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!
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