Flash on the Desktop: Zinc vrs Air vrs Director vrs F-in-Box September 18, 2007

MDM Multimedia put there, with their comparison of AIR and Zinc, and I It's accurate but I feel an incomplete pitch. AIR doesn't really expect much more users than they currently expect with the flash plugin, and they expect much less from developers working in AIR, than Zinc or other lanaguages.

OTHER POINTS FOR AIR

• Integrated with Flex and Flash production tools. 1 step publish. Zinc, F-in-box, Director have many more steps and over the course of a project it adds up.
• integrated PDF and HTML and Javascript, with cross language communication.
• has a SQL database built into the runtime, no need to setup one.
• very quick installers and install from web.
• it can load/play anything flash can play, and will support the same codec as quictime, which shortly will probably represent 80% of the video on the web, youtube is already streaming their content for iPhone consumption.

The first two I think are very important. It opens up desktop development to web developers which has normally been an different tier of, and it does it much faster than Java or C+ workflows. Within minutes and only a paragraph of code one can create simple tools for text and image manipulation. Flash is great, but it's not necessarily ideal for text or layout heavy docs (e.g. tables). It can also be hard to source talent for. HTML on the other hand most kids in junior high can code.
F-in-Box's key points are, ability to stream movies and FLV from memory...nothing ever hits the disk. Write in Delphi, C, etc. But this requires someone skilled in one of those 'hard' languages, familiar with memory management.
Director is the lowest of my list at this stage as it has not kept up, but it has 3d support and has had stable cross platform desktop access for years. I think it's weak point are windowing, it's primarily kiosk mode or nothing.