#Corel 4 – Great Nothing
11 messages in this thread
Somebody here was a beta tester for Corel 4 and, as far as I can remember, was
pretty hot about the thing.
Well, I just got the upgrade this morning and so far this has been the worse
piece of software I have ever installed in my computer. Aside from the 40+
megabytes of disk space, all those stupid DOS device drivers they stick in your
config.sys and autoexec.bat (occupying 65k of precious memory) when no other
paint program I have does… It just doesn't work. I played with the thing for
about 30 minutes and found over 30 major bugs (system lock up, garbage on the
screen, scanner won't work, menus that do nothing yet available) the list goes
on and on… Well, it's back in the box and out it will go UPS tomorrow…
Sick, just sick…
Just a note about r4. Must agree with you not too hot a product over 3. I
havn't had any problems running it yet no lockups or crashes on anything.
Maybe just a weird conflict with your system. Lots of stuff for your buck
though. Don't think I could live without it (corel 3) but 4 yuck!!
TTYL
-KB
Well, gosh, Gus — it's not my fault, really!!<g>
Yeah, my 4.0 is still in the shrink wrap — my last beta version was so buggy
that it was unusable, and I turn around and there it is at Egghead in full
release! The Corel people told me that their "in-house" beta people had
finished the job, and all was ready to go. I told them I seriously doubted it,
and it sure is foolish to perpetuate Corel's reputation for releasing buggy
software. As you know, they did it anyway.
But, buggy as it is, it is still evidently usable on some systems by some
people. I personally know of two firms that use it all day, every day, and they
haven't needed to re-install 3.0 *yet*. All-in-all, I'm not gonna depend on it
untill I hear about a patch or two, but I will install it soon 'cause it has
some awesome features (when it doesn't bomb), great for 3DS users. One of which
is the contour operation, which simplifies the creation of beveled text, and
the new fractal-based texture-generator is quite awesome too, if a little slow.
Hopfully they will get the messege that feature-laden software is pretty usless
if it is full of bugs.
-Alan Iglesias
Alan,
If anyone wants to know about the bugs in Corel 4.0, just take a stroll over to
the Corel forum and read through the hundreds of complaint messages. Its pretty
viscious . . .
One thing I noticed with 4.0 was that after spending 40 minutes trying to find
the manual's section on their new OCR program — there is no mention of it in
any of the docs. It is clearly listed on the product box and in their ads but
not in the docs or in the program's help index.
After a long, long time I was able to call Corel and found that they "forgot"
to include a section on the OCR in the docs — although the program is there:
hidden in the Trace module.
The consensus among the heavy users is that the Corel 4.0 ship date was forced
to coincide with their stockholder's meeting.
Alec Jason
Really. Unfortunately is would seem that the stockholder thing (or something
like it) has got to be the reason behind the obviously early release. Maybe one
day the people who stand to make (or lose) the most money in a situation like
this will also have the foresight to identify a potentially explosive situation
and think about quality and *it's* relationship to sales as opposed to beating
the Jones' or whatever their deadline was all about.
Yeah, those guys on the Corel forum are pretty upset. You shoulda' heard 'em
when Corel announced the original upgrade price!
-Alan
I am amazed with this corel 4.0 thread. They forget to put the OCR in the
docs?????? They have tell the mags, in the CorelDraw! 4.0 presentation, that
they are going to release a new version each year…but with this problems, who
will buy it? I'm happy with the 3.0 and with their CorelSCSI package (which I
think to be really good) but this 4.0 problems really astonish me.
And then you hear people complaining about Windows bugs…he!
Ana
Alan: I've been a Corel user since 1.2 and have yet to upgrade to 4.0. I
talked to the Corel people at Comdex which was hard to do because they didn't
even have a booth???? Does this indicate financial problems at Corel? Anyway,
back to the tech stuff. I am considering upgrading until I hear all this bug
stuff, I really wanted the upgrade to acquire the purportedly expanded clipart
library on CD-rom. How much better is it than 3.0 CD? Also, one feature Corel
draw seems to lack is the ability to join more than one set of nodes in an
object at once by selecting a selection in pairs process. You know, if your
outline is broken in more than one place you have to manually re-outline the
object to correct this situation. This happens alot when corel tracing a
scanned piece and attempting to separate and edit the objects. 40 Megabyte to
install? Guess I'll check out another 1 gig drive too.<g>
I really haven't been in as close touch with Corel as I used to. My old
contact, Vivi Nichol, has been promoted to "boss of all tech people" or some
such. Knowing her, this must be a complete nightmare for her. I wish her the
best as she was a great person to know and talk to about computer graphics.
.So I don't have a clue about thier problems, really. Alec's suggestion is
probably closest to the truth 'cause nothing else seems to make much sense. I
don't know that pressure from Adobe, Aldus, or even Gold Disk(?) is
particularly high right now, but I feel they really should start putting
quality releases ahead of gobs of features, etc.
-Alan
Agreed! I really was shocked at Comdex after searching for their booth and
only finding a lady with a Corel badge standing next to a wall. She told me
Corel decided not to have a booth this year. This was shocking to me because
Canada was the honored country at Comdex. Something's up.
Wow! Hmmmmmm….makes ya think, don't it?
-Alan
It does, eh, it realy does, eh…