MDM Zinc 2.5 for Windows (with Mac OS X Plug-In)

When in Flash...

To really get into the whole application-development-using-Flash aspect of Zinc, you're going to have to get familiar with {mdm}Script. What, pray tell, is {mdm}Script? Well, without getting too technical, {mdm}Script extends ActionScript within the Flash development environment to enable your Flash movies to do all sorts of things that Flash by itself, well, just can't. There are hundreds upon hundreds of {mdm}Script functions to choose from, but let's look at a small and simple example. Say you want to find out where your Zinc projector is currently "living" on your system (whether that's on the local drive or removable media is irrelevant). In its simplest form, you might use something like the following script:

var path = mdm.Application.path;

So, if you're on a Windows machine, and the projector is sitting on the Desktop, the variable path would return (for example): C:Documents and SettingsusernameDesktop, which you could then use in any number of ways. (And, for the sake of completeness, that same code when run on a Mac would yield something like Macintosh HD:Users:UserName:Desktop:.) Again, this is a very basic example, but it's one that hopefully illustrates a couple of things. For one, {mdm}Script looks and feels as natural as regular ActionScript does. Intermixing {mdm}Script with ActionScript isn't a back-and-forth proposition, as the syntax and usage is more or less identical. The other thing (which is not readily apparent from the example, but is vitally important nonetheless) is that {mdm}Script 2 (the latest version of the language introduced in Zinc 2.5) is completely synchronous. For those of you who may have just blurted out a "huh?", allow me to explain a bit:

Synchronous execution of code pretty much boils down to code that is "ready" as soon as it's called. In earlier versions of {mdm}Script, many functions were asynchronous, meaning that the example above would have had to be paired with a callback function or run inside of a loop until the variable, for lack of a better term, "existed." In other words, the code didn't run in real time, and you had to jump through some hoops while the code ran and returned what you asked it to. With {mdm}Script 2, there's no waitingresults are available as soon as the code is run. That's the difference between synchronous (good) and asynchronous (not so good), so we're definitely in "good" territory here.

Now, without rambling on even more than I already have, it's probably useful to give you an idea of just how comprehensive {mdm}Script is. I feel a bullet list comin' on:

You can connect to databases.
You can embed other media (PDFs, Windows Media/QuickTime/Real, Shockwave, or even a Web browser) into your projectors.
You can create application menus.
You can find out various things about the host system, such as screen size, CPU speed, or the specific version of Windows or MacOS the host is running.
You can transfer data via HTTP or FTP.
You can manipulate and convert certain image types.
You can encrypt and decrypt files.

Of course, I'm just scratching the surface hereas I mentioned, there are literally hundreds of commands to choose from. Sadly, not all commands are cross-platformnot even close. I'd love if Zinc allowed me, for example, to embed a Web browser into my Mac projectors, but alas, that functionality is Windows-only. However, there are some intriguing Mac-only scripts available, such as AppleScript and shell script integration. But the fact remains that you're probably going to want to use some killer feature in your application, only to find that it's not cross-platform functionality. More on that in a minute.

Issues(?)

So now that we've covered how Zinc itself works and discussed the all-important {mdm}Script part of the equation, it's time to talk "gotchas." Fortunately, there aren't many; Zinc does what it's supposed to do (and does it pretty well, I might add). So let's spend our remaining time together today talking about a few broad issues and then going over some of the nits I had.

First and foremost, I was very interested to see how well Zinc-wrapped projectors ran on Windows and Mac systems. I haven't seen a Flash wrapper application yet that didn't yield some drop in frame rate from the "raw" SWF file, and Zinc is no exception. However, Zinc does pretty well in this area, and I'm guessing that the improvements in Flash 8 play no small part here. In my very unscientific tests with some pre-existing Flash content, the results varied. Windows projectors often performed with no negligible drop in frame rate, though depending on content (read: however many pixels I was shoving around at any given time), it wasn't uncommon to see perhaps a 5-10% drop in frame rate over a native Flash projector, while some older (pre-Flash 8), higher frame rate SWF files dropped as much as 20%. (Again, these are extremely unscientific measurementsmore of a "gut feeling" than anything else). Mac projectors didn't seems fare as well as their Windows counterpartsI came to expect anywhere from a 10% (minimum) to even a 25% or more reduction in frame rate over native Flash projectors. As an aside, it's worth mentioning that creating Mac projectors from a Windows-based program is extremely easyZinc bundles the application into a HQX file, which you then move to a Mac and unpack on that end. But I digress. Overall, Zinc projectors did about as well as Director projectors (Director being my usual Flash wrapper application) with similarly embedded Flash 8 content, so it's safe to say that at least for me, Zinc performs about as well as I had expected. Of course, Flash content varies wildly, so your mileage will definitely vary here.

Another big issue I wanted to check out stems from personal paranoia. You see, some time ago I was using one of Zinc's competitors as my chosen Flash wrapper application, only to find out that the projectors it made wouldn't run on Windows 2000 or XP machines where the user wasn't an Administrator and the latest Flash Player wasn't already installed. Suffice it to say that I religiously check for that scenario now, and there is good news and (a tiny bit of) bad news when it comes to Zinc projectors. The good news is that Zinc creates truly standalone projectors that do not require anything additional to be installed (the caveat there being that if you've used a function that relies on a third party technology, such as QuickTime, all bets are offyou have to make sure your target users have those extras). Zinc projectors also work just fine for users with non-Admin accounts on Windows. The bad news, such as it is, is that depending on your build of Zinc 2.5, you may find that your Zinc projectors tend to "trip up" machines with XP's Data Execution Prevention feature enabled. I couldn't figure out for the life of me why a projector that worked fine in Windows 2000 would flat-out refuse to run on my XP box with DEP enabled. Fortunately, I didn't waste too many brain cycles figuring it out, as I had recently had an encounter with DEP while using another program, so it was one of the first things I thought of. In any event, the most recent build of Zinc that I downloaded (2.5.0.15) fixed this issue, so just make sure you have the latest build.

