Why MDM Zinc V3 is so rubbish
Perhaps, since the Zinc story is obviously striking a chord with so many others, I should attempt to explain why Zinc V3 is so full of bugs.
Back in the Flash Studio Pro days, MDM hired Xtrabass (Jethro Grassie) to make their first OSX-supported software, Zinc 2.0. Jethro disappeared after that and OSX support started to falter with no-one there to support it.
MDM then hired Kevan Harriman as their lead developer (according to a news item on their website), and he worked on the Windows and OSX rewrites which gave way to the now infamous Pandora/Zinc V3. Kevan disappeared from the forums about a year ago and now runs Deep Cove Software (according to DNS records for deepcovesoftware.com), and it’s these guys that have built Inferno for MDM. Inferno, MDM’s newest application, was developed outside of MDM because MDM currently lacks the development capability in-house. For a company that sells software, this is a serious problem, the results of which we are seeing today with Zinc V3 being so bug-ridden.
Anyway, Viper (Matthias Davis) disappeared from the MDM forums over a year ago and his website (fatal-exception.co.uk), which used to be full of Zinc-related posts, has been completely overhauled. I don’t know if Matthias was doing development or just support but that pretty much left Peter and Gambini holding the fort at MDM.
The departures of Jethro, Matthias and Kevan have had a big impact on the level of support at MDM and Gambini himself has been distracted doing stuff for his other venture, Amayeta. With no in-house expertise in the technology it’s not surprising that support sucks and they can’t get bugs fixed in a timely fashion, and with Inferno being developed externally you can bet there will be support issues with that software too.
By all accounts from people that I have spoken to, Gambini has managed to alienate pretty much everyone he’s ever worked with. It will be interesting to see if he can hold onto a decent developer long enough to fix the issues with Zinc V3 once and for all, though his other option is to do what he did with V1 and V2 before it and just ditch the software overnight and launch a new version and charge everyone an “upgrade” fee for continued support.
Think I’m making this up? Check out their forums from about 2 years ago.
Consider yourselves warned.
Just a clarification or two…
MDM licensed a piece of technology from Xtrabass which enabled them to make synchronous commands work on OS X.
They opted for only a key piece of what Xtrabass had in the hope they could develop all the actual MDMScript commands themselves in-house.
However, with little to no proper Mac software development skills in house (and I’ll refrain from mentioning the developers name as he is a really nice chap, just lacking dev skills on Mac), MDM’s Zinc v2 on OS X was very buggy and lacked the support the product needed.
MDM lacked the drive to ask/get/pay Xtrabass to help sort their product and instead looked to Zinc v3 with new developer(s) (as you state, Kevan AFAIK) relying on no third party licences or royaltee payments.
On the whole I think this started well for MDM. What has happened since then is anyone’s guess.
The general consensus seems to be (for the people who have ever used MDM software) that the amount of bugs MDM software has just simply isnt acceptable, especially for the money they charge.
How or why this has been the case is a little unnerving, sure, for any new MDM products, but that isnt to say MDM are not addressing the issues or perhaps learning from past mistakes.
And lastly, lets not forget, what with AIR 2.0, pretty much everything Zinc and Inferno does is not needed anymore, so will be interesting if MDM can really innovate now anyway.
Hi Jethro
Thanks for the clarification on all those points.
It will indeed be interesting to see what MDM does with the release of Air 2.0. I’m afraid that innovation by itself won’t be enough next time around though, because after the shambles that is V3 they will also need to ensure that whatever it turns out to be is absolutely bullet-proof.
I must say, having looked at Zinc and the other similar technologies – I think for multiplatform accessibility, AiR is pretty good.
As far as SWF wrappers go, SWF Studio is the only one we use. The folks at Northcode are truly dedicated to their community.
With that said, we are mostly moving to Flex/AIR. I wonder if AIR signals the death of all 3rd-party SWF wrapper products?
Zinc is simply too buggy for any professional use.
Hey Gareth,
I was wondering if you will ever do a review of Zinc 4. Now Zinc “Exports to Xcode 4.0″! Ahahaha, I couldn’t stop laughing when I read that in my email. They can’t even work on SWFs without jutting out tons of bugs, and now they pretend to export to Xcode! Ohgod.
