It has been almost two years now since Adobe started releasing super-secret early betas of their mobile AIR runtimes and Flex framework. During that time, only a select few were kicking the tires and seeing what was possible while waiting for more phones to successfully run Android 2.2 and the iPhone packager to be completed.

Fast forward a few months, and it’s October. Seconds after Adobe pushes up the first versions of AIR for Android, I’m pushing up the first early version of my well-received Queue Manager application—the first AIR for Android application on the Android Market. Within a few months, planning on multiple projects for various projects is at full speed and many clients are adopting AIR and Flex for their mobile enterprise applications.

If we fast-forwarded a few more months, we’d see Queue Manager being used by more than 20,000 unique users daily and having over 500,000 downloads. Between personal and professional projects, I’ve created around a dozen mobile applications that use Flex and AIR, and I was fortunate enough to be asked by Manning if I would write a book about my experiences building Flex applications for the mobile environment. Originally, the request was to make a book showing how to use Flex to make Android applications, but, as Flex developers, we know that we can do better and that cross-platform development is the name of the game.

I’m proud to put into one book a collection of resources, examples, and explanations that will help new Flex developers transition from desktop- and browser-based applications to the mobile world, and assist any developers that want to make visually stunning applications that execute consistently across multiple platforms with a singular and elegant code base.