Kenneth, the "News Publisher" (the 24/7 App) acts only as News reader, parser and server. Using SS´s TCP Socket it sends out News feeds in a propitary format to Clients on the Dev. Boxes (also SS Apps) The Server itself does not have any heavy user interaction going on, it only has a Fullscreen Interface for displaying and browsing news currently available for broadcast. It is a single SWF.
However, I´m using SS since about 3 years now and did many Projects with it. These projects include many heavy UI Apps and also some Video/Multimedia projects going on, and I never regretted to use SS for it. It performs quite well even with heavy Uis or large data moving going on. My current project for example is a kind of authoring environment for Movie / TV directors, so you can definitly do great things with it. Lee, as stated above I´m a long time SS user and I´m absolutely satisfied with it, so my comparsion may be kind of subjective. Well here I go. I download the recent Zinc Demo from time to time to see how it evolved, I´m also looking on their forums quite often to see how things going. >From the feature set Zinc has two big advantages against SS: Multiple form support abd Mac OS X compatibility. The third advantage, real transparency, was added to SS just yesterday and works very well for me. I think the feature set of Zinc is focused on quantity, however SS focuses on quality. Zinc claims to have "over 800 new and extremely powerful commands" which may be a correct number, but take for example SS´ Shell.execute. To get the same functionality with Zinc, you´d need Process.create(), System.exec(), System.execStdOut() and System.execUnicode(). Still you don´t get the same flexibility, due to the great API SS offers. Since every command takes an Object as Input parameter, you won´t have to worry about parameters, adding or removing, new features and so on. You´r code won´t break if Northcode changes anything on the functionality. Unfortunatly you can´t rely on this in Zinc, there where some situations they changed the parameter order and everything breaks. In case of reliability/stability my point cleary goes to SS. I have never seen any "NilObjectExceptions" or non-working commands or anything that simply does not work as advertised. NC´s QA is far better than MDM´s. It simply works! Also, you can be sure that if something worked on build 93, it will still work on build 124. At Zinc you´ll have to jitter every time a new build is released if your old code will still work ;) Sometimes they even break Flash´s native commands,... Performance Another point for SS. I haven´t noticed any performace changes depending on UI Components, used features and so on. Also in the recent Zinc version File System operations performed really bad, don´t know if that was fixed in the meantime, thou. I did an extension for SS to interact with an SQLite Database and it performs very well. Depending on your needs an advantage of Zinc may be the skin support. I personally really don´t need it, since I´m trying to develop serious-looking/"brave" Apps, but it may be worth a look for you if you are more of an Desginer. All in one I would recommend SS, however I can only suggest you to try both trials, and see how they perform for you. You would need to spend some quality time with both to see which one suits your needs. Both have fuill online Docs available so you can look into their feature set. The API of SS may be a little learning curve, but you don´t want to get back to regular parameters once you are used to it. I hope that gives you a first impression. As stated it´s my very subjective opinion so please forgive me if it sounds not very objective. If you have any further questions feel free to ask, I´ll do my best to answer them as objective as possible. Regards, André -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Kenneth Kawamoto Sent: Wednesday, March 29, 2006 2:21 PM To: [email protected] Subject: [Flashcoders] If not Zinc, then what? >I´m using an SWF Studio App 24/7 here at work (kind of XML news ticker/reader) and it works just fine. Hi André, Does your app have heavy user interaction? Does it have multimedia (audio and video)? Does it have multiple SWF modules rather than just one SWF? Is it full-screen app? If so and it's stable I'd look into SWF Studio (no OSX is bad though!) Kenneth Kawamoto www.materiaprima.co.uk _______________________________________________ [email protected] To change your subscription options or search the archive: http://chattyfig.figleaf.com/mailman/listinfo/flashcoders Brought to you by Fig Leaf Software Premier Authorized Adobe Consulting and Training http://www.figleaf.com http://training.figleaf.com _______________________________________________ [email protected] To change your subscription options or search the archive: http://chattyfig.figleaf.com/mailman/listinfo/flashcoders Brought to you by Fig Leaf Software Premier Authorized Adobe Consulting and Training http://www.figleaf.com http://training.figleaf.com
