Gareth Jones

Umm… by solely including the PDFs, you’re leaving out Gambini’s unedited posts. He told you to “Piss off” amongst some other details.

This guy’s had more edits than the Book of Mormon.

Holy shit, Gambini actually lost it! For the longest time, I’ve been of the opinion that Peter would be better off running the show. Until that happens, I’ll stick with v2.5. It’s broken, but I’ve had to learn to deal with it. Just a crying shame Gambini couldn’t learn to do the same.

This is the second time I read your MDM forum conversations with Gambini and I’ve enjoyed it both times. Thanks for speaking up for all of us.

I started using Zinc about 3 years ago (maybe 4) but only to add basic reading/writing of two files as settings for a flash application.

Almost 2 years ago, I decided to add more functionality to the flash application I had and use more of Zinc’s “power.” I was thinking it would take me at the most 3-4 months to finish my additions. WRONG! Besides the known bugs, I still had to test and re-test just about every “working” Zinc function I wanted to use, under Win 2000, XP, Vista, 32 bits, 64 bits, admin privileges, standard user, etc. Somehow, things NEVER worked the same.

I had to write my own documentation (since MDM’s documentation is very poor in my opinion), but in the end it wasn’t good enough. Zinc results were always different depending on the computer/user configuration. And this is only due to poor coding practice on Zinc’s end or poor maintenance at best.

I have a basic understanding of C so I started learning about the Windows API to write my own extensions. From reading the MSDN documentation, I noticed that the Zinc functions I used did not follow Microsoft’s guidelines. Every test was a surprise which cost me hours of debugging.

I even reported in detail the exact problems of registry functions between different Windows configurations in the forums, with links to the appropriate documentation on MSDN (http://www.mdmforum.com/forum/index.php?&showtopic=25466, by the way I know you’re banned from the forums, but anyone else might be interested). The problem is that I got the standard “workaround” response and all I was asking was what was going on, why, and if anyone else had noticed that behavior.

It turns out, with not much experience but a great deal of time, I was able to re-write some of Zinc’s API functions, including better registry functions, system time functions, file system, admin stuff, calling programs, and so on. I was able to get consistent results from Windows 2000 to Windows Vista with my extensions. So I thought, how is it that I can do this without any experience and the people at MDM can’t get it right? I will never understand.

MDM are very proud to tell the world that Rosetta Stone runs on Zinc. My guess is that either Rosetta Stone doesn’t use more than a few really basic Zinc functions or that most of the work Zinc does is through custom extensions written by the Rosetta Stone team.

I bought a copy of Northcode’s SWF Studio last June and was able to finish my application in a few weeks. I converted the C extensions to C++ plugins (with no C++ experience) and rewrite the Zinc calls to SWF Studio calls in about one-two weeks.

There was a post by Thomas Frank a while ago calling the Zinc community as a whole to come together and do something to help each other instead of moan (since we weren’t getting anywhere with MDM support). I was the first to respond (after several months), and said I would volunteer time to make better documentation freely available to everyone and if anyone was willing to set up a server I would contribute. After several months Thomas replied (was the first one after me), saying he didn’t use Zinc that often anymore. I was already using SWF Studio at the time, and told him that I had walked away of Zinc to SWF Studio. Of course the post was deleted, and it seemed that other people had started jumping in the conversation to complain about Zinc. A quick and dirty solution on MDM’s part, and I even mentioned it in a post, would be to open up comments to their online documentation.

The sad part is that the Zinc community did not respond to Mr. Frank’s call, which is a sign that everyone was/is tired of dealing with a lousy tool. Users seem to get to the MDM forums after hours of trying to figure out what went wrong, only to find out things don’t work as advertised and you need some workaround to do what you need to do. My final workaround was called SWF Studio and it took me 9 months of wrestling with Zinc to find it. I would have spent a third of that time (or less) had I started with SWF Studio.

You’d need a team to fully document Zinc’s functions and odd behavior, write extensions and/or wrappers with workarounds so you can actually get to write an application and get the expected results in the amount of time needed.

Notice I only talked about Zinc under Windows. I didn’t even try OS X, let alone Linux.

Sorry for the long comment. I wanted to share my experience and thought your blog post was appropriate.