DEMO 07 conference presented by Adobe Apollo Senior Product Manager, Mike Downey.

Way back in October of 2004, I built an eBay Desktop demo for Macromedia MAX in New Orleans. The thought was to place an eBay Buying Experience on the desktop using application interactions, personal settings, and a rich interactive experience. All the characteristics of a Rich Internet Application for the desktop and it just so happens Adobe has defined Apollo in the very same way.

The key reason for building such an application was to drive efficiency and streamline the eBay Buying Experience for users.

Alan Lewis from our eBay Developers Program kick started a project last year with the Adobe team, which had a similar goal. I was brought on board at the same time to consult on Rich Interaction Application design, the eBay user experience and the technologies of Flash, Flex and AJAX (some of the technologies Apollo encompasses).

During most of the summer and early fall of 2006 Alan, Adobe and a third party vendor planned and built an initial prototype of San Dimas (Alpha) that was later demo’d at the Adobe MAX keynote in Las Vegas.

Alan and the teams involved did a wonderful job of building the initial prototype. It demonstrated Apollo’s technology and shed new light on its great potential when applied to a fresh eBay experience. The third party vendor, Effective UI who built and initially designed the application displayed exceptional skills and execution during the build process.

The San Dimas demo at Adobe MAX was well received by the Adobe Developer Community and was later written about over at ZDNet Ryan Stewart, who provided some great coverage on the application as well as the technology behind it. The application was also later TechCrunch’d by Michael Arrington.

Shortly there after, we were excited to hear the project became an internal initiative (i.o.w. we received funding) at eBay. Alan and I both accepted key roles on the project, he as the Product Manager & Evangelist and I as the User Experience Lead overseeing the information architecture & design and the user experience of the application.

I will be writing about this application and the design effort quite a bit so check back for weekly updates on our unofficial eBay project.

UPDATE: I am Leaving eBay and San Dimas to Join Ribbit.

rob.

¹ Adobe Apollo is a cross-operating system runtime being developed by Adobe that allows developers to leverage their existing web development skills (Flash, Flex, HTML, JavaScript, Ajax) to build and deploy rich Internet applications (RIAs) to the desktop.