Gareth Jones

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.

After my banning from the MDM support forums for pointing out that Zinc V3 is a load of rubbish, MDM pruned the forums of multiple posts that had anything negative to say about the software and closed down the bug reporting page:

We have currently suspended new Bug Submissions whilst we compile and validate existing entries. Thank you for your patience.

Evidently, the only way MDM is able to reduce their bug count is to prevent people from being able to report them in the first place. Likewise, the only way they’re able to have a forum of satisfied customers is to delete every negative post as it comes in. Let this serve as a warning to anyone thinking about buying anything from MDM.

On the positive side, the entire conversation was saved before it was deleted by Gambini and is provided here for posterity: Page 1, Page 2.

As you can see, Gambini seems to be of the opinion that if a large organisation has been sucked in by his false advertising, the ridiculous bug level of his software is irrelevant. He also seems to believe that unless you have a multi-million selling product that your opinion on software that you’ve paid good money for is worthless. Furthermore, should you dare to ask questions about this, you will be banned.

Is this is a company that you want to support?