Corel Draw Graphics Suite

[Larry Shelby]

$70 minimum

https://www.humblebundle.com/software/freedom-to-create-with-coreldraw-graphics-suite-2024-software

[User 905133]

2 hours ago, Larry Shelby said:

$70 minimum

Is that a deal?  I haven't used new Corel software since they privatized the company for less than many public investors paid.  While the Capital Loss was somewhat useful to offset some Capital Gains, the privatization still stung.

Quote

From 2019:

Corel Acquired for Over $1 Billion

 

Corel’s previous primary owner, Vector [aka Vector Capital], has described the privately-held firm as “highly profitable,” and the firm is known to have “millions” of customers. Unlike many of its contemporaries from the 1980s, Corel has also succeeded simply by surviving. It was once positioned as the primary office productivity alternative to Microsoft Office.

The deal is likely a rich one for Vector. The firm initially paid $124 million for Corel and then paid $30 million to take it private in 2010.

JMO: Not a bad profit.  

[aidan o driscoll]

As with most software these days its SUBSCRIPTION or ONE TIME PURCHASE here - this is the 2025 edition pricing:

https://www.coreldraw.com/en/product/coreldraw

€30.75pm OR €779 ONE TIME

So i know this deal is for 2024 edition BUT at €60 ONE TIME its a no brainer really if it floats your boat.

I used to use it ages ago but stopped upgrading once I found AFFINITY. The Affinity suite when NOT ON SALE is €179 ONE OFF inc tax. On sale it has been as low as €99 I think ..

https://affinity.serif.com/en-gb/

Edited 20 hours ago by aidan o driscoll

[Scott R. Garrigus]

Corel makes some great software. Although, these days the graphics category has some nice open source stuff like GIMP (photo), Krita (digital painting), Inkspace (vector design), and Blender (3D and animation).

[mettelus]

CorelDRAW and Pinnacle (I think) are the only two apps still being developed by Corel. PaintShop Pro, Painter, and VideoStudio all got put on "hiatus" after the 2023 edition "while they figure out what to do going forward." Not sure if anything has been done with WordPerfect or Roxio, but AfterShot Pro has been unchanged for years now.

The Humble Bundle for MOHO struck me as very odd, since that is version 12 (is now 14) and that version was before it it was bought (back) by Lost Marble in 2020!! I am not even sure what is going on with that one, but it "should" be able to be upgraded. It is not even close to being current though.

[ZincT]

11 minutes ago, mettelus said:

The Humble Bundle for MOHO struck me as very odd, since that is version 12 (is now 14) and that version was before it it was bought (back) by Lost Marble in 2020!! I am not even sure what is going on with that one, but it "should" be able to be upgraded. It is not even close to being current though.

Was looking at that myself but the upgrade from 12 Pro to 14 Pro is $299 --  https://moho.lostmarble.com/pages/buy

[mettelus]

37 minutes ago, ZincT said:

Was looking at that myself but the upgrade from 12 Pro to 14 Pro is $299 --  https://moho.lostmarble.com/pages/buy

Ouch, that is why they chose version 12 then, I guess... I didn't catch that aspect of it  

[Amberwolf]

Still using an ancient  PaintShop Pro 6...tried GIMP but every version so far has had wierd problems, or works in ways that can't do what I want without immense gyrations of user input.  PSP6 just works, and is "obvious" how things work, and it does almost everything I want it to, even if most of it is manual tedious work. 

 

GIMP (and lots of other software) has too much "programmer syndrome", which means that the designers of things get this idea in their head of how something works internally and then do that with the UI, instead of making the UI (user interface) for the *user*, which is going to be completely different from how the internal stuff works.  But many programmers don't see that, and can't be pushed to do so by users; they just push back and say "no, *this* is how it works" instead of letting their userbase show them how it *should* work to actually be useful to most users.  

Maybe it's improved in recent years, but I doubt it....  

 

 

 

 

 

 

[mettelus]

6 minutes ago, Amberwolf said:

Still using an ancient  PaintShop Pro 6

+1 to this! I still have (multiple copies) of PSP 5 and have it set as my default editor. It has 90% of the features I use as is, is so small (17.4MB!) that is can be put on thumb drives to fix things on a work laptop, and opens instantly! The guy who coded it (JASC) was my next door neighbor when I was in MN, and the fact that it was "future-proofed" to access available memory made it even faster as computers evolved. It is funny how you can look at a 30-year old piece of software and suddenly realize how few of the added features actually get used.

