The others
As we don't pretend to make money, we don't have to tell BS about our project. We know its strengths and weaknesses and we want to shared them with you so you can make the best choice.
HippoHX
Our biggest problem right now is Flash player redistribution. Read the Wiki for an in depth explanation and what are we planning to solve the problem.
We are also veeeeery little. We are just starting and we don't have a team devoted to improve HippoHX. This means that implementing a specific feature might takes us long time, that's why we are asking everybody to contribute. Also please read below the note about propietary projects.
And read the Awesome list for a list of big features that we don't have implemented.
Adobe AIR
Although really, really late, Adobe has finally developed its own SWF wrapper software. Actually, they've gone further than that embedding Webkit and allowing developers to wrap full HTML pages too. And let me tell you this: Adobe has done a great job.
Having said that, there are a couple of things that might or might not be important to you:
- You need to go through the AIR installation process, including signing applications.
- From time to time you find restrictions that can stop your project such as the famous "not launching 3rd party apps" problem. Something like this won't be a problem with HippoHX because it's Open Source and you can extend it.
On the bright side, with AIR you can embed full HTML pages and PDFs and also you have a lot more APIs available at the moment.
SWHX
As we've said many times, we are just a layer on top of SWHX so if you are fluent with haXe, you might want to skip the middle man.
Shu
We are not layers but after reading Mike Chamber's post about AIR runtime redistribution it might well be that they have to modify their product. But we cannot really speak for them.
MDM Zinc
Err.... we don't know because we haven't used it.
Note about propietary vs Open Source projects
Both Open Source and propietary projects are controlled by someone: a company, a foundation, a good dictator, a bad dictator, etc. That means people far from you take decisions that might impact your project very much (AIR and launching 3rd party applications anyone?).
The difference between Open Source and propietary projects is that with Open Source projects you have access to the code and you can implement whatever feature you need or fix whatever bug is annoying you. That's just not possible with propietary software.
Even if you can't fix the problem yourself, you can always hire someone to do it. You have the option and the right to change the code, that's a key difference.
There's no right or wrong choice for everyone, just chose whatever technology is best for your project.