And now, with the experiments run, here are the issues I found while working with Zinc:

1) To put it bluntly, Zinc likes to "phone home." After querying a MDM rep, I was informed that Zinc does so for a couple of reasons: one, Zinc connects to MDM's servers to check for news and updates. Two, Zinc validates registration, which, if I didn't know any better, sounds eerily like product activation. The good news is that there is an option to turn the annoying notifications "feature" off; the bad news is that there is no way to disable registration checking. Now, it's easy enough to block the connection with the firewall program I use, but once I do Zinc takes up to 25 seconds to become usable after launching the program (at least on my machine) if it doesn't find an Internet connection. I was also told that Zinc shouldn't connect at every launch, but in my experience it tried to. Needless to say, this process is highly irksome, and as I dislike Internet connectivity as a seeming requirement to even run properly (and especially in light of my seething hatred of product activation), Zinc wasn't seriously considered for our highest rating.

2) I've already touched on this issue briefly, but the lack of cross-platform parity with regards to {mdm}Script is somewhat troubling. Don't get me wrong; there are plenty of features that are supported on both the Windows and Mac platforms, but chances are that you'll want to use a function that is limited to one platform, and if that feature is crucial to the success or failure of your application, you'd have to target a single platform. For example, I'm not certain of the technological impediments to the implementation of PDF functionality into Mac projectors, but if I wanted to author an application that included embedded PDFs, I would either have to target the Windows platform only, or enable some workaround (such as document launching) that results in reduced (or at least different) functionality on the Mac (which, I suppose, is better than it not running on Macs at all, but is still not an optimal solution). That said, there are still many cross-platform features that can and do permit very rich applications that will run on multiple platforms; I would just like to see the full feature set supported everywhere Zinc runs (where possible and applicable, of courseI don't expect AppleScript to run on Windows, for example).

3) Initially, I kept running into a "Library not Registered" error message every time I launched Zinc or imported a SWF file. Apparently, it's because I didn't have any Flash 8 ActiveX controls on my system (only Firefox plug-ins), and Zinc (again, apparently) requires access to the host IE ActiveX control to show certain elements during the authoring process. However, Zinc will still work fine, and will still build perfectly functional projectors even if you don't have the ActiveX version of the Flash Player already resident on your system.

4) I really wish that Zinc offered a "grand unified" file format. If you want to create multiple projectors for different platforms, you have to create different Zinc files for the same project. I'd like to see Zinc store different platform information within the same file, which not only would allow for easier projector building, but would also streamline the projector building process for multiple platforms. It's not a huge sticking point, but it would be a "nice to have" option for a future version.

5) Another wish list item: I'd love to see MDM provide a component for the Flash environment that offered debugging from within Flash. As it stands now, you have to write your {mdm}Script trace or debug code, publish your SWF file, switch to Zinc, enable debug mode, build the projector, run the projector, and then see the results. Wouldn't it be great if there were a Zinc component that simulated the Zinc engine, so you could at least run (for example) simple traces on {mdm}Script functions? It would for me, anyway.

6) Lastly, a word of caution rather than a true issue. Zinc is chock full of options, and {mdm}Script is overflowing with functionality, but inevitably, you'll likely find that there's a specific thing you want to do with Zinc that it doesn't have. In my case, I like to "sniff" for certain screen resolutions, and if a user is running at 800x600, I try to have my projectors lose the window chrome and just go full-screen. Director does this, but try as I might, Zinc doesn't seem to have a way of changing the window modes in mid-stream, as it were. It's something I can work around, of course, but the point here is that you'll likely come across something that Zinc can't do amid all the hundreds of things that it can. That's not a damnation of the product by any stretchI guess what I'm saying is that with all the things that Zinc can do, it may suffer from the high expectation paradox. Don't let it!

The bottom line

I'm getting within spittin' distance of the 4,000 word mark here, and I still feel like I left out 99.9% of Zinc's featuresit's just that huge and that comprehensive. Keep in mind that I reviewed the Windows version with the Mac OS X plug-in, so your experience with any of the other flavor of Zinc that MDM offers may be much different than mine. But the long and the short of is that Zinc is a fantastic program that offers tremendous flexibility to Flash designers and developers who are looking to do more with Flash. Zinc has something for just about every Flash user type, from designers and animators to "tweeners" (like me) to hard-core developers looking to create full-blown desktop applications in Flash. It works well, is fairly easy to pick up, and is just an all-around solid product, and as such earns a Strong Buy rating (the connection/activation "feature" being the main reason Zinc was kept from more rarified air). But don't just take my word for ithead over to the MDM web site, grab a trial version, and evaluate it for yourself.

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Kevin Schmitt has been waist-deep in the ever-changing muck that is digital media production since the days when grunge was actually popular. When not living the customary high-roller lifestyle that goes hand-in-hand with being a DMN contributor, he doubles as an award-winning freelance animator, artist and multimedia producer in the livestock-laden wilderness of central Virginia's Shenandoah Valley. Whether you're looking for help on your next project or are just in the mood for a good rant, feel free to either drop him an email or visit his Web site to check out his article archives and portfolio. He's ready to believe you!

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When in Flash...

Issues(?)

The bottom line

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