Twisting Pixels Plug-In Sale

The folks at Twisting Pixels are having a sale on their plug-ins. Enter the Discount Code of ASPCUST and you will get 25% off of any of their products. I'm not sure how long this code will last so take advantage of the sale while you can.

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Add-On Brings CAD Functionality to CorelDRAW

I learned of a new add-on for CorelDRAW this week that adds CAD-type tools to CorelDRAW. The add-on works in CorelDRAW 11, 12 and X3 as well as Corel Designer 10 and 12. It is called CADinTools and is available as a trial download. New features included a number of tools for selecting different type of objects in a drawing, scaling functions, in-depth information on the selected objects, curve editing shortcuts, additional transformation functions, more ways to modify movement and rotation, stretching, mirroring, skewing, working with lines and arcs, isometic transformations, shape development, calculations and much more. Give it a try and post your thoughts on the product. If you simply want to buy, the price is $50 US.

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What's Worse--Spam or Spam Filters?

Nobody likes spam. I get at least 500 pieces of "no questions about it" spam every day. There are probably another 50 pieces a day that are definitely not spam, but they aren't of interest to me. For example, I receive quite a few press releases because I write about computer stuff. Some of them talk about products that I want to tell you about and some are about really obscure stuff that doesn't have much to do with what I cover.

Like most everyone, I have spam filters that filter out the majority of the stuff that should never be sent. Heck, a lot of the spam is in Russian and I can't even read it so I'm not really sure how someone benefits from it. Oh well, I digress.

I needed to cover that ground so I can explain the true problem with spam filters. They are often over aggressive and block "good" mail. Part of this is user error, but a lot of it has to do with stereotyping.

A day doesn't go by where we don't hear from a customer furious that we haven't sent them a product they purchased via e-mail. I freely admit that maybe 1% of these are our fault. There are probably another 10% where the customer has an old e-mail address on their PayPal account and so we sent to this "old" e-mail. It was the only address we had. The vast majority of the problems are spam filters. We did send the mail and the user either didn't get it at all because of spam filters or they haven't looked in the area where their spam lands.

So please go to your spam filter right now and whitelist the unleash.com domain. This will save all of us headaches down the road.

Dealing with those spam filters is certainly annoying, but it is nothing compared to the problem we had last week. I sent out a newsletter announcing that the latest issue of our CorelDRAW Unleashed magazine was available. If you have an AOL address, you didn't get it. AOL blocked the e-mail because it contained a "spammy" URL. Of course, they just tell you that one is spammy without telling you which one. This upset the company who manages our newsletter list as all of their customers were blocked from sending to AOL addresses because of our newsletter.

We did some investigation with AOL. Their first response was that there was nothing wrong with the newsletter. After digging a bit further, they gave us the bad URL. The offender? It was a link to buy CorelDRAW from Corel Corporation directly. No matter your personal definition of spam, that is about as far from spammy as it gets.

Like many companies, Corel has an affiliate program. That means they provide links to buy their products and those links are coded so that a third-party can receive a small commission if they send a sale to the company selling the product. Corel uses Commission Junction to handle their affiliate program. So the link is actually a Commission Junction (CJ) domain which then redirects to Corel. If you were to click on the link and bought a copy of CorelDRAW, we'd get a small commission on the sale. This helps vendors sell products and helps those of us who publish content make a little bit of money.

I can only guess why the CJ domain is blacklisted by AOL. There was probably someone who put one of their links in an e-mail and truly sent it as spam. CJ manages affiliate programs for hundreds of companies and millions of products. The sad thing is that AOL just blacklists them all. Other companies that supply large amounts of freemail like hotmail.com, Gmail, yahoo.com are not nearly as strict with their filters and do allow some user configuration. AOL is just bad. Their filters are clamped down so tight that I'm sure there are false alarms going off like crazy. If I had an AOL e-mail address, I would drop it immediately!

So while I hate spam, I really hate spam filters!

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Get SnagIt and Camtasia for Free

I've been a big fan of these TechSmith products since early versions first appeared. SnagIt is the most powerful screen capture program on the market. Camtasia is a screen recording application and is the what I use to make the movies supplied with my CorelDRAW X3 Unleashed ebook.

Of course, there is a small catch. The "free" versions are older versions. SnagIt is version 7.2.5 and Camtasia is 3.1.3. Think that is a problem? Don't! This deal was first offered with PC Plus Magazine in the UK and I have no idea how long the deal will last. So if these programs interest you, get them now.

First, you need to download the software. Download SnagIt. Download Camtasia. Since these are the full versions, you'll need a license key so they don't expire. Don't worry, those are free...for now. All you have to do is register with TechSmith and they will send you a license key. Register SnagIt. Register Camtasia. From what I understand, these freebies will also qualify you for upgrade pricing if you want the newest versions. You certainly can't beat the price, free!

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OEM Versions of CorelDRAW Also Lack VBA

A little while back I told you a number of reasons to avoid the Academic version of CorelDRAW. The main reason being that it lacks VBA.

After I wrote that post, it was brought to my attention that OEM versions (most, but not all) also lack VBA. This means if CorelDRAW was supplied with your computer, you probably don't have VBA. Where it can also bite you is that some vendors will illegally sell the OEM version and claim it is the full version. So if the deal you find on the "full" version seems too good to be true, then it probably isn't what is being promised. Make sure to get it in writing that VBA is included.

I've seen a number of reports from users lately that they can't record macros or work with existing add-ons for CorelDRAW. All of this is because they got a version of CorelDRAW without VBA. So even if you don't think you need it, you may be in for a rude surprise when you find something that could really help your workflow isn't going to work for you.

So that you have some current pricing information, the upgrade lists for $179 (in the US) and sells for $159.99 at Amazon. The full version lists for $399 US and sells for $279.99 at Amazon. There may be lower prices out there, but if they are much lower then you are probably not going to get what you are being promised.

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