I haven’t used it in 6 months (and I’m thankful for that), but when I last used it, it still had bugs that required work arounds. The network connectivity detection sucked, learving you to implement wierd hacks like pinging sites or pinging in a hidden command line and parsing the results. The answer I got from Zinc was basically, ‘Well your network doesn’t always clear its state immediately, so sometimes it will be cached and return the wrong answer.’ That was in Windows by the way, I’m not even sure how well it worked on Mac.

Or even better, the SWEET bug involving the activex flash plugin in IE. Apparently if that wasn’t installed on XP then your Zinc projector would crash. So much for a self contained projector that doesn’t require flash to be installed on a machine huh?

Despite all of these shortcomings Zinc has, you’re still right about it, most of the things AIR does currently Zinc can do as well. But it can sure be a major pain in the ass to have to implement them in it. So even if all AIR ever becomes is a replacement for Zinc I would still welcome it and find it useful.

Regarding your thoughts on AIR fitting into the enterprise, I don’t really see how it fits either, but I don’t think its intended purpose is to create industrial strength desktop apps. I think its intended to bring browser based apps offline, and give them a little bit more access to the machine than you can get in the browser.

I think you need to give it a bit more time before pronouncing it useless. Once a 1.0 version hits the streets and we see how fast market penetration is occuring then it will be time to determine if we’ve got another Central on our hands.

Always been a fan of your blog and today you nailed it :) I tried this approach many moons ago but it came off as being ‘MSFT says Apollo sux’ (goes with the brand i guess). Yet, you’ve pretty much just put it on the floor and said ‘this is what hurts, this is what rocks but overall this is where I need to be’.

I think AIR could be enormous, but striking the balance between Security Context and Desktop Client App derived from Flex/Flash is the delicate balance. I don’t envy the engineers behind the product, as it looks awfully tough :)

I did also giggle at the ‘Echo Chamber’ part.. that was funny.

–
Scott Barnes.
MossyBlog / Microsoft.

Cool… thanks for the correction. To be crystal clear then… are you saying AMP will only utilze APIs native in FlashPlayer/AIR? How does the DRM work?

Specifically, say I want to build an app that can view DRM’d FLVs…. can I do that? I had the impression the end user would HAVE to use the AMP. I’d even be happy if the DRM was available as an add on via some server technology that my client would have to buy.

My take–and please correct me if I’m wrong–is that the ONLY way you’ll be able to view DRM’d FLVs is using the AMP… is this not the case?

Wrong.

Philo / Adobe Media Player is built on top of abd deployed via the same AIR runtime that everyone else will have.

mike chambers

mesh@adobe.com