Disgusted: Painter 7 should never have been put on the market in its present condition
humidsign
bugs and crappy features in Painter 7 are in a totally different
category to the annoying bugs and defects in every other piece of
software that I have ever used. I am convinced that only a company
that has an unbelievable degree of contempt and disrespect for their
customers could possibly release a program onto the market in this
condition. What is wrong with these people? Do they not care at all
about their reputation? The frequency with which this program crashes
is beyond all reason. And don't think that saving your file is any
kind of precaution, when Painter crashes there is a very high
probability that it will destroy your file in the process. And any
time you open Painter there is a probability that it will crash more
than once. Not only that but it has a most spectacular method of
crashing by completely vanishing from the screen.
While of course it is possible to try to find complex and elaborate
workarounds and to use save as every 15 minutes. But I gather there
is a consensus amongst the people who use Painter that it is still
going to crash very frequently. How many times more frequently will
Painter crash than most programs? Maybe twenty or thirty times.
Painter also seems to have problems with such simple things as opening
documents. Everytime I open a document the bottom edge of the
document window is too far below the bottom of my screen to be able to
reach it with my cursor. Should I maximise the window it maximises to
leave the bottom border of the window half an inch above the bottom of
my screen.
The layers and masks in Painter 7 are so defective as to be a joke.
The watercolour brushes in Painter 7 seem to be like a feature that
has only been halfway developed. They fail to live up to even the
most minimal standard that could possibly claim to be realistically
simulating watercolour. The most characteristic feature of
watercolour is that the brush strokes merge into each other, this is
why it is possible to create even washes and gradations in
watercolour. In Painter 7 's watercolour brushes the brush strokes
will always have clearly defined edges no matter how hard one tries.
Learning to get something useful out of these brushes would be maybe
twenty times more difficult than learning how to use watercolour from
scratch. I suspect that to be willing to devote enough time to using
these brushes to get some interesting result one might have some other
motive than purely artistic such as profiting in some way from some
sort of relationship with the Corel Company.
I think it would be very appropriate one day although unlikely to
happen, but one can hope that several hundred users of Painter will
perhaps make a sufficient amount of noise and make a sufficient
nuisance of themselves as to cause Corel a significant amount of
discomfort. They deserve it. It is awful that they should be able to
get away with this kind of behaviour and that there is nothing anyone
can do.
Not everyone is a graphic designer with thousands of dollars a year to
spend on software, there are actually artists who may decide to play
around with this software who are not particularly rich.
Yours sincerely, humidesign.
Sven Olafsson
> I can hardly express how angry and disgusted I feel with Corel
You're not the only one. On the official Corel forums, the attitude
of people who've been using it since the beginning (1991) is one of
despair and frustration. I think the heads of Corel changed and
turned out to be a bunch of asset-strippers - at least that's what the
general opinion seems to be. I bought CorelDraw 10 in all good faith
but will not be buying 11. They sat back and ignored pleas for
patches for a good 10 months. I went back to 9, although now there
are patches available, I don't know how long they've been around for
as I stopped checking their website after the first few irritating
months.
Corel ought to concentrate on their core activity and stop pissing
around with Linux, Ray Dream Designer, Painter etc. Corel used to be
a badge of quality, but now it's become a wasp-like warning signal on
any software. They're going to have to work long and hard to win back
the oldies like myself. That's if they want us back.
Sven.
MikeC
FREE upgrade to v8 when it comes out - assuming that it is less buggy
than v7!
Mike