WHEN ALL THE BUZZ about Vista hits full volume, it's easy to miss the fact that some of your hardware just won't run the new operating system. That's especially true in most Irish primary schools. What to do? IT team members might look at Apollo's PDF based sandbox because it can isolate internet access, protecting the legacy operating system from the threat of Bebo bullies and YouTube skin flicks. If you don't have the money to upgrade your operating system and you want to avoid hardware snags, why go through the costly Vista upgrade cycle and repeat the security worries of the last ten years all over again, much less the application compatibility issues? You can actually get all the visual swish factor of a vectorised interface through Apollo, without breaking unexpected things in the process.
I have not used Apollo but I know that you can set up an operating computer's software to run inside the Apollo interface layer. Apollo doesn't care about the underlying operating system so you can update it later--as easily as installing a new hard drive or mapping a new network resource. Users still see the same look in the interface and everything appears to run consistetly. Moreover, you can embed Apollo to a USB key and give people their own personal interfaces.
Imagine the market impact if Dell let you skin your desktop appearance, all the way down to the icons and colours. You could get Vista underneath but OS X as a desktop.
I think Irish ICT volunteers should start coding up the "PSOS" (Primary School Operating System) and distribute key fobs with the interface for peer review around the country. It's going to be a real mess next year when teachers, principals and computer instructors try to pull their old hardware into the new world of Vista.
