Dec 03 2008
24 Comments
By Mims H Wright AIR, Discussion

In the age of AIR has Zinc zunk?

by

I recently spotted an ad on a website for Zinc (a tool for creating standalone software from Flash content) and was actually kind of surprised to see that they were still around since the release of AIR which does essentially the same things and works with existing software (Zinc’s price tag is $849.99). I was actually hoping that their site would offer some explanation about why we should use Zinc instead of AIR. Unfortunately, the only thing I could find was a comparisson to the Apollo Alpha!

In the spirit of playing fair, I’d love to hear about your experiences with Zinc – good, bad, or obselete.

  • http://www.returnundefined.com/ Ben Clinkinbeard

    I used Zinc at my previous job for quite a long time. One feature we used that I don’t think AIR supports is that you can pass command line parameters to the app on startup. One feature we didn’t use but that I know AIR doesn’t support is you can call DLLs from your app. Zinc was buggy at times but I think in some instances it definitely still fills a need that AIR cannot.

  • http://www.kelvinluck.com/ Kelvin Luck

    One thing that all of the “exe wrappers” can do which AIR can’t is create a standalone exe. I don’t like the fact that AIR applications have to be installed and can’t just be run…

  • Mike

    The main problem – Zinc is awfully buggy. You never can tell what they (I mean MDM team) will break with the next Zinc update. I’ve seen lots of topics on their support forum – sorry, Zinc, but I’lll move to another solution, we had to cancel projects because of endless Zinc bugs…

  • http://www.asyncria.com aSyncRIA

    AIR is good, but it requires to install an AIR runtime first (over 10M size), and AIR is not extensible. Another alternative is our product “Async Flash Studio”. Get it at http://www.asyncria.com. It supports Flex, and it supports OOP. Maybe it is fit for you.

  • Rob

    Zinc is buggy, one of the slowest apps I have ever used, and existing content breaks with every new release. Good riddance. Welcome AIR.

  • Quentin

    http://www.asyncria.com/ just looks like a scam…you guys may be legit, but your website does nothing to back that up.

  • http://www.thecodezone.com John Hattan

    I still use Zinc version 2 for my Windows games. It does the job of making standalone executables that don’t require separate installers, which saves me the tech support issues involved with installing a runtime engine.

    Also, it supports versions of Windows back to Windows 98. When you sell discount games, it’s not always a good assumption that your users will be running the latest stuff.

    That being said, the new version requires at least XP on the client machines, which is why I didn’t upgrade.

    Also they never got OSX running Intel-native until recently, so I use mProjector for the Mac versions.

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  • http://blog.fatal-exception.co.uk dVyper

    The latest version will work fine on win98. The requirement for XP is simply because 98 isn’t supported by Microsoft themselves. Also, Intel-native support arrived in January…

  • http://www.dehats.com davidderaedt

    @Ben AIR actually supports command line invoking, including parameters. However, you’re completely right when you say it cannot call DLLs.

  • http://www,brandonellis.org Brandon Ellis

    Zinc updates were like a box of CrackerJacks – every update had a surprise inside.

  • http://partlyhuman.com Roger Braunstein

    Zinc was great for kiosks – especially when you had to interface with hardware. I had a zinc app dispensing and writing magnetic cards by communicating over the serial port! That’s something you still can’t do with AIR. But to be honest, the API was pretty bad and when I worked with it (this has since been fixed) EVERY call was asynchronous – without events – it just posted the result to a global variable when it was done. I wrote some cool classes to make it more tolerable but it was still kinda nightmarish. Anyway – stuff like this was also kinda obsoleted with binary sockets in AS3… people have been writing native or Java apps to access hardware and other lower-level utils and using Flash to communicate over localhost with them. If someone approached me to write something like I did for that kiosk again, I wouldn’t consider any of the commercial flash shells out there, or at least not very hard.

