Written by members of the Apollo product team, this is the official guide to the Alpha release of Adobe's Apollo project, the revolutionary cross platform desktop runtime from Adobe Labs. Adobe Apollo Pocket Guide for Flex explains how to build and deploy Flash-based Rich Internet Applications (RIAs) to the desktop using Adobe's Flex framework. This book describes concisely how Apollo works, and offers numerous examples for those who want to start building RIAs for the desktop right away. Why put RIAs on the desktop? They're already supposed to offer the responsiveness of desktop programs. Unfortunately, web browsers can't support all of the interactions we expect from applications. You can't drag a file into an RIA and have it act on that file, for example, or have RIAs interact with other applications on the computer. Adobe's Apollo project gives you the best of both worlds - the RIA development model and true desktop functionality. This pocket guide explains how. Topics include: The types of applications Apollo targets:Steps for creating your first applicationUsing the File I/O APIUsing HTML within Flex-based Apollo ApplicationsApollo Mini Cookbook for common tasksApollo Packages and Classes, and Command-Line Tools Once you understand the basics of building a Flex-based Apollo application, this pocket guide makes an ideal reference for tackling specific problems.