Zinc! Who doesn’t know zinc? A long time ago, before the Adobe AIR runtime was available flash developers didn’t had much choice when developing desktop applications, screensavers, either you created an .exe / .dmg file directly out of the Flash IDE or like I mentioned before you bought Zinc!
Let’s be fair, Zinc isn’t actually that bad, their API is huge and you can access a whole load of methods that you would never think about, the first time you use zinc and browse through the API you automatically try out the OpenCDTray method, something happens how cool is that? 
But let’s start from the beginning.
It was a nice sunny day in Zurich, and I got an assignment to create a screensaver with a shitload of functionality, (read images from a specific folder (user can’t change the folder), resize the images accordingly, resave them again with the new size and settings. read some registry values from the Users computer, and so on.. so I thought, let’s unpack Zinc and give it a try. yes it was the first time I ever used Zinc!
I ran into so many issues / problems / bugs / headaches / sleepless nights that I thought I need to share this with you guys.
1. Zinc 2.5 vs. Zinc 3.0
When you have the choice of using an “old” version against the new version, your guts tell you that maybe you shouldn’t use the new version, stick with the old one which is in use for enough time to get a good resource to get information from.
So I began to develop with Zinc 2.5 after a few headaches and tons of coffee I finally managed to get my screensaver to work, yay. But let’s have a look at the performance, 30% CPU, 40MB RAM.. well not that bad for so many operations and graphical changes. Apparently there were some issues with the performance and resources on the clients environment, so I decided to jump on the new train (zinc 3.0) and guess what. Zinc 3.0 uses 38% MORE resources then the previous version AND I’m still using the same player version and same settings. Hmm.. does Zinc 3.0 really have that many more base code? After a few coffee sessions comparing API’s and looking into their code. NOPE, they only repacked their old code and gave us a few more methods to work with, damn does that really result in 65% CPU and 120MB RAM? sigh… Ok spend another few hours reverting everything back to Zinc 2.5. Nice…
2. Screensaver Dualscreeen
During the course of development the client asked me if the screensaver is going to work on a dual screen system, I knew from my colleagues that Dual screen is not supported with Zinc 2.5, hmm maybe it works with Zinc 3.0? The answer is NO! Starting to wondering why I ever took the step and use Zinc, a working colleague who already worked on a few projects with Zinc, gave me the idea of selecting an Application deployment with 2 windows instead of screensaver settings, that worked out pretty well on the first few tests, both windows were opening fullscreen, and the “screensaver” was running as expected.. BUT… a few tests later the windows stopped responding to my settings what the heck is going on here… ????
3. Competition
Let’s have a quick look at some other products that are able to create screensavers, but sadly there are no other products that can compete against the feature set of Zinc.. so therefore I just have one single software that in my eyes could reach Zinc in a few months of development.
InstantStorm:
Pure SWF to SCR converter with a dozen of capabilities, multiscreen support and I’m not only talking about 2 screens, literally MULTIPLE screens.
Easy to use interface, dozens of settings possibilities like capture of mouse / keyboard events, settings dialog, transparency support, custom kickass installer, multiple swf files for various purposes like widescreen or preview and much much more, this piece of software is FREE the only downside is that you don’t have some kind of API like Zinc does and the flash player needs to be installed in order to run properly something that you don’t need to do with Zinc as it’s being wrapped into their own containers which already contains the flash player.
4. Support / Bugs
Go have a look for yourself on the mdm zinc buglist, you will find bugs that are older then 1 year and still not resolved, let’s take the multiscren issue for instance, instantstorm A FREE tool is able to display your “screensaver” over multiple screens, why isn’t Zinc able to do that as well? The forum is ok visited and that’s it.. I’ve opened a case 4 months ago and I still didn’t get any confirmation that it has ben read by anyone at mdm.
Bottom Line
It was a pain using Zinc, but like I said before if you are dependent on certain functionality then you will have to use it, until someone else hopefully InstantStorm comes up with a new version that can compete with Zinc. Over the course of the next weeks I will try to post some of the pitfalls and solutions that I came up with while working on this project. Stay tuned for more
The Zinc – A love hate relationship by Tiago's Weblog, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 Switzerland License.
In my opinion the one and only “real” reason why I would use zinc is that it can generate an executable file on both os-systems.
I had similar problems with Zinc, ultimately it did what I wanted it to do but it would literally crash every other time I made an exe. I didn’t think about trying out ver 2.5, I just jumped right into 3 – I’m going to try that out – thanks!
The last time I tried 3.0 it was advertising features that just didn’t work. I’d love to see some healthy competition in this space.
Ali:
The only reason I see when to use Zinc, is when you want to gain access to the filesystem in an easy matter.
Paul:
Let me know what your experience was, maybe you might get a complete other result then I did, imo results with zinc are always unexpectable
hebchop:
absolutely, I really hope that instantstorm comes up with a few features that could beat zinc, specially like I mentioned a stable API.
Have you tried swf studio by northcode.com I haven’t used it for screensavers but I know it has that functionality. And it does everything else that zinc does except unlike zinc it actually works. I purchased both swf studio and zinc – I was excited by the fact that zinc does mac versions but it’s so unstable and unreliable that it’s completely useless – probably the worst software I have ever bought. Swf studio is outstanding for making exe’s
Thanks david, will have a look at swfstudio.
You might want to check this out:
http://www.gareth-jones.co.uk/2009/12/05/switching-from-zinc-to-swf-studio/
Or maybe just subscribe to the RSS – I think there’ll be more…
http://www.gareth-jones.co.uk/feed/
Send a copy of your Zinc registration email to support@northcode.com and we’ll send you a coupon code that will give you a discount of $75 off a license for SWF Studio V3 Professional. Put “Zinc Sucks” in the subject line of your email
This offer is open to any Zinc user. Tell your friends! Please note that SWF Studio is Windows only.
Derek, thanks for pointing it out to a really good case of bad customer support.
Northcode:
) nice move there, I’m definately going to try swfstudio out, if I’m happy with it I let it know 
I used to be a Zinc user but made the switch to SWF Studio. I think it’s a good move and I won’t look back.
http://www.gareth-jones.co.uk/2009/12/06/mdm-stick-their-head-in-the-sand/
There’s another post. I was present during that whole thread, too. Gambini, their head Zinc developer, really lost his cool in a defensive, unprofessional rant that did little to address the concerns of his customers (rather, he berated them) or the direction of the Zinc 3.0 application.
Zinc 2.5 users SHOULD NOT switch to Zinc 3.0. Instead, they should be incensed that Zinc 3.0 even exists. They were sold ½ an app, promised the moon, then told to upgrade to ½ an app when 3.0 came out.
Dunlavy: Thanks for your input and advice to new users.
Working for a company that makes Flash based desktop apps regularly, until recently i was using a sort of self made version of Zinc/Northcode, we had some issues, that seemed small at first, but got bigger over time, and we decided to try out comercial products that did about the same thing as our self made exe. As you can imagine, we where looking for a very wide array of capabilities, as we did’nt have any limitations until this point. It took me about 1 week to convert our Flash project to use Zink, only to come to the conclusion that the applications resource needs went up by 50%, and it keeps crashing any time we tryed to do something “interesting”. After this failed attempt I tried out SWF Studio by Northcode, not only the transition was much more easy, the results where much better. The best part was that we found alternatives to all functions we use to have with our own projector. So basically, there is not even grounds for comparison between the two.
Zinc 3 is absolutely horrible. 2.5 was bad, but 3 is so much worse. Do not buy Zinc!
http://www.gather.com/viewArticle.action?articleId=281474979360268