I never get excited about updates to Word! There have only been a handful of bug fixes I miss when I happen to sit down at a version of 2003 (not seen a version earlier than 2003, but that was when the major file format change occurred anyway).

[Scott R. Garrigus]

My personal favorite is PhotoImpact Pro. That app was way ahead of its time because it can do so many things. I still use it all the time. And the nice thing is that all it requires is a serial number to install. I can use it forever as long as Windows doesn't kill support for older applications.

[Mr No Name]

I got corel draw standard 24 recently, I'm pretty tight so I wouldn't have paid much for it, can't remember where it came from?

[Starship Krupa]

47 minutes ago, Amberwolf said:

"programmer syndrome", which means that the designers of things get this idea in their head of how something works internally and then do that with the UI, instead of making the UI (user interface) for the *user*, which is going to be completely different from how the internal stuff works.

It's not often that I come across a description of an engineering phenomenon this spot on and succinct.

Having worked on many consumer software packages in the past 35 years, yep, that's a thing. I think that the leaner things are, the less top down control there is, the greater the danger this will happen. Larger organizations have such creatures as product managers, who are not programmers. One of their jobs is to steer what new features will be added and how they will work.

At least that was the common structure 25 years ago, maybe it's changed.

Programmers, IME, tend to be at their best when presented with problems to solve. People who are good at programming aren't necessarily good at other aspects of creating and marketing a software product. Many are, but it's not a given.

One of the difficult things about FOSS is the lack of "adult supervision." Some things work better when there's more hierarchy. There's no authority figure to tell them that the feature should work this way, just a bunch of whiny end users who think they know everything.

Also, when everyone works on the modules that they themselves think are the sexiest, more mundane stuff like basic workflow and (especially) documentation can suffer. My favorite plug-in house, MeldaProduction, suffers from this. Vojtech is a genius who came up with a way that he could continue to do the coding as a one man show for a long time. His products are so feature deep that I could spend the rest of my life digging into them and never finish. And one of the reasons for that is that his written documentation is traditionally sketchy. He started out using the same "shared code" concept that the plug-ins are based on, so the documentation for a large number of the plug-ins is 90% boilerplate that applies to all of the plug-ins at the expense of information pertinent to the individual plug-in.

[Starship Krupa]

2 hours ago, Amberwolf said:

Still using an ancient  PaintShop Pro 6

I was psyched to get PaintShop Pro 2023 when I picked up the Humble Bundle with Painter, PaintShop Pro, and VideoStudio. I mostly wanted it for Painter, but I'd been wanting to get an image editor with more muscle than Paint.Net, which had been my go to for years. Great program, free, but limited.

However, while I've enjoyed using Painter with my Wacom tablet, I just can't seem to get with PSP 2023.

I used JASC PSP 30 years ago when it was still shareware. It was great for image format conversion. What continually trips me up with the current version is that what I want to do with it is strictly photo editing. I don't care about the vector part of it. But the program won't let me ignore the fact that it can do vector. It seems to default to vector mode, even if what I've opened is a JPEG. There seems to always be some dialog about whether I want to convert a layer from vector to pixel or vice versa, and it usually sends me running back to Paint.Net. Maybe there's some way to set the preferences so that it wouldn't do this, but I don't know how.

[Amberwolf]

I think I've seen the vector message in PSP6 now and then, but only if I am drawing something using the limited vector stuff it has, and flattening layers or exporting, not if I am just blending / layering / compositing pixel images (like when I make my album art). 

 

 

Regarding the "programmer syndrome" i suppose it would be better called "engineering syndrome", as it happens in mechanical and electrical / etc. UI design as much as software.   

EG: Mechanically, sometimes it's something as simple as button placement, like buttons on the opposing sides of a device that if used in combination perform some function different from using them separately, but is not normally desirable to happen randomly...but the device has to be held by both sides in one hand, and pressing one button requires squeezing the hand and the fingers naturally fall on all the buttons...with sometimes no natural way to hold it without this problem happening.  

Software equivalent: dialogs that appear one after another, where cancel on one dialog is in the same place as OK or continue on the next, etc.  

So many examples...but I don't want to drag the thread even further OT. 😊