Duncan Riley over at TechCrunch let's us know Digg API Visualization Contest Delivers Apollo Powered Applications, specifically

The Digg API Visualization Contest held to celebrate the launch of the Digg API is now in its final stages with 10 shortlisted candidates.

Four of the ten finalists are Abode Apollo based applications, remarkable for a platform launched just over 2 months ago.

Agreed, it's pretty remarkable to see so many desktop applications in a Web mashup contest. As John Dowdell warns in his post Apollo ain't casual an Apollo application is a desktop app with all the security implications that come with that. So it is definitely impressive and a little scary to see so many people downloading random executables off of the Web and voting for them in what you'd expect to be a Web-based mashup contest.

It's also somewhat interesting that all the apps seem to be written using some variation of the Flash platform; Apollo, Flex or Flash Lite. I guess it just goes to show that for snazzy data visualization, you really can't beat Flash today. On reading the contest rules it seems it's sponsored by Adobe given that the prizes are primarily Adobe products and submissions are required to be written in Flash. Too bad, it would have been interesting to see some AJAX/DHTML or Silverlight visualizations going up against the Flash apps.