Building Flash desktop widgets with Zinc
what is Zinc?
Quote:MDM Zinc
is the industry leading SWF2EXE application - Create, Build and Deploy real Desktop Applications based upon the Adobe® Flash® Format! Available for Windows, Mac OSX and Pocket PC, Zinc™ v2.5 is the fastest, most powerful, most feature-packed Rapid Application Development tool for Adobe® Flash®!
...
Zinc™ v2.5 empowers your Adobe (Previously Macromedia) 6, 7 8 and 9 SWF files with unrivaled functionality and flexibility. Create powerful Desktop Applications for Windows with over 800 new and extremely powerful commands for your Flash projects.
MDM Zinc is a piece of software that helps you to create Rich Desktop Applications with a bigger scope than a widget can have but we won't harm anyone if we use Zinc's power to create a simple desktop widget.
Why Zinc?
Zinc is perfect to extend flash files only, so if you are not familiar with Flash, is better if you look for another approach if you want to build desktop widgets.
There are many more applications that helps you to create executable files from a flash file but I found MDM Zinc really easy to use and it has all what we need to create standalone desktop widgets.
One of the advantages of having a standalone application is that the end user won't need to install any environment to be able to use it, meaning your widget will behave as any other simple document that can easily be opened, closed, dragged to a different folder or deleted.
How to build a widget
First of all we would need a flash file, in this case I'm using the clock I build for the tutorials "
Building Flash web widgets".
After getting a copy of MDM Zinc (
trial version available from here) we will open it and start the simple process:
Write your widget title and form caption (I wrote "PieClock" on both) and in
Input Source search for your .swf file.
As soon as you find it and click "open", the view will be updated and you will be able to preview your widget
Your widget is ready to be built and if you press build, in few seconds will be ready, but will have a not too nice rectangular shape, so if you want it to have the widget's shape then you need to click on the style tab and change the window style to transparent.
Again, the widget is ready to be built but, is better if we allow the user to drag it and to do so, just go to the Input Devices tab and select "drag window" from the left mouse button option. The other two (middle and right mouse button) can be set to "ignored" by now (We will use them in the next tutorial).
you can press "build" now to compile your widget, a pop up window will ask you to lunch it, click ok
As soon as you do so, Zinc will minimize and you should see your widget alive! a big smile will come from your face (happens to me all the time
) and just press "Esc" to close it, Zinc will pop up again and you can continue playing with it (I invite you to do so) and explore the other tabs and options. If you are happy with your widget, then its done.
That's the basic way of building Flash desktop widgets using MDM Zinc; in the next tutorial we will add interactivity to the widget so it will be ready to be uploaded to WIDGIPEDIA
salut!
:: Games Garden :: 
