Airsoft Softwair is proud to announce that the Hollywood Player is now also available for all desktop platforms supported by Hollywood (AmigaOS 3, AmigaOS 4, MorphOS, WarpOS, AROS, Windows, Mac OS PPC & x86, Linux PPC & x86). Although it was originally scheduled for release on June 3, 2006 (and even finished back then) its final publication for desktop systems was postponed again and again limiting the availability of the Hollywood Player to the Android platform for several years.

But now that the Hollywood Player is finally available for desktop platforms as well, software authors can choose to distribute their programs as Hollywood applets instead of stand-alone executables.

In contrast to stand-alone executables, Hollywood applets are universally executable which has the advantage that you don't have to compile your programs for as much as almost a dozen of different platforms but just one Hollywood applet is already sufficient. The end-user then simply has to install the Hollywood Player compatible with his platform and can run the Hollywood applet with it. Another advantage is that applets are much smaller than stand-alone executables compiled by Hollywood. While stand-alone executables often take up as much as 2 MB for only very few lines of code, Hollywood applets are very compact and often consist of only a few kilobytes. A last advantage is that programs distributed as Hollywood applets will automatically profit from improvements and bug fixes in newer versions of the Hollywood Player while programs distributed as stand-alone executables would have to be completely recompiled with each new Hollywood update in order to profit from improvements and bug fixes.

As its very name implies, the Hollywood Player can only be used to run applets compiled by Hollywood. It obviously cannot be used to create your own programs. You will still need the full version of Hollywood to create your own programs, of course.

On all Amiga compatibles, Hollywood Player installs itself to SYS:Utilities to be globally available as a default tool for Hollywood applets. Software authors choosing to distribute their programs as Hollywood applets can then simply set the default tool for their applets to "HollywoodPlayer" and inform the user to install the Hollywood Player before attempting to run the program.

The Hollywood Player is now available for free download from the official Hollywood portal for a wide range of architectures and comes with three demo applets to show its capabilities.