My friend Paul Newman (yes, that’s really his name, and no, not that Paul Newman) called me a year ago to ask if I’d like to help write a book about Apollo, which was the codename for Adobe AIR at that time. I was already overworked, but I hesitantly agreed. Although I’d known of Apollo in a general way prior to that, it was only at that point that I started to seriously take a look at the technology. Paul later had to bow out of the project due to other demands on his time, but I continued to look at Apollo and prepare to write this book.

Previously, I’d held a few prejudices in regard to Apollo. I’ve worked with Flash and Flex for a decade, and the idea of using Flash or Flex to build desktop applications was hardly a new one. I’d been building executables from Flash for nearly as long as I’d worked with it. I’ve used programs such as FlashJester, Northcode SWF Studio, and Multidmedia Zinc with varying degrees of success to enable enhanced features for desktop applications built using Flash, and I’d previously seen Apollo as merely another alternative to these programs. Frankly, I felt a bit of resentment that Adobe, a huge corporation, would try to swoop in and crush these existing companies with a competing product. However, after working with Apollo, I saw that it was really quite different from these other products.

Soon after, Adobe changed the name from Apollo to Adobe AIR. AIR allows developers to use existing Flash and Flex skills to build desktop applications. In that regard, it’s similar to the other products I previously mentioned. However, AIR doesn’t create system-specific executables. Instead, AIR applications require the AIR runtime. In this regard, AIR has less in common with programs such as Zinc, and more in common with runtime environments such as Java or .NET. This understanding changed how I looked at AIR.

Nearly a year on and the manuscript is written, edited, and ready to go to print. During that time, the authors have learned a lot about AIR, and we’ve endeavored to share that with you in the pages of this book. We sincerely hope you find this book valuable and that we can provide you with useful understanding of how to work with AIR.