The AIR Cookbook was on Amazon last week and now the project was officially announced by Adobe. I'm pretty excited for this book because, first of all, it is my first book for O'Reilly and then we got a great group of authors: David Tucker, Rich Tretola, and Koen De Weggheleire as well as myself. Today Adobe has launched the AIR Cookbook site. Like the Flex Cookbook you can use the AIR cookbook to share knowledge and find answers to common coding problems.

Adobe has created a new section on the Adobe AIR support page oriented to IT administrators. On this page you'll find the "Adobe AIR Administrators Guide" (PDF) that provides details on how to deploy Adobe AIR in enterprises and tuning of other runtime settings, and other reference documentations for the enterprise scenarios.

I've just finished working on the Advanced AIR Applications book for FriendsOfED, that a new book project started. I'm now involved in writing the O'Reilly AIR Cookbook, accepting the invitation made by David Tucker. The other authors are talented Flex and AIR developers with a lot of writing experiences: Rich Tretola, Koen De Weggheleire and David Tucker. This is my first book for O'Reilly and I'm glad to work with you guys !

These days here in Comtaste, I'm very busy for a consulting activity to support a project for an Adobe's Italy partner (I'm under NDA so I can't do names), working on a enterprise desktop AIR application (that uses Java, Oracle Form and Hibernate). The project is a porting of an ActionScript 3/J2EE web application, so what we're doing is to write ActionScript 3 classes to add AIR desktop functionalities.

Reading the Alex Harui's blog, I found this interesting post about a new Adobe Open Source project called the Marshall Plan. I read that the "Marshall Plan" is the nickname for the SDK feature to support cross-versioning.

On the Flex Team official blog Matt Chotin wrote that the SourceForge.net 2008 Community Choice Awards are open, and wouldn't it be great if Flex were a winner? Click here to nominate Flex SDK and select the "Best Tool or Utility for Developers" category.

If you create help system, knoledge base RoboHelp is the tool you're using. Now Adobe has released the RoboHelp Packager for Adobe AIR on Adobe Labs. You can download th package and start exporting your assets for the desktop with AIR.

David Tucker has posted about the possibility to join the O'Reilly AIR Cookbook project as technical editor: As a technical editor, you will evaluate the chapter once the author completes it to ensure that the code samples work correctly and that the technical exposition is accurate. The technical editors are essential to any technical book - and you will get your name listed in the inside of the book with the other technical editors.

For Adobe Italy Comtaste has created a series of free events where we'll talk about the use of Flex, Livecycle Data Services, BlazeDS and AIR development in enterprises contexts.

Comtaste is continuing to grow. Our development team gained a talented and experienced JEE and Flex developer and our blog has a new author, Kira Garfagnoli, that will publish articles about user experience in the RIA world. Her first post has been published two weeks ago : Flex rich interface design: why big companies choose Flex and many others will follow. I'm so enthusiast to be part of this growing !