This is a bit of a duplicate from the thread I had in the X8 forums, but perhaps it will get some developer attention here.
1) I'm not sure if that's a side effect of the new system or someone at Corel actually listened, but the selection redraw on Undo is gone, which is BIG.
This is how it used to behave (in X8): (Demo is a self-made nesting macro - basically just moving objects around)
And this is now:
It's still not perfect, as the cursor blinks and it is slower than what this does:
Sub ProperUndo()
Optimization = True ActiveDocument.unDo Optimization = False ActiveWindow.Refresh Application.Refresh
End Sub
But it's a step in the right direction.
2) Not sure if sketching is super stylus/finger optimized, but with a Mouse the results are terrible:
3) Corel, I implore you - Let us Right click - Frame type - None with multiple selected objects or make deleteing all objects in PowerClip in VBA turn off that X).
4) Picking colors through Powerclips changes their colorspace, that's BAD (Also in X8):
5) Add .PNG support to custom icons, please (Since, apparently, CD itself cannot export usable .ICO files with transparent backgrounds for this purpose).
6) Not that outlandish a scenario - a bunch of powerclip objects with some 150 DPI images inside. Would you like to enter a powerclip and, perhaps, zoom in? Well, better have a cup of tea handy:
Do you think this is normal/acceptable, Corel?
More to come with more usage.
Alright, here are some other annoyances that are still present. These have to do with Document Palette.
Issue one - the entire palette panel should be good for dragging and dropping objects to sample colors, not just the active elements. If you don't have any colors there or just a few it's super annoying to try and hit the couple of pixels that will let you in:
Especially ironic given how there's a nice inviting text telling you to drag the colors "here".
And a second thing, which has been an issue for a while - I don't know where it gets the colors from, but CorelDRAW just loves throwing in color duplicates or even colors that aren't even in the scene. This is a brand new document, nothing has ever been there previously. Let's change the color and reset the palette, shall we?
On first approach we get a bunch of colors that aren't even there, like the balck and on second approach we get a duplicate color for whatever reason and an extra color that isn't even in the document... why? This should be a tool you can use to check the colors in your document, but as is, it is absolutely unreliable (I'm not sure if it also does things like different names for the same color in several varieties, like C100 M100 Y0 K0 and C:100 M:100 Y:0 K:0 as it did in previous versions, haven't encountered that yet). I can build a macro to help with this, but not everyone can, so this should work properly out of the box.
Two more things. The new ability (since X8 I guess) to copy parts of the curve is great, actually a useful feature and I'm glad it's there. But... if you have a powerclip it will keep all the contents inside... why?
With the part I copy in this example the contents are visible, but if we were to, say, copy the sides it would be basically impossible to tell that there are powerclip objects there. Yet each object would have 3000 extra objects inside slowing things down, inflating file sizes and potentially messing with output.
This sounds like a great feature implemented lazily - just copying the base object and deleting anything not selected.
And the second thing, you may have noticed up there - if nodes are selected Copy and Paste commands are missing from the context menu. I use shortcuts (and probably 99% of the users do for copy and paste), but just generally if a function is available it should be represented there.
Actually, some more stuff, since we are here. Already spoke about seemingly inefficient redraw, so... why does it redraw the selection every time we switch a tool?
And, related, there should be some system of optimizing how selections are shown with many objects, like a dashed line rectangle or something as the density grows, this is hardly useful:
Of course there's more! Alignment, what madness is this?
Ok, sounds good, just like X6, for example. Let's use the L and R hotkeys, shall we?
That's an awfully peculiar "bounding box" you have going there, Corel... Align objects to: needs an option "Selection boundary", because I'd say that's what 99% of the users would logically expect to happen. And the L and R hotkeys should act the way they did previously. Almost had a bunch of objects overlapping because of this.
joe said:It feels like they don't really use the program the way an end user would, which is understandable, since they are programming it, not working on projects daily. But that should mean they should pay more attention to user feedback, which ties us into...
Defintely agree with that. The Guidelines Docker is a prime example of that mentality. They think of a cool new feature then don't care if its really as efficient as the old way of doing it.
joe said:Furthermore it is often hard to tell if your feedback is making any difference. I feel like it would make sense if (some version of) the beta bug report process went public once the new version does, ideally with a voting system for the users to determine priority of things to work on. Since they like their online monetization features so much, might as well reward users with, say, credits for artwork or something like that for verifying bug reports, etc.
It is indeed a frustrating experience, knowing the amount of hours you put in to investigating and reporting bugs to then find that ones you reported 3 versions ago still remain. I do believe a public beta is a much better way of engaging with the userbase, and will engender respect and support from loyal customers. But the cost to Corel is probably beyond their capabilities. One thing you cannot do with a public beta is ignore a lot of bugs or downgrade a bug because of low priority, which is what happens now.
In many cases it's not if you have information, it's if you have the ability to understand it an utilize it, then after that how to allocate resources.