Gareth Jones

I like to stay up-to-date with my software, always making sure to take advantage of new functionality and security features as soon as they’re available. This applies to Skype just as much as anything else, so a couple of weeks ago when I noticed that Skype had released a new version I downloaded and installed it as I always do.

After installation I loaded the program to take a look and see if I could spot anything new. To my surprise and slight horror, a pretty big window called Skype Home opened alongside Skype itself which I quickly closed, assuming that it was only showing because of the fresh install of the latest version. Just to be sure though I quit the application and loaded it again, and to much greater horror this time Skype Home opened once more.

I had a look around for one of those “do not show at startup” tick-boxes that you sometimes get with stuff like this but couldn’t find one. I opened Skype preferences and had a look in there, hoping to find something similar to the settings in both Windows Live Messenger and Yahoo Messenger, but to no avail. It was then I opened Firefox and did some searching on Google to find various forums full of people lamenting about a new “feature” that Skype have added without any way to turn it off.

A number of things became apparent while reading these forums, such as the fact that Skype did something similar back in 2010 but backtracked in the face of mass protests from their users – so why they would try exactly the same thing two years later and expect a different reaction, I don’t know. Another potentially helpful fact I learned was that the issue only affected users who use Skype in classic view – those who use it in the new, social network-style view are unaffected as Skype Home is built into that interface. I say potentially helpful because sadly it wasn’t of any help to me as I don’t use that view – because it takes up two or three times more screen space.

The bad news was that Skype really haven’t allowed a way to disable the window and with only vague hints that such a way might be provided in the future I was given a choice: either go back to an older version (5.3.0.120 is the latest unaffected version which you can get from here) or find an acceptable workaround. I contemplated rolling back to the previous version but some of the changes in the change-log refer to fixed bugs, and the thought of re-installing software with known bugs didn’t really appeal to me so I decided to search for a solution.

After trying a few different solutions, the most elegant one I’ve found is ClickOff by a guy called Johannes Hübner from Sweden. This tiny little program continuously searches for other programs with defined window titles and performs default actions on them when they’re found. Apparently it was written with the intention of automatically responding to prompts (hence the word click in the name) but another task it’s ideal for is to close unwanted windows such as Skype Home. What makes it better than some of the custom-written programs out there that are specifically designed to target windows called “Skype Home” is that ClickOff will also work for users who use different languages. It can also be used with any other applications that might sometimes pop up unwanted windows (WLM does sometimes, even though I have specifically told it not to) or of course with prompt dialogs that you always answer in the same way.

Why am I posting this article today? Well yesterday Skype released another updated version of their messenger, and after the torrent of abuse they’ve suffered over the last couple of weeks I expected them to have included a way to disable Skype Home from within the program – but unbelievably they haven’t! So it looks like I – and many others – will continue to need ClickOff for the foreseeable future at least.

Update: It’s taken the Skype team an awfully long time to resolve this issue, but at long last they have. As of version 5.5.59.119 the Skype Home window no longer opens by default!

After getting the kicking of a lifetime over their controversial plan to force gamers to use their real names when posting on its official forums, Blizzard vice president and executive managing director for international operations Michael Ryder told Eurogamer before StarCraft II’s midnight launch in London that the “process” had “worked”.

So, it turns out that getting their arse kicked by the community for coming up with such a stupid idea was all part of the plan.

To celebrate this revelation, I have prepared a couple of images that show other people’s plans coming together.

Tonight we’ve unveiled the Learnalot portal and opened the discussion forum for registrations.

The portal isn’t yet taking subscribers as there’s still some work to do on the resources themselves, but with the portal now completed it made sense to unveil it for three important reasons:

1. It gives people who are interested in what we’re doing (and Google Analytics shows there’s a fair few of you out there!) an opportunity to take a look and to get excited about what’s coming.
2. It allows people to register for the newsletter and be kept up to date with resource progress and more importantly, the portal’s launch.
3. Finally, it allows the search engines to start indexing the site so that when we do launch, potential users will be able to find us.

Registrations on the forums are welcome to all those who are interested in the portal or who wish to ask questions or provide feedback. Naturally, the portal will also serve as a support forum when we launch.

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.

The guys over at Northcode have obviously taken a keen interest in recent events on the MDM forums and have put on a great offer to help get people working with decent software.

Send a copy of your Zinc registration email to support@northcode.com and put “Zinc Sucks” as the subject, and they’ll send you a coupon code that will give you a $75 discount on a SWF Studio V3 Professional license.

It’s worth pointing out that I’m not getting any commission or anything else for posting this offer – it’s just the right thing to do since SWF Studio works and Zinc V3 doesn’t. Update: here’s why.

