This thread is continued from:
http://community.coreldraw.com/forums/p/19344/100072.aspx#100072
... but is intended to be PP specific. It's a list for Corel bug fixers... one place for them to easily find many bugs... big or small, crash/freezing or just wrong GUI stuff. This is not intended to be a wants list, but obviously sometimes there's overlap... one person's wish is another person's GUI bug. This thread will probably be boring reading for most of us, but hopefully this will efficiently help the bug-finding and bug-fixing process. Hopefully you can be as specific as possible about the circumstances of what you were doing when the problem occured, but I know from personal experience that some of the crash/freeze problems just happen or are around all the time.
I'll start it off with a few itty bitty new ones.
- Make the popup text the same for icons as they're called in the customization/commands dialog
-eg. "Fit in Window" is a zoom command, and it's popup text says "Zoom to fit" - which imho is a good name... fit to window should be changed
-eg. "Initiate cutout tool" is not the cutout tool being started... it's the "cutout lab"
- The zoom 25% command is using the zoom 33 icon.
- when you hold L on a pallete colour to bring up the super cool hue popup colour picker box (which is great), don't force the user to pick a colour with Left-mouse (for foreground in PP) if you accidentally drag the mouse (with L button still down) into the popup... if the user goes out of the popup with L held down, let them release without a choice being registered, and keep the popup open so the user can use L or R to pick.
- this colour picker kinda-bug (sorta) is also a wish/bug for Draw (for fill and outline instead), but I've been told that it's better to separate the threads for better communication.
Here's to a better PP and Graphics Suite X5.
- at different zoom levels, the outside area (overscroll area) changes form light to dark... this is bad because (at least on my reasonably quick computer), when you zoom using the mouse wheel, you get a dark grey and then light grey flicker effect. It's very brief, but adds to the feeling that the software isn't solid. Make the outside area one colour... and make it a changeable option... so the user can choose to work light on dark or vise versa.
- when you crop to colour when you're zoomed in, the refresh doesn't work correctly for the background area (it goes the dark shade)
- *maybe* (as an option) make the brush use XOR on the brush's outline so you can see it over chaotic textures. When I'm drawing on some textures, I can't see the brush.
- the drawing utensils need to be able to have shortcuts set for them. Everything else can... even obscure icons/actions. The basics should definitley be able to link up to a shortcut key... eg. brush, airbrush, pencil, pen, marker, etc. I'm not even talking customized brushes (which also need to be shortcutable)... I'm talking the basic drawing tools. This also includes smear, smudge, and all the other specific "effect" tools. This is a no-brainer. You don't primarily use the program to do "pen and ink"... you're smudging, smearing, cloning, and using the different brush tools... Clone is shortcutable... the others should be too. It's common sense.
- have a way to disable the "masks will not be saved in this format" message when you're working with jpgs and other basic raster formats. It's annoying and completely unnecessary the thousandth time... make it a dialog that can be disabled?
Davoid said: The basics should definitley be able to link up to a shortcut key... eg. brush, airbrush, pencil, pen, marker, etc. I'm not even talking customized brushes (which also need to be shortcutable)... I'm talking the basic drawing tools.
One problem is that I bet 9 out of 10 PP users don't know the effect tools exist. They are missing tons of power.
I totally agree that access to the powerful tools with user-definable shortcuts is critical.
Sometimes I think Corel looks at their software from a new user's perspective, instead of a experienced user's POV who looks at the Corel suite 8-12 hours a day. They should track down the top PP users who are somehow able to create fine art in PP in it's current state, and ask them what drives them crazy.
Pro software will inherently seem complex to newbs due to extensive features. Newbs have no loyalty. Pro users do. Newbs showed up at the PP focus group for the 100.00 and free sandwiches. LOL
Corel's job is to convert newbs into pros, and the only way that's possible is if newbs can make a living by using fast and reliable software. Dumbing down software to appeal to newbs, and irrititating pros by hiding the power they need (and understand) is the wrong path (for pro software) IMO.
One dialog I want to DIE forever is the prompt to retain clipboard contents. I see that 60-100 times, every freaking day....
** A hint for anyone who is also accustomed to the occasional crash... know where your printscreen button is!!!!! It saved more than an hour's worth of work last time. When you hit printscreen, the whole screen is copied into memory. Wait for PP to crash or open up some other image editor (eg. iview), and Ctrl-V paste it in, then crop out the image of whatever you were working on. Of course this only works if you can see all of what you've been working on... at least you'll get part of your work back so you can paste it into the file you were working on as a separate layer, adjust the transparency of the layer to line it up with the rest of the image, and when it's good, turn the transparency down to 0 and combine it with everything else.
One more thing, make sure you do the printscreen quick before PP goes greyed out... then you'd have way more adjusting to do and it probably wouldn't be worth the effort.
Had another crash after using PP for several hours on several files.
It's the darndest thing. I'll be using whatever typical tools (brush, clone, smudge, burn/dodge, touchup, rectagle mask, wand, and occasionally some others)... everything is humming along great and then whammo... freeze/crash.
I wonder if there's something specific that's going on behind the scenes that's periodically running only sometimes... like some sort of anti-piracy something or other that might be interfering with the brush processing and messing up memory. I never thought to check, but maybe it only happens on the hour or something like that.
I tried exporting my gif to PNG, but the image gets messed up... some colours are gone (black/greys it looks like).
when you click one layer's print icon, for some reason the lowest layer gets openned.
Crash again.
