Adobe AIR 1 vs Zinc 3

Well what is the difference between

Adobe Air

and

Multidmedia Zinc

Not a lot in fact both provide similar yet different APIs to cover the non web bits, File access, local DB etc.

I like AIR a lot, but I also really like Zinc 3. Here is a summary of the key differences

Adobe Air 1 Pros
It's Free
It's intergrated
Its signed code
It gives you a package that installs through the air Installer
You can make an application from HTML

Adobe Air 1 Cons
You need the AIR framwork installed
You can't customize the installer
You can't produce a standalone version (exe)
You need to purchase a certificate to become a known publisher.
You need to take your app say flex and write it differently for Air.

Zinc 3 Pros
It's nice new studio for building your package
You can customize everything and use a third party installer if you want
It can produce standalone native exes and mac / linux equivilant
It requires nothing addditonal for your users to run your program
You require no code changes to turn your SWF into an exe

Zinc 3 Cons
It's not Free
It's not as nicely intergrated, although they do have plugin versions
It's has a huge new competitor Adobe that it may struggle against.

Given the good marketing and hype that AIR has received I think it's important to consider the options, I personally don't get it since Zinc has been around a while, I've been thinking but I've been able to do this for a long time.

And don't choose AIR just because it's free, remember that you need to purchase and renew certificates. If you haven't tried either, I recommended that you give them both a go.

Adobe AIR Code Signing Certificate Expiry

We have looked at signing our Flex applications using a purchased certificate, but the question lurked in the back of my mind on how the expiry of these cerftificates affected the applications.

Recently at a talk in Melbourne Australia by Danny Dura I asked him these questions, and he didn't really know, but asked me to ping him later and he would chase the answers. Which I did and I got all the answers back promptly. Here is a summary of the questions and answers, note not the verbatim questions or answers.

Q: When you purchase a code signing certificate you might notice you are purchasing it for 1 or 2 years. So what happens to your application once the certificate expires?

A: Nothing, the application will still function normally and will still have the Green tick, the certificate expiry is indeed different to SSL type of certificate expiry, it expires only in the sense that once expired you can no longer sign code with this certificate, thus if you wanted to release a new version you would need to renew your certificate.

Q: How does the application validate the certificate, do you need to be connected to the internet for the certificate to be validated back to the certificate host?

A: No, the certificate validates locally without going to the network.

More info on that here
http://livedocs.adobe.com/labs/air/1/devappsflex/help.html?content=distributing_apps_13.html#1037515

So this all makes sense and is good, you sign your app and distribute as much as you like, in the event your cert expires or you want to distribute a totally offline app that will never have internet access, then these answers say your good to go.