Thoroughly vetted by Adobe's AIR development team, Adobe AIR 1.5 Cookbook addresses fundamentals, best practices, and topics that web developers and application designers inquire about most. The hands-on recipes in this cookbook help you solve a variety of tasks and scenarios you may encounter using Adobe AIR to build Rich Internet Applications for the desktop. It's an ideal way to learn the nuances of Adobe AIR, with practical solutions you can use right away, and detailed explanations of why and how they work. These recipes will help you:
Build an AIR application with Flex, Flash, or HTML and Ajax
Create a database and connect it to your application
Put together native menus for PCs and Macs
Work with the Service Monitor Framework
Utilize the Adobe AIR Update Framework
Create branded desktop experiences with custom chrome and custom application icons
Distribute your AIR application with the Seamless Install Badge
And more. Adobe AIR 1.5 Cookbook includes dozens of recipes from rising stars in the AIR development community-David Tucker, Rich Tretola, Marco Casario, and Koen De Weggheleire-along with the best solutions posted by visitors to the Adobe AIR Cookbook community website hosted by Adobe and O'Reilly (www.adobe.com/go/air_cookbook). If you're ready to expand your skill set with Adobe AIR, this is the book you've been waiting for.
Synopsis
Now that Adobe AIR has been in alpha/beta for a year, and in official release for two months -and now that Rich Internet Application design and development has become a staple of business growth strategy in many circles -there 's a rapidly growing circle of developers who have begun using it themselves, and who are eager to expand their skill sets. Adobe AIR Cookbook is for them.
About the Author, David Tucker
Marco is one of the most dynamic developers and consultants in the Adobe world. He has been passionate about informatics since he was little more than a child and used to program games in Basic for Commodore 64 before dedicating himself, while still very young, to innovative projects for the web using Flash and Director (as far back as versions 3 and 5.) In 2001, he began to collaborate with Macromedia Italia. Since that year he has produced and headed a long series of presentations, conferences and articles, which you can find listed in detail in his blog entitled "hands on Adobe world" (casario.blogs.com, ) which is currently receiving several thousands of unique visitors every day. In 2005, Marco founded Comtaste (www.comtaste.com, ) a company dedicated to exploring new frontiers in Rich Internet Applications and the convergence between the web and the world of mobile devices&emdash;MobyMobile (www.mobymobile.com) and YouThru (www.youthru.com) are representative of their recent work. Another example of Marco's achievements is that he is founder of the biggest worldwide Flash Lite User Group (groups.yahoo.com/group/FlashLite/) and of www.augitaly.com, a reference point for the Italian community of Adobe users, in which he carries out the role of Channel Manager for the section dedicated to Flex (www.augitaly.com/flexgala.) Marco is currently busy working on the development (in Flex) of a very ambitious project concerning bank counters at European level, and in various consulting and Flex and Flash Media Server training activities for the realisation of Rich Internet Applications on behalf of buyers of the calibre of Capgemini, Engineering, IBM partners, and Adobe Systems Software Ireland Ltd
