Tiago's Weblog Code & Technology Aficionado – Come for the Flash, stay for more!

Zinc – A love hate relationship

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...