Is Corel Support really this useless? I have a problem and they told me to reset my workspace. Terrific. Done. Problem still exists. They then tell me to send computer information back to them which I do. They respond again with, "reset your workspace". I already did that. I respond back to the email they send and tell them just that I already tried this and a couple days later I get an email saying they haven't heard back from me. I reply back to the email and get this in response:
Thank you for reaching out to Corel. We would like to inform you that this email address isn't maintained anymore.
If you have a support request or any other question related to Corel products, please contact our Support Team or check our Knowledge Base.
Sincerely, The Corel Support Team
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What is going on? I still can't fix my problem.
I don't want CorelDRAW to disappear either. Some of that is out of the selfish concern for my huge stockpile of CDR-based work files.
Affinity Designer does indeed have a long way to go before it could be considered a truly viable replacement for either CorelDRAW or Adobe Illustrator. I bought the version 2.0 upgrade of Affinity Designer on the last day of its introductory sales price period. Serif has made some decent improvements here and there. But there's still a lot of features missing that I'm spoiled to having in either CorelDRAW and/or Adobe Illustrator. Affinity Designer still doesn't even support Variable Fonts; they don't appear to have any plans for adding support any time soon either. Most of the commercial type packages I've bought in the last couple years included OTF Variable fonts. They're a big deal to me for sign making purposes. Adobe recently added nearly 150 variable font families to its Adobe Fonts service.
A lot of people in the graphics industry don't like Adobe for various reasons. But the only trend I see happening right now is Adobe getting even more dominant in the traditional graphics space (page layout, photo editing, vector graphics). Adobe Illustrator has had some major improvements over the past couple years. Adobe's most serious challenges are coming from the video production end, particularly from DaVinci Resolve Studio. Apple and Avid still have their slices of that market too.
I agree with you.
I saw the 2021 perpetual license too maybe they did that because the 2022 perpetual license deal at that time was for long time holders of upgrade protection only. Who knows?
I'm cautiously liking the incremental upgrade process, (if Corel could get its act together and truly market what's in them) and address legacy bugs. We'll have to see how it goes.
Things like the new pages docker, symbols are nice steps forward, the Trace function in 2022 upgrade is better than V12.
The adjustment docker, light tools, smart selection mask, mask fade and smooth tools in Photo-PAINT are exceptional tools.
For many years users have straddled the fence between what can only be labeled unusual Corel coding and their own self destructive practices.
There's no doubt the features in Draw are interesting sometimes but the users some times are interesting also.
I learned decades ago to build work stations that were powerful, calibrated and with a good display, but also at least one generation behind the state of the art. Trying to use low to moderate power systems hurts more than helps. Add to that the vast number of users that think that they're great with computers and fail to understand the core business practice of efficiency in labor VS total cost of ownership. A $1000, 2 year old system does not get repaired, it gets trashed and a realistic budget is adapted. However a vast number of users tend to use systems that cost more in lost labor than it would cost to buy a productive system.
I also learn to comprehend core technologies, that's important because by not understanding this you create more problems than the software issues. In reality if you don't understand basic color management you can't figure out how to properly use the find replace tool.
Then again Corel makes zero effort to provide that training.
X7 was near bug free but didn't support UHD monitors as well as it could.
They have now completely lost all sense of a clear direction IMO.
Look at the history of what works, the code they write themselves. They lost their way when builds started to use more libraries.
It became "what does this library do and how can we leverage that".
Quite a natural process at first, bring on multi-threading and GPU processing.
It's all been lead off in too many directions. I suspect that had Corel only ever done Draw and not got involved in getting all excited about buying this and that useless app, they would be much stronger today.
Too late now... they need to sell it off to someone that cares more about code. Or "Corel" need to care more about code and less about how much they can screw people for the software.
I think the biggest fail was in how they managed the transition from little purchase security to this inflated system that exists now. A massive underestimate of how piracy had been a massive factor in creating marketshare.
Don't spose they can bring people that have left back but I do miss Tony and Alex.
Certainly there never was a bug free version of Draw, I don't like their lack of commitment to resolving bugs, nor their erratic methods.
You certainly underestimated the number of illegal Draw users and the impact it had on profitability. When Corel started tracking code use via the internet, illegal users outnumbered legal users 2 to 1 that's an unsustainable situation.
The business climate today will not support the CorelDRAW Graphics Suite as a stand alone application, that is the only application of a financially viable corporation.
Development costs are too high, user base too cheap, user demand for high end function increasingly disappearing.
Last week I was sitting beside a "high" end Adobe user in the design department of a 300 employee architectural firm. Her work as well as all the other designers work 99.9999% of the time is destined for a display, ALL of her high end effects file construction methods are unreproduceable in print without significant work or serious quality degradation.
This is what Adobe programs for, even their artificial intelligence features produce at nest quality only good enough for display.
I was there helping the company with migration of some of their content to their short run digital print engine. They have a true PDF RIP dry toner heat fusion digital print engine with bindery capabilities. They have need for high end prints in the 5 to 25 count range.