We just did our first application with a projector app like this.
Thankfully the target was only for Windows 2000 and XP, but it needed to
support nice transparency with non-rectangular windows.
First I gave Screenweaver OS a go, but it has some major bugs, and
almost no development (well, not on the version 3, apparently they are
working hard on the beta version 4). After a couple of days we decided
that we needed an application that could provide support.
We looked at them all, and decided on Zinc, as it seemed to have the
most active forums and developers (ie they respond to bug reports
quickly), it was cross platform (thinking about future projects), and
had a lot of features. Unfortunately we found that CPU usage was
extreme - with an application approximately 800x600 it would use 65% of
a 3.0GHz cpu just sitting there, and 100% cpu when there was any
animation inside the window. This is due to the transparency - it was
much better with a regular rectangular window.
As our client found this unacceptable we moved to mProjector (at their
recommendation). We found mProjector to make the smallest file size,
and have the best CPU usage. Unfortunately their support is much slower
- the forums are much less busy and the devs will take some days to
respond to emails. They were in the process of releasing their new
version at this time, so this may explain it (they are a much smaller
operation than Zinc). Unfortunately we found there was a bug that would
cause the application to crash sporadically (when loading external
movies/data), and some two months after reporting this as a bug it was
still on their "todo" list. Also transparency was fine in the Flash 7
build, but in Flash 8 was very patchy (I believe this has been fixed since).
So, we had to move to Northcode SWF Studio. This was our last option,
as we couldn't find any other Projector applications that had
synchronous commands (and switching to asynchronous would be far too
much work this late in the project). Northcode has fairly quiet forums,
but their devs replied to every post at least once a day, and responded
to emails within a day (with the timezone difference from Aus to Canada
I thought that was pretty good). The downside is that their
transparency support was fairly poor - the only reliable method for
non-rectangular windows was to have 1bit transparency. They did provide
me with a pre-release version with better transparency (which I believe
has been released now), however this did have pretty much the same CPU
issue as Zinc.
So, overall:
- Northcode (which we ended up going with) had the best support and
least bugs. But did make the largest filesize.
- Zinc has the most features, and the CPU issue appeared to just be
Flash 8 - all three had ver poor CPU usage when using nice transparency
in Flash 8. Medium filesize
- mProjector had the smallest filesize, and with Flash 7 had the best
CPU performance. The app/libraries had the least features (ie no cross
platform, no screensavers, no support for standard rectangular windows).
And at the end of it all, I have vowed to avoid working on any Projector
applications like this again. They all seem like patchy solutions, and
I guess that's why Macromedia never added more than basic fscommands to
the standard Flash projectors.
Regards,
Grant Cox
Chris Velevitch wrote:
On 3/29/06, Gene Jannece <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
I've been reading pros and cons of using Zinc, I started to wonder what are the
pros and cons of other projectors?
Flash Magazine did a comparison of projectors.
http://www.flashmagazine.com/1095
http://www.flashmagazine.com/1097
It's a little old now, but is a good starting point.
Chris
--
Chris Velevitch
Manager - Sydney Flash Platform Developers Group
www.flashdev.org.au
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