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. We all know how well that turned out. 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. That’s right, 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 is a bit of an idiot and he’s 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.