  • http://www.thecodezone.com John Hattan

    Oh, and Zinc also works with pre-AS3 stuff. That’s becoming less of an advantage, but it’s there.

  • JG

    I have recently been using mProjector and considered to use Zinc. Since it creates .exe files that is a feature that cannot be duplicated with AIR therefore is a far better feature since no installation is necessary. Zinc does sounds like it has its bag of issues. What about mProjector what are your thoughts on it?

  • Ryan McIlmoyl

    The Merapi project (http://www.merapiproject.net/) is an example of what Roger was talking about, a Java application that AIR can interface with over localhost. It’s another application that needs to be installed and running, so no good for those who want everything in one .exe. However, for something like a kiosk, would be a good choice.

  • Lincoln Mongillo

    We’ve used Zinc 2.5 successfully in the past to create a standalone exe that acts as a visualizer for data across distributed systems. It worked amazingly well in this capacity in that we were able to create a standalone that communicated directly with .NET. We had some issues with the HTTP server that comes with Zinc not being as stable as we would have liked but we were able to work around that issue. One of the main features we were able to fully exploit was the ability to call DLL’s as part of a larger .NET app.

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  • david doull

    I’ve used (and still use) Northcode’s SWF studio. I bought zinc and basically felt ripped off because it was so buggy. On the other hand, SWF studio has been really reliable – I’ve successfully sold software built with it.
    I’d love to use AIR but the size of the installer and the scary warning messages it displays to users when they try to install your app. make it a no go for me.

  • JMC

    I’ve used zinc a lot for creating downloadable games. Vital for this were – setting the screen resolution to 800×600, storing values in the registry, encrypting text files on the hard drive and also, creating an installer for the .exe.

    Would LOVE to do those with AIR, but don’ think it’s possible. Most important is the screen resolution issue, anybody know any other solutions for that (besides Director)?

  • http://www.entertainmentafrica.com Ian Pretorius

    zinc == unstable! I tried for over a year and a half to produce a stable product using the zinc platform and never reached that point. Access violation errors been the main issue, fps of the wrapped flash player was poor , and various other bugs. Our agency resorted to having a custom VB6 wrapper built , which is stable but also requires installation of all the supporting runtimes. I have recently started reading through the Air API and will soon venture into developing something new on this platform.

  • http://breign.com Breign

    while (zinc == to_expensive)
    just_pack_into.net(yourself);

    I think it is a tool made by good developers though.

  • http://indied.com Jake

    ZINC is bull. Use SwfStudio instead. I’ve used both and swfstudio is definitely less buggy

  • http://indied.com Jake

    zinc is buggy as shit. use swfstudio instead

  • http://blog.tobyskinner.co.uk Toby Skinner

    my few thoughts.

    I spent about 5 months working with Zinc 2.5/3.0.

    Zinc was the only viable option in terms of supporting both windows and (theoretcially) mac.

    Zinc 2.5 was buggy in very annoying ways, save a project, try to open later and it hangs for 5 minutes before corrupting the save :s

    Or it just dies on startup, or randomly corrupts compiles.

    Generally unstable and very very frustrating since I HAD TO PAY THEM.

    Zinc 3.0 felt a lot better, looked like it was all done in .NET, much cleaner, but they shafted you for additional money ‘upgrading’ your plugin licenses though. They should have given all Zinc 2.x users a free upgrade.

    They made us wait while they figured out what to do after Adobe revealed Air, so we all waited and got another half arsed product.

    Zinc 3.0 was also quite buggy, last time I used it it still wasn’t producing native executables that worked for all the various osx versions.

    The forums were full of un-resolved bugs and it really felt like there were in trouble all the time, making us wonder if they would just dissapear.

    They did release a Windows-only scriptable command-line edition which I feel is probably the only really decent thing I have seen from them.

    I *really* wanted Zinc to be great, it has really dissapointed me and is very, very frustrating. If they manage to stabilise the product and bring out a linux command-line edition I would buy it though purely for the native compilation.

    Toby