ok Xara ltd. of Gaddsden Place somewhere in England. [img]/infopop/emoticons/icon_smile.gif[/img] (provincial texan that I am. . i believe it is outside of London . . .too lazy to look it up at the moment).
Had a product called Xara Studio. Somehow they made a deal with Corel that Corel could market Xara, the program at least in the US and apparently in the UK. When TigerDirect (a US Computer junkies catalog) helped advertise a Corel Roadshow going through Houston, I got to admire, for the first time, the concept of graduated transparency in a vector application (this was back in '95 . . when CorelDRAW 6 was coming out in conjunction with Win95). I read the TigerDirect Hype and it looked awesome. I went to the roadshow and Xara was great. Admittedly, as Freebird says, version 1.1 had printing problems but Xara (not Corel) fixed them in either version 1.2 or 1.5 AND they did those as free upgrades. (they did not make you pay for a bug patch)They added great functionality in those versions also.
(you know what, Freebird, my recollection is fuzzy I don't recall if us diehard Xara fans just exported to .tif and printed from those -- we so adored the Xara tools)
But the shoddy treatment from Corel that Erik is referring to, I believe, (not being the best of mind readers [img]/infopop/emoticons/icon_wink.gif[/img] ) is this:
Corel never bought Xara the program or Xara ltd. lock,stock, and barrel. They took great ideas from Xara's product, incorporated them into Corel Draw and then locked Xara 2 the next version of the program in the dustbin in the basement. Barely letting Xara have food, water, or letting Xara see the light of day. Sadly Xara 1.1, 1.5, and 2 were the stepchildren of Corel and Corel really only seemed to show interest in sustaining CorelDRAW!. that is how the xara Community saw it. . ok .. that is how I saw it. (Corel did a horrible job of marketing XARA2). When the contract finally ended between Xara Ltd., and Corel. All rights of ownership and marketing reverted back to Xara Ltd. They were free to market their program as they saw fit. All that time, Xara maintained complete control over the program code of Xara. So I think their parting was amicable. . . as amicable as such a parting can be.
Corel never wrote or owned the code for Xara.
Corel's purchase of Painter and other former MetaCreations software WAS more along the lines of Lock, Stock, and Barrel. To my understanding, they DO own the code for Painter and everything that that implies. (metacreations,if they are still alive --- as if we care--- do not want the program back. they just wanted the money)
And yes, Thelonious, I agree. If you didn't care about Painter you'd let this issue drop. Customer Service people have to realize that when a customer is complaining, they are giving the company a 2nd chance. . . a chance to redeem themselves. I remember a similar instance where I had bought a program called HoTMeTaL Pro and they had a bug that they fixed in a new version. . . they did not fix it in a free patch. A bug I considered a functionality bug. and I never bought the next version. I took my money elsewhere. I switched to Dreamweaver and have never looked back. I quit caring what HoTMeTaL did.
Since Corel now owns Painter. .. the code. .. .I would expect that Corel will sustain Painter. I think that because of the unique nature of Painter, they will never try to make it compete with Adobe Photoshop or Corel PhotoPaint. I'm not sure that Painter could sustain a head to head battle with Adobe Photoshop. Painter used to be marketed kind of as natural media tool (or that's how I viewed it) and not as a competitor to Photoshop. But all that aside, I agree, it is not unreasonable to ask a company to produce a product that works. I think you've been doing a fantastic job presenting the problem here. It makes perfect sense to me. Although, [img]/infopop/emoticons/icon_smile.gif[/img] I still haven't tried to duplicate the error on my machine.
But where I'm guessing the Corel people are coming from is this: You can work and work and work and still not get a 100% perfect program. so at what point do you say you can let a program out of the gate? Allow the users to enjoy new functionality? (admittedly, from watching the thread on print quality, one does wonder what new functionality is in this program). Corel has been notorious for letting version A out with bugs (forcing the user to get out the cans of RAID, the big Boots, and the rolled newspapers) but they are normally pretty good at getting alot of stuff fixed in version B. They (Corel) drive perfectionists crazy but they do move the program forward (you may never see the forward motion because of the distraction from the other problems, but the movement is there [img]/infopop/emoticons/icon_wink.gif[/img] ).
I really hope that they move this feature up on their list of bug fixes. It would make Painter so much cooler to have this feature work the way you describe that it could work. [img]/infopop/emoticons/icon_smile.gif[/img]
Thank you all for this fascinating discussion,
Athena
[img]/infopop/emoticons/icon_smile.gif[/img]
(ps I once had professor tell me that as a perfectionist, I might lose out to the person who regularly delivers shoddier material because they do more in the same amount of time and have a greater likelihood of getting decent stuff out ... decent not perfect . .. something seems insane about that. . . but I understood his point.)
Athena
Our thoughts are bounded by words. The quality of those thoughts is largely determined by the words that compose them.
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