Zinc 3.0 versus AIR

Adobe AIR certainly changed the way we think about rich desktop applications. It was a real sigh of relief for me when the details of AIR came out during the initial days. We no longer had to battle with the Flash security sandbox while building desktop/kiosk applications. A lot of our dreams could turn to reality. It took a few lines of code and the power of Flex to build a simple Picasa desktop widget to display your Picasa album pics. The same code with a few changes can be ported to the web as well. Now, that's kewl!

As the human needs grow, we want more power in our applications, to not just build apps that rely on the power of the Flex SDK, but, to push the limits a bit further and talk more to the system, use DLLs built using .NET or other languages, configure the application easily setting numerous options, create screensavers, use the text-to-speech engine to make things more interactive, launch other applications and the biggest of them all – do no framework installation. A lot of clients just ask for a simple EXE which doesn't rely on other installations to run. Even though AIR 2.0 address a couple of necessities, it doesn't offer them all.

I am not against AIR and in favour of Zinc or the vice versa. I like them both. They have their own pros and cons and it is up to the requirement and the developer to decide which is best suited. I like Adobe AIR because – its FREE, you can create AIR applications from Flash Builder, Flash IDE or HTML, the certification makes it a secure way to distribute applications, there are so many things you can readily do because of the community reach that Adobe AIR has. Multidmedia Zinc 3.0 is expensive and so is new offering Inferno (I love the name!). Using Zinc, the amount of extensions you could use is really a big point to note. If AIR gives us some of these abilities, it would certainly be awesome!

At the end of the day, the technology we choose is established on "client requirements". The reason I have seen a lot of clients deviate from the use of AIR for deployment is because AIR needs the AIR framework installed. It is not too big a deal for us, but, in closed environments like at my workplace, where, computer users are "Power users" and would not have installation rights for software, AIR draws a big question mark. Most applications I have developed over the years are really simple little applications – Widgets, kiosk apps etc which have the big basic requirement – "Every user should be able to install the app on their desktop". This makes me go back to Zinc every time, even though, I, as a developer, would naturally prefer AIR.

Would Adobe have to worry about Zinc? I am sure it doesn't have to. With the amount of reach and community interest it has generated over the years, AIR is here to stay big time! Most certainly, AIR has a long way to go before everybody accepts it. Adobe took a big step forward with the new features introduced in AIR 2.0. Zinc fights a very good game. I wish the technology was cheaper though. J