I’ve just managed to get myself banned from the MDM forums for stating that their Zinc V3 software is a load of rubbish. Released about two years ago, the software currently has a whopping 70 open bugs – many of which date back to the beginning of 2008!

I first started using Zinc around 6 years ago, back when it was called Flash Studio Pro (1.9.x). The software was pretty flaky but was good enough for the small projects that I was working on at the time. Soon after though, support for the software vanished as MDM released a new product called Zinc V2 which provided a new GUI and a load of new commands. I upgraded like most of MDM’s users, only to find that Zinc V2 had just as many bugs as FSP and that MDM was just as slow to fix them.

Some time later, support for V2 again dropped off the face of the earth as the company excitedly announced the release of Zinc V3 – a cross-platform application that was built from the ground up, no less. MDM made lots of noise about it being the most stable version of the software yet, thoroughly tested and that it would only be released when it was absolutely bomb-proof thanks to an extensive beta phase. Another thing that I remember from this time was disgruntled customers who had just bought Zinc V2 being told that their product was no longer supported and that if they wanted to move to V3, they’d have to pay an upgrade charge. The V2 forums were also locked, making it difficult for people who didn’t want to “upgrade” to V3 discuss and resolve issues collaboratively. So much for looking after your customers.

Anyway, fast forward two years and here we are. The bugs that are to be fixed in the next version (the 17th for those keeping count) include fixes for such basic functionality as being able to export JPEGs, read and write to the Windows registry, resetting event handlers, broken AS3 support, broken MAC mask support and a load of other things that should have been resolved before launch let alone before the software’s 2nd birthday. There are even bugs on there that were once fixed but have since been re-introduced in later “updates” thanks to the poor level of testing they do over there. A full list of the open bugs is helpfully available on their website here.

I never upgraded to V3 myself. Having seen first-hand how painful it was to come up with workarounds to V2′s bugs after jumping from V1, I decided to sit out the next ride and wait for the inevitable bugs and other issues to be resolved before taking the plunge – yep, despite MDM’s bullish claims of QA this time around. I also didn’t see any major benefits in V3 seeing as I hardly ever need to develop for Macs or Linux-based PCs (just as well as the support for these two OSs is patchy and inconsistent), so I was in fact more than happy to watch from the side-lines until the dust settled. The problem was that the dust never did settle and two years on V3 users are still having to put up with an insane bug count. V2 was bad sometimes, but nowhere near as bad as V3.

Despite not having taken the plunge for V3 myself, I would still visit the forums occasionally, sometimes helping out a newbie or two with some Flash/Zinc related questions and sometimes just watching in amazement as the bug reports continued to come in thick and fast – bug reports for standard functions that showed quite clearly that were was next to no testing going on at MDM between releases. As the bug count continued to rise and MDM continued to clumsily release hit-and-miss updates, I thanked my lucky stars for not having given them any more of my hard-earned cash.

Finally it was the 2nd of December 2009 and I took another look at the forums – hoping that by some miracle V3 was in a usable state by now. What I found in Gambini’s post (that they were “aiming” to fix some of the bugs but couldn’t make any guarantees) just floored me and so I started asking awkward questions and suggested that perhaps a 2-year-old application that had over 70 known bugs is actually a load of rubbish and that hey really needed to sort themselves out. Other users agreed but stopped short of venting their own frustrations as openly as I – surprising really since they had paid good money for V3 while I had not. MDM responded by offering some pretty lame excuses (we’re a small team, there’s lots to do, we’ve had lots of things go wrong this year, blah blah) and totally failed to explain why 2-year-old software that they charge good money for should still be on the shelves with over 70 known bugs.

Rather than admit Zinc’s problems, Gambini (or Jaspal Sohal to give his real name) tried all kinds of tactics to divert attention from the software by – among other things – accusing me of not caring about MDM and being there only to start arguments. While I don’t really care for MDM either way (why would I? And why is that even relevant?), I do care about having access to good software and I do dislike it when honest, hard-working people are ripped off when buying faulty goods.

Anyway, for making my thoughts known, I was banned. I haven’t logged back in to see what they did with my posts, but I was there long enough to see that they deleted some other posts that didn’t reflect too kindly on themselves or their products.

In short, anyone who owns Zinc V3 and is unimpressed with its bugs should be prepared to be banned from the forums if they dare raise their concerns with the administrators. Anyone who is looking to buy some decent (i.e. working) software on the other hand would be wise to seek out some alternatives! The one that I’ve recently started using again is Northcode’s SWF Studio. I had used SWF Studio in the past but was never 100% happy with the script language, but having been forced to search for an alternative to Zinc due to V3′s ridiculous bug count, I found that the latest version of the software (SWF Studio 3) has a brand new scripting language that is much more intuitive – but most importantly it actually works!