BUT, I don't think I've seen this before (?).... it asked if I want to save first.
PP crashed... and took a while to get to 77% of mem usage and then a few popups saying out of memory... the usual. BUT! It asked me if I wanted to save! I'd rather have the option to do a **SAVE AS** so I don't accidentally ruin my file (and all my work) with a possibly bad save (especially with memory out), but I tried the save... but it says "Unable to create a DOM document. Not enough storage is available to complete this operation. Verify that MSXML6 is installed."
I really hope this means something useful, and I hope somebody from Corel reads this!
I have no idea what MSXML6 is but maybe this is the difference between a crashy computer and a non-crashy one?
I have tons of harddrive space, so I'm guessing the message is talking about space in RAM.
THEN... after hitting okay on that error messagebox, another pops up saying "Runtime Error! Program: c:\Program F... This application has requested the Runtime to terminate it in an unusual way. Please contact the application's support team for more information." The "..." above is what it had in the popup.
I'm not sure if this is referring to Visual Studio 2005 or Corel PP... but I thought I better write it down in case it's helpful too.
After clicking OK on that message box, Corel full on crashes and MS says it's looking for a solutino to the problem... blah blah blah.
I decide to go Debug (cause I have VS2005) and it gives me a just-in-time popup saying "An unhandled win32 exception occurred in CorelPP.exe [7352].
I send it to VS2005, but it can't attach the crashing process.
Hopefully that number 7352 is important. Hopefully that points to the exact exception so you guys can kill the bug.
Another bug... working in PP with a GIF with transparency... I open it in PP, I have only one layer... no background. Okay.
I start adding to the image and creating more layers... and I go Ctrl-Shift_down to combine them all (with the background)... and the transparency goes away and there's now white where the transparency was. Okay. This was my dumb fault... I undo and go Ctrl-down with all the layers selected, BUT it still makes them all into the background and removes my important transparency. If a background isn't asked for, one shouldn't be made. I should have been right back to the start when I openned my GIF... with one layer with transparency.
The work around was to create a new layer and combine everything but that layer... but I'd still way rather Ctrl-down worked properly.
Hi Davoid,
I rarely ever use Ctrl+Down Arrow as I just click on the Combine Objects button in the Object Docker (4th button from the left). I just tested and can confirm that Ctrl+Down Arrow is flattening the image (in the circumstances you describe), but if you use the Docker's button it works correctly. So no need for workarounds with extra layers, etc., just use the button instead.
I totally agree though that the keyboard combination shortcut should work and should be fixed.
Best regards,Brian.
Brian said:I just click on the Combine Objects button
I see that one's also on Ctrl-Alt-down. Thanks for the feedback! That'll work.
(still hoping they fix problem).
when you press down on a guideline to move it, it doesn't follow exactly where your mouse is... sometimes above and sometimes below.
I took a screenshot, but it doesn't show the mouse position.
It seems to depend on the zoom level. I see the problem at 75% and it's really bad at 50%.
I thought someone had mentioned in this thread that they occasionally get a crash when using the Straighten Tool, but I can't locate that post now, so maybe it was in another thread. Anyway, I (to an extent) discovered some time ago what was going on with this. As strange as this seems the Straighten Tool does either does not like images of a particular pixel dimension or a particular aspect ratio (I haven't determined which is the culprit). I use 3 RAW editing programs and when I process images they can turn out in slightly differing pixel dimensions to those produced by the camera, depending on the RAW editor I use. One particular dimension will crash PPX5 EVERY TIME if I try to use the Straighten Tool. If I grab the Crop Tool, shave a few pixels off the image in either direction the Straighten Tool works flawlessly and never crashes. As I said, I am not sure if it is a specific pixel dimension which stuffs up, or whether it is a particular aspect ratio that causes the issue.
Just a second point I thought I would mention here: When I had a single processor computer (Pentium IV) - setting the Cache Level to 1 in PP always made transformations quicker. Following a recent post about this subject I checked this out on a Core i5 computer and transformations are FAR quicker and smoother on this computer with Cache Levels set to 4.
Brian said:I checked this out on a Core i5 computer and transformations are FAR quicker and smoother on this computer with Cache Levels set to 4.
Interesting. I have a new i7 and PP was crashing at the default level of 4... so I read that turning it down to 1 helped.
What does this level mean I wonder? If you google any chip, you'll find the number of cache levels that can be used. For i5 and i7 it's 3.
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/Intel-i7-nehalem-cpu,2041-10.html
Is "cache" used in a different way in Corel-speak?
From what I can tell, 4 levels seems impossible (?).
I have the level set at 1 right now, but maybe I should go to 3 or 4? I have no idea. I'll set it to whatever... I just want to keep it from crashing.
Brian: I checked this out on a Core i5 computer and transformations are FAR quicker and smoother on this computer with Cache Levels set to 4. Interesting. I have a new i7 and PP was crashing at the default level of 4... so I read that turning it down to 1 helped. What does this level mean I wonder? If you google any chip, you'll find the number of cache levels that can be used. For i5 and i7 it's 3. http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/Intel-i7-nehalem-cpu,2041-10.html Is "cache" used in a different way in Corel-speak? From what I can tell, 4 levels seems impossible (?). I have the level set at 1 right now, but maybe I should go to 3 or 4? I have no idea. I'll set it to whatever... I just want to keep it from crashing. t. Albert, Alberta, Canada
Brian: I checked this out on a Core i5 computer and transformations are FAR quicker and smoother on this computer with Cache Levels set to 4.