Review: Zinc 2.5
- Article 6 of 9
- Computer Arts, May 2006
Build your own applications from Flash movies
For any new media developer, Flash is the standard tool of choice when creating an application. But Flash isn't so good if you want that application to run outside a web browser: end-users have to download Adobe's Flash Player first and the applications don't have access to the full range of commands available to native applications. Multidmedia's Zinc attempts to bridge this problem by letting you create self-contained applications based on Flash files; it also gives you access to far more commands than Flash's built-in ActionScript programming language allows, so that you can use many of the functions available to native applications.
While Zinc does what it says on the box, in practice the results are unsatisfactory. The applications Zinc produces certainly work, but they lack the look and feel of native applications, and don't necessarily behave the way you think they should. Since the Zinc interface is so simple and you need to develop everything in Flash first, fine-tuning applications is harder than it should be, if not impossible at times.
The new Mac OS version of Zinc, while welcome in theory, is even more underpowered, lacking many of the functions and ActionScript commands of the Windows version as well as standard interface features such as keyboard shortcuts; yet despite these flaws, it's the same price as the Windows version.
While Zinc shows promise, unless you have a great need for platform-native versions of your Flash movies, it's not a worthwhile investment, particularly if you work on a Mac.