As you can probably assume from the general latency between posts, things have been pretty busy around here. Marc and I (and Todd) have been hard at work on our book for Wiley. We had not mentioned the title of the book prior, but now that the book is available for pre-order on Amazon, its safe to announce it. The book is titled AIR Instant Results. It has been a major work in progress the past few months as the alpha and beta releases of Apollo/AIR have changed a bit and at times did not deliver the functionality we assumed it might have. Alas, the book should hopefully be available not too long after AIR is officially released to the public.

The book is a "by example" book and each chapter teaches you how to create a different application using AIR within the Flex framework. It should be a great place to start learning about AIR if you have some experience with Flex already. The applications, for the most part, are not too complicated and be a good stepping stone into making your own versions of the same applications, or even spur some inspiration for applications of your own.

After working with AIR for the past few months, I have to admit, I'm very pleased with the direction the developers at Adobe are taking it in. Initially I had doubts about just how useful it would be. I had used MDM Zinc quite a bit at my previous job, and I had a feeling it was going to be similar, but I was completely wrong. Given the functionality that has been implemented so far, and the rumors of future additions, I can safely say that AIR will definitely be a useful technology that developers should consider learning and using. Surprisingly, there's already an initiative to start using the beta runtime over at Pownce. I personally have not used Pownce yet, but its nice to see it being put to good use. Marc and I have even tossed around the idea of whipping up our own application at some point, but not until we finish this book. So be on the look out!