Klaus, just want to thank you for your support if you are still around. You were incredibly helpful over the years and your assistance with this product is very very much appreciated.
More about this; https://www.digitalengineering247.com/article/corelcad-discontinued
For those who get the Graebert offer, please consider two things.
1) Graebert don't fix their bugs, and they make a LOT of bugs in their product. New versions often have the bugs fixed, but that means you pay for bug fixes and get more bugs in the process.
2) Graebert is only offering yearly licenses to Corel users, not perpetual license discounts like they offer to every other CAD user... It's a bit of an "Up Yours" by Graebert to CorelCAD users, which is a shame.
Sad to see this product go - I liked it. It was really taking off back when we had the old Forum, then the execs at Corel somehow decided to destroy their brand and created this forum which has ridiculous security, poor design and makes it impossible for new users to find support for CorelCAD. As though they think CorelCAD users will just start using CorelDRAW! ( I use both, but CorelDRAW is not fit for purpose for cad applications ).
But CorelCAD was good. I liked it and while it was obvious it was never going to be Solidworks, it was far more reasonably costed and allowed perpetual licenses. Did they ever make a CorelCAD 2024 or was 2023 the last in the series? I would love to know since I only recently bought CorelCAD 2023 from Corel and feel a little cheated by the late news, especially as it has a lot of serious bugs :(The only question I have is what is going to happen to our licenses now when we reinstall? Is that even going to be possible? CorelCAD checks back with Corel. Might be time to start asking for the printed licenses rather than the online versions.
Why use a dead product?
There is a reason Sketch Up is so popular. It's the closest thing to Draw and Illustrator for CAD.
It's a bit pricey I believe.
Subscription... about the cheapest of the CAD subs.
Look at the similarity between the owners of Sketch Up and Resolve; Trimble and Blackmagic.
What do you see?
They are both hardware vendors in the same industries they sell software.
In both cases they get incredible input from understanding hardware and how people use it.
For Trimble that is surveying, mapping, extended reality...
It's not AutoCad, it's matched to Trimble and an understanding of space.
My guts has said for some time that the only company capable of getting sales performance from Draw is Fuji. It needs a super solid player in the publishing space to deal with the "Adobe is industry standard" BS. Even so, if Fuji engaged in software their is no shortage of ways to support unblocking the Adobe hemorrhage without Corel.
I thought I'd hunt up some stats and found this...
Bit of a weird group of apps to put together. Looks like Quark is about to fall off the list.
Like i said, it's not the profit that can be extracted from Draw but the immediate need to build up user numbers by every means possible. It's never been that Draw was a "lemon", they just have been doing the same stuff over and over that fails to create market share.
So obvious to those of us that were here from the start as to what created the initial market share and what has taken the wind out of the sails.
I stopped BETA testing after 2019, we had a mutual parting of the ways, 2019 was the absolute worst CorelDRAW product ever, I never implemented it for daily use in my company. In my opinion Corel has no qualified application designers for the corporate graphics market and Corel listens to too many so-called Draw power users, all which have a path that dies when they retire. The future is with corporations that have users that span multi-generations.
When they brought out the Corel Font Manager, I believe around version 2018 and followed up with the 2019 version, I lost every corporate licensed user of CorelDRAW I had built up over 25 years.
I track my time and when I donate $20,000 worth of time in a testing cycle to an application that destroys my client base I have to go. I was at the time preparing to sell off most of my assets and semi-retire, I had no more time/money to lose with the Corel Corporation.
They had 1 good thing that I worked on with a developer that they managed to get implemented in 2019 and that was improved handling of improperly created fountain/gradient fills in PDF export. The rest of the program was an absolute bust.
The objects docker and the keep desktop objects on layer implementation while being a great idea was handled, to put it mildly, extremely poorly. The end result is overly complex, it changed how nearly every user used the program and still resulted in a quirky operation that forced me to tell all CorelDRAW users to turn of the keep desktop objects on layer feature and rename and save the file before sending it to me.
Over several cycles I suggested to Corel that they create an administrative lock to prevent customizing the workspace. This would allow an IT administrator to test and implement customized workspaces as they proved viable. Every corporate client that I had using CorelDRAW was forced to fire designers because of their idiotic addiction to customizing their workspace to the point of screwing up the application.
To this day a large amount of application issues are in my opinion caused by heavily customized workspaces and workspaces brought forward from old versions. I fired 3 employees over the years due to customizing the workspace screwing up my systems and wasting time building Macros that had very limited to no value going forward.
One of your best posts.
It wasn't an all bad relationship because I didn't BETA test just to get free software.
I also made my money using CorelDRAW in my business not supporting CorelDRAW.