Things that make you go hmmm - Corel Conspiracy Theory

I mean apple does it to the older model phones to "save battery life" so It wouldn't surprise me. I've been having corel issues for a few months myself. I cant get my macros to work even after doing a complete reinstall. I get a VBA error. Im running x7 tho.

 

I can't get my Corel to work anymore, so I gave up. That was about 12 years ago. I took it off all of our systems entirely.

 

In part I can understand the inclination to think conspiracy, but keep in mind Draw 16 is what X6? That has no official support for Win 10, which I would imagine most on here would be on. That in combination of the rolling release nature of Win 10, I wouldn't expect X6 to work for long even if it did initially.

It's entirely possible that there is a conspiracy to force updates, but have to keep in mind the nature of Win 10 and that X6 never was supported on that platform version. I am assuming you are on Win 10, most are by now I would imagine.

 

I think Corel was bought by some corporation in 2019, they probably want everyone to upgrade.
I am not a Corel user so can't help you with the conspiracy thing.
I have been using Affinity Designer more and more. It's not a cloud base thing.

 

I'll say my Corel X6 is stable as ever....
on my windows 7 machines. I hate win10

 

Change is unsettling. I like the fact you don't have to pay a monthly fee and it is really nice program with a lot of helpful videos.
Have Affinity Photo also.

 

I have been using Windows since it was invented, and DOS just before that.
Win 10 is the most horrid thing ever, and Win7 was the best.
Forced to change. That's a conspiracy.
Is Corel starting a Conspiracy?
I can't imagine why they would.

Sure, there are plenty of pansies out there who would just suck it up and say oh well..
But when push comes to shove, I certainly would drop Corel like a hot rock!
To much free stuff from people who want to screw the system.
Conspiracies come at a cost, like Corel losing everything they have going.

I have Corel 4 and LXI Expert Pro that I got for free when I bought some junk from Sign Whorehouse.
Why do i need anything else? It prints large or small, converts to EPS, and I cut with the LXI.
I like everything simple.

I now have WIN 10 now..
I would not be surprised if that was your whole issue.
Corel gives me some crap at times, I clean the machine, do virus killers, clean the registry regularly, and what ever else, reboot, and Viola!

Back in business.

There! Now I feel better!

 

Hey, while I have corel guys (Corelanites? Corellis? Corelthians?) in one place, I have a joke of a pdf that one of the sales guys sent over, converted in corel to a pdf from a bitmap and some vectors. Everything is janky as hell, the picture is split into like a 100x100 grid of bitmaps, the vectors look like corel's trace function from corel 11, and I can't figure out how they are generating such a pdf. Anyone come across this? I'm attaching the pdf if anybody wants to crash their copy of corel...

 

Ironically, I have also been accused of thinking that devs are incompetent (at least Adobe ones as that was what that thread turned into being about).

Depending on what your stance is on programming languages (high v. low level, strong v. weak typed etc), I have created my own programs (python and electron (web languages) based. In other words, I can have sympathy on things changing that are beyond the developers control (why I usually try to make mine portable, even my closed source ones). Why I am usually also sympathetic to the latest releases and leary of updating way, way too soon.

What can I say, I'm just full of contradictions.

I will say this, Win 10 is what got me off Windows. If I have Windows anytime in the future it will be solely to have Windows builds of whatever I'm working on, if it can't be done with WINE (electron apps can be, not so much with Python, at least not how I've been able to get it to work). I have used Windows since the DOS 3.2 days when I was a little kid all the way up to Win 8 (last version I had on bare metal, Cintiq Companion 1st gen). Win 98 was by far my favorite and the most powerful. Not necessarily power in terms of computing power, but what abilities the user had within the operating system that are now being locked out of within the later versions, con of that is that one could bork your system fairly easily, but that seems to be the cause with this latest OS and the rolling release nature of it.

But I digress (which seems to be a common theme with me, oh well, I just try to spread sunshine and I'm reckoning we could use a little bit of that in this day and age).

 

When SSD's started getting big, I recall coming across a video comparing read/write speeds of different OS's. The winner by 5% or more was 98.
I miss stuff like My computer (still hit m on occasion to get to my drives list), Network Neighborhood, and so many other minor changes.

 

If you're thinking about switching to Affinity, now's the time. Because of COVID, they're 50% off right now for two more days. And, they're still offering (also for 2 more days) 90 day free trials. I have all their products and I'm happy with them, although I primarily use Illustrator at work.

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

 

I wouldn't put it past Corel to do something like that. The company has been owned by private equity companies since 2003. Vector Capital bought it then. They put some effort into loading up Corel with lots of debt by acquiring various other companies like Jasc Software, Roxio, Word Perfect and Parallels more recently. Last year Vector Capital sold Corel to Kohlberg Kravis Roberts (KKR).

Private equity companies are famous for meddling in the operations of companies they acquire and ultimately ruining them. Sears is an excellent example of this. So it wouldn't surprise me if honchos higher up the chain at Vector Capital or KKR were giving orders to Corel's engineers to sabotage older working copies of CorelDRAW as a means of forcing users to upgrade.

There are other notable cases of tech firms doing hinkey things to slow down legacy software and hardware. Apple is a prime example. They were caught bogging down the performance of older iOS devices as a ploy to force customers to upgrade to their newest, even more expensive blingy bling. Their defense: the software and hardware was compromised to protect the aging batteries in those devices. This ignores the cottage industry that has built up to replace integrated batteries in mobile devices like the iPhone. Nevertheless, most Apple fans believed the excuse without much question.

Corel doesn't have the brand equity of Apple, not to mention the level of customer loyalty either. If they were indeed messing around with older software (using their push notification and ad delivery system as a means of doing so) the act would be very risky.

It's most likely that Windows itself is the culprit in degrading performance of older versions of CorelDRAW. Windows 10 is in a perpetual state of change due to the evolving situation of computer security. Corel doesn't update any of its legacy software, much less do anything to make it work with changes Microsoft makes under the hood in Windows. An update to Windows 8 forced me to upgrade from CorelDRAW X5 to X6. The big "second edition" update to Windows 98 is what killed CASmate for our shop; we had to migrate to Flexi.

I'm tempted to buy a copy of Affinity Designer with it being 50% off currently. $25 seems like a bargain. If we start receiving Affinity files from customers it might be good to have a copy on hand to be able to troubleshoot the art files if there are any problems. I gave up writing the newsletter for my civic club (after doing it for over 20 years); the lady who took it over isn't doing a good job with the page layout. She's using some junk software she picked up at Staples. I tried suggesting she just use MS Word for that. I'm thinking about trying to point her toward Affinity Publisher.

 

I am using Windows 10, and also have Corel's latest subscription version. However, I also still have all the versions back to X6 still installed. I fired up X6 and did a brief test drive. Then shut it down. Found no odd behavior. No popup trying to sell me anything. Maybe you just need to adjust your tinfoil hat?

 

While I will accept poor behaviour from a corporation as probable, I am on Corel x5 and windows 10, no issues with Corel, but don't get me started on Win10. Corel doesn't like poorly prepared pdf's, if the designer knows what they are doing they can give you a pdf that will work in any program. I gave up trying to make crappy pdf's work and just insist on a print ready pdf, transparencies and gradients converted to bitmaps, fonts to curves and no extra layers, and they always work in Corel.