After fiddling with AIR a little bit I decided to look at another option: zinc. This thing rocks. I had a standalone up and running in no time at all, and best of all it does not require an installer to run your swf. I really think that there is real value here. Having access to the mac shell and file system with no need for an installer is pretty darn handy, it also is probably the make or break of getting a widget on a users desktop. This will come in super handy for all kinds of things from mp3 players to rss readers.

All I did was make a little flash app that loaded an xml file and some images of all the employees at my job. Then I opened up zinc and made a new file with the .swf. There are good deal of settings but the transparent window stuff is the part that was immediately appealing. The only drawback I saw is that you only seem to be able to set transparency on mac via a color channel. That makes for only being able to have solid alpha transparency. Hit publish and you have your app up and running. This was real chore trying to achieve with AIR and CS3 although it is probably easier with Flex Builder. The tutorial I saw used stylesheets.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 17th, 2008 at 6:09 pm and is filed under Actionscript, Flash.