Comments on: Multidmedia Zinc 3.0 and Adobe AIR in review

By: amar shukla

amar shukla — Thu, 05 Mar 2009 05:27:09 +0000

AIR 1.5

fully free , you need to pay for the IDE but otherwise you may wish to go for Eclipse /Aptana Plugin which is also free . AIR Apps run smoothly on WIN/MAC OSX/All Linux flavours . With the time the number of AIR apps as well as Developers are growing day by day and support for AJAX/JavaScript makes ti far more better than others…

Thanx!

Amar shukla

By: Murray

Murray — Mon, 19 Jan 2009 11:04:23 +0000

AIR is free… for now. I’m guessing the next versions will come out with a “Basic” and a “Pro” release, with certain limitations around the basic and a heftier pricetag on the “Pro”. I’m a bit skeptical that Adobe is going to maintain a free SDK forever, but it’s clever getting early adoption with a nice free carrot initially. Honestly, if they had wanted to keep it free, they would have made it open source. Come on guys, Adobe is the Microsoft of the media industry. You can’t tell me that their products are priced affordably or that they don’t try cornering the industry by creating proprietary standards. Welcome to business in the real world.

My main gripe with AIR is the runtime download. It’s fine in countries with super fast cheap internet, but in the developing world, it’s a grudge download. Also, future updates to the runtime will add yet another app to the list of updates asking for more bandwidth.

But it’s early days still, let’s wait and see what happens…

By: WikiMe

WikiMe — Wed, 05 Mar 2008 11:51:48 +0000

to Cahlan: so why not just download the trial version and evaluate it first? If you had to Pay for Air, would you just go ahead and buy it, or would you evaluate it first?…

Now that air has gone out of beta, I will be using it more for my “smaller” projects, but Zinc 3 is really leaps and bounds ahead of where zinc 2.5 ever was, and has air beat for building CD apps.

Peace.

By: Cahlan

Cahlan — Wed, 27 Feb 2008 22:23:12 +0000

Sure, Zinc 3.0 looks great when you check out the “What’s new” page; but honestly, how many of those features are bug-free and tested to the point that Adobe has tested AIR?
I used Zinc 2.x extensively for two plus years and got incredibly sick and tired of making hacks and workarounds for when said “features” didn’t work the way they were supposed to or lead to memory leaks or other problems.
Honestly, I’m a little scared to drop the money for Zinc 3.0, especially if it’s as buggy as 2.0 was.

By: Tom Chiverton

Tom Chiverton — Fri, 01 Feb 2008 17:23:49 +0000

“AIR – the engine and business model is free, but to develop any application you have to pay”
Not true. The Java-based SDK will be free, and run on all three major platforms.

By: WikiMe

WikiMe — Fri, 01 Feb 2008 15:07:48 +0000

I think everyone is also forgetting that you CAN’T make standalone apps with AIR that work on CD or DVD. Thats VERY important to freelancers like myself who develop cd-roms for clients. I like air, but I love Zinc!

By: MrSteel

MrSteel — Fri, 01 Feb 2008 12:26:32 +0000

no doubts Zinc is great piece of software, and no doubts AIR will develop in fast pace
there is also a slight (or big) difference – MDM Zinc is not free and AIR is free
I like Zinc, but I have much greater expectations and beliefs in AIR

By: Dictionary guy

Dictionary guy — Fri, 01 Feb 2008 07:52:47 +0000

witch is a woman who is mean and casts spells…

You may want to change witch to which.

Nice review. Might have wanted to add in that Zinc costs over 800 dollars to do what they say. Air is free.

By: Igor Costa’s comparison of Adobe AIR and Multidmedia Zinc 3.0 » MyLineRider

Fri, 01 Feb 2008 05:18:03 +0000

[...] Igor has posted a nice initial comparison of these applications that allow creating web-enabled desktop applications using Flash and Flex. [...]