Previously, as an avid user of the product Zinc (formerly Flash Studio); produced by Multi Dimensional Media in the UK, I was skeptical when Adobe announced Adobe AIR. Of course I was already a tiny bit bias to the SWF2EXE programs that simply work as a third party conversion tool for Flash and Flex. You simply build your desktop app right in Flash or Flex, then you just run the SWF file through the SWF2EXE utility and wallah, you now have a functional desktop application ready to use. Zinc always had a large number of features it could add to your applications and for that I was regularly impressed.

When Adobe AIR was first announced, I dove straight into it to figure out if it could deliver as many features as the SWF2EXE utilities. I was surprised to find that there are quite a few features offered in Adobe AIR, but not nearly as many as Zinc. Upon further research, I found out why and why it really doesn't matter. Yes, Zinc offers a full line of features from DirectX manipulation all the way to file manipulation. Also, the database connection abilities of Zinc, in particular, far exceed that of Adobe AIR. Zinc has support for numerous database types with your projects. One of the things I often did to get a quick start, was to build a quick and dirty database with using MS Access. And then I set up all my data connections using it. After everything seemed to be in working order, I'd export the data into a more stable database, such as MySQL, and change the connection strings to use the MySQL database. However, these features are primarily designed for the Windows OS. There is very little support for Macintosh and almost no support for Linux. When you weigh out the fact that Adobe AIR may have fewer features but they all work across the board (Win & Mac), you start to understand why it might be a more attractive technology over the SWF2EXE utilities. Just knowing there will probably be less headaches involved, due to compatibility issues, often puts my mind at ease.

I suppose we'll all just have to wait and see what truly happens to the SWF2EXE programs as Adobe AIR progresses even further. Multi Dimensional Media has made statements claiming that Zinc is still the definitive desktop application development tool. They've also made claims to the effect of Zinc and Adobe AIR not being directly in competition with one another. In fact, they seem to think Zinc and Adobe AIR can work hand-in-hand in some projects. Now before I close this post proclaiming that Adobe AIR will win the battle, I wouldn't be comprehensive enough if I didn't list out so me the other advantages Zinc does definitely have over Adobe AIR. There is still the tiny benefit of not having to install any extra plug-ins in order to run a desktop application made with Zinc. In fact, SWF2EXE apps made with Zinc don't even need to be installed at all. They can run completely stand-alone. But if you're using any kind of local database, external images stored locally, etc. you will need to create an installer to add all the other files to the computer. One more fairly attractive feature Zinc offers is the ability to connect to external DLL files, but once again, we're only talking about Windows here again. A full comparison chart can be found at: http://www.multidmedia.com/support/articles/?action=detail&id=33. Of course this article is so old, it's actually making the comparison between Zinc and Apollo but it's still worth taking a look.

To finally close this off with one of the biggest reasons I thought about for Adobe AIR being the "killer" of SWF2EXE utilities is the fact that Adobe is one of the most respected software companies in the world. It's only natural for developers to jump right on to the Adobe AIR band wagon. I don't know if the SWF2EXE utilities will die out right away because of Adobe AIR, but I've already found myself, a diehard user of Zinc for many years, merely only using it for creating screensavers at the present day. I knew the day that happened; the SWF2EXE days would more than likely be numbered.