Zinc 2.5

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 other native applications.

Multidmedia’s Zinc attempts to solve 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 certainly does what it says on the box, in practice the results are unsatisfactory. The applications that Zinc produces do 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 much harder than it should be, if not impossible at times.

The new Mac OS version, while welcome in theory, is even more underpowered, lacking many of the functions and ActionScript commands the Windows version has to offer as well as standard interface features such as keyboard shortcuts. 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.