In the meantime, I’m having the time of my life with SWF Studio (which I got thanks to your suggestions). Awesome support, and and it simply works.
Hey Daniele, how are you? It’s been a while. :)
A review of Zinc 4.0 would be good from a completionist point of view but in order to be able to write one I’d either need to buy a license or have Jaspal supply me with one.
I’d rather give my money to Scientology than buy any more broken software from him, and in light of our exchange a couple of years ago I don’t see him giving me a license any time soon… so I guess the answer will have to be no! Sorry!
Great news regarding SWF Studio though. I haven’t had many projects require it lately but it’s always a pleasure to use it when they do come up.
@Gareth
Hey :) It’s been very long. What about you? I see you’re busy with toys, and Learnalot seems to be going well? :)
Me I’m great, lots of changes here, and now I’m mainly wasting my time with Unity coding (just finished a virtual museum, and starting a game), and writing/drawing comics (plus some illustration, plus moving to Serbia, plus… oh, that’s enough). But I’m still pushing SWF Studio now and then, especially for a big app who needs monthly changes and updates: I just do the updates, publish it, and it never crashed. Hooray for Northcode.
Unity, really? I have plans to get into that as well – downloaded the engine a few weeks back but so far haven’t had a chance to do anything with it. :(
Do you have any screenshots of the museum application?
Why the move to Serbia?
Unity is kind of a mess. Buggy and with a lot of missing features. But once you learn all it’s pros and cons it becomes quite powerful. One of the main cons is that packages are not allowed, thus you can override existing classes without realizing it (I personally start all my classes names with HO, to keep them kind of unique), and that, absurdly, there is no decent tweening system (iTween is the most used one, but it sucks, compared to what we’re used to with ActionScript). One of the main pros is that it really allows you to work in team with designers, because you can easily build plugins (way easily and more quickly than Flash’s SWCs) which control everything, and which they can set as they see fit.
Oh, and a note of advice: use C#, not JavaScript. Way better :P Anyway, if you have some questions I’d gladly answer: I found it quite disconcerting to start with Unity from scratch :)
I got no screenshots of the museum here (it’s about Athanasius Kircher, quite a fun thing to do). I’ll show you one when I’m back in Rome. And the move to Serbia is simply and happily for love. Though it’s not a complete move for now: more like 3 weeks in Serbia than one in Rome. This is where I love that my job allows me to work via internet :D
Can’t believe it! I just discovered that all the executables I made with Zinc3 don’t work on Windows 7. They run once, then when they shut down they leave an un-destroyable process, so they can’t be started again. Ugh! I wanted to update my flash website (and also put those museum screenshots), for which I made a desktop content manager with Zinc3 ages ago, and now I’m stuck unless I want to do it manually :/
P.S. self-promoting corner: if you’re getting into Unity, I just finished a serious Tween engine: HOTween (http://hotween.holoville.com) :)
Have they fixed that issue in Windows 7 yet? The OS isn’t exactly new (Windows 8 is already getting beta-tested for heaven’s sake!) so it’s ridiculous that MDM could have such a major flaw in their software. I’m not all that surprised though to be honest!
Thanks for the link – HOTween looks very useful! Unfortunately I now have even less time to start playing with Unity. :(
I can’t wait to show what I’ve been working on at the BBC though! In a few months I’ll hopefully be allowed to talk about it. ;)
@Gareth
Can’t wait to see what the BBC stuff you’re doing is about. I’m still amazed you accepted contract work, thus I believe you must be working on some really awesome stuff. Will eagerly wait those months :)
Last cool thing about Unity I’ll mention (for when you’ll be getting at it): 2D Toolkit (http://unikronsoftware.com/2dtoolkit)! Great plugin to make 2D games – oh, ok, I’m a nerd, but I’m having so much fun with Unity these days :D
P.S. I suppose MDM settled that Windows 7 issue in the new Zinc v3 (which I obviously didn’t buy), but I don’t dare to download an updated version of my Zinc v2 to check that, because probably it would break my project even worse (as usual with Zinc updates :/).