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© 2000 by Rick Altman. All Rights Reserved.
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However tempted, I stop short of declaring that version 10 of CorelDRAW is a dramatic event in the life and history of the product. Whether that is good or bad depends entirely upon your point of view.
Look, we’ve seen some dramatic releases of DRAW in our day, you and I. The most notable might have been version 4, largely regarded as the biggest failure. Corel’s history is well-documented for trying for too much and trying for it too quickly.
However, that accusation will not be leveled against version 10. In fact, the most prevalent critique might be that its improvements and enhancements do not add up to its $249 upgrade price. On balance, however, we prefer Corel to err on the side of less grandious efforts, and we think that version 10 warrants your close attention. Many users feel it is ready for prime-time now, and the rest of you might find that it is just one maintenance update away from being a favorite of yours.
The single biggest newsmaker in the box is the new vector animation tool called Real Animated Vector Effects (RAVE for short). This 1.0 product is not as mature or refined as DRAW or PAINT, and it is not intended to match Flash feature for feature. But in one step, Corel covers a lot of ground with RAVE, offering a tool for creating simple animations in Flash, GIF, or AVI format with an interface and toolset that are decidedly Corel (as opposed to the Flash interface which is decidedly...not like anything else).
First, a confession: Flash makes me feel really stupid. Few programs confuse me as much as it, and I am forced to follow tutorials, step by painstaking step, in order to produce anything. Maybe it’s me, maybe it’s Flash...in any event, it is from that perspective that I approached RAVE.
And my experience with it was altogether different, due in large part to the fact that I did not need to learn any of the tools of creation and manipulation. Creating, rotating, duplicating, combining, grouping...it’s just like being in DRAW. I could concentrate my efforts on learning the new concepts. I produced Figure 1 in about 30 minutes, only having to retreat to Corel’s tutorial once (to figure out how to keep an animation on screen once it is done animating).
Confession No. 2: It is the first time I have ever created a Flash file that I have shown in public. Confession No. 3: After my 30 minutes in RAVE, Flash no longer seems so scary. There is no question that qualified users can do more in Flash than in RAVE, but it is equally clear that many users, including this reviewer, are better off not trying.
As an entré to the world of animation and as a simpler alternative to Flash, RAVE will make a positive contribution to a Corel user’s experience. (I wasted little time creating a second, which is at our home page this month.)
Despite the earlier assertion that changes to DRAW 10 are not significant, our laundry list spans two pages of legal paper, and I write small. Here is that list...
NEW TOOLS
New to the Toolbox is the Perfect Shape flyout, with automatic tools for creating stars, captions, flowchart elements, and directional arrows. If you create a lot of these, you’ll appreciate these tools and tolerate the infiltration of WordPerfect nomenclature. If you don’t care about such things, you might not even notice its presence.
The Distortion tool now works on a frame of paragraph text, and as a result, I have now used this tool for the very first time. Like the work of Envelope, the text is not distorted, but the frame in which the text flows is.
You can now drag and drop colors into extruded objects...copy envelopes from other enveloped objects...contour groups of objects...mirror patterns and textures for easy tiling...erase bitmaps...more interactivity for many of—
Wait, what? Erase bitmaps??
Indeed, the Erase and Knife tools can now strut their stuff on imported bitmap images. When you erase a bitmap, you essentially turn it into two or more separate images, each one clipped along your erase path. Figure 2 would have required an intricate session with PowerClip; instead, it was created in about 20 seconds.
But you know what I think might be the coolest new tool? It probably won’t merit a bullet on any marketing sheet, nor would it earn a spot in a demo. I have long been frustrated by how difficult it is to duplicate a color used in a drawing. Only recently have we been able to perform a right-drag-and-drop of one object atop another, or use the eyedropper and then the paintbucket. Even still, should it really be that hard?
In DRAW 10, when you select an object and its color appears in the small swatch on the Status bar, you can drag that swatch and drop it onto any other object. Perfect!
THE INTERFACE
Small changes to object and layer management are overshadowed by Micro Nudge, which is trumped by a new Navigator window, which is upstaged by an overhaul to the Customize engine, whose show is stolen by the Page Sorter View.
Yes, it is easier to manipulate objects and layers in Object Manager now, and the 2% of all users who take advantage of this hidden jewel will welcome the refinements.
Those who have observed the evolution of Nudge will be happy to discover Micro Nudge—whereby nudging with Ctrl pressed causes the nudge value to decrease (default factor is 2). I wasted little time setting the Micro factor to 20, thereby turning my Micro Nudge into a Microscopic Nudge, which I use when zoomed way in. The anal-ysts in the group might not appreciate that Nudge settings have been moved to the Document section of Tools | Options, meaning that its settings are no longer universal, but rather subject to change with each drawing opened. I already don’t like that; your mileage may vary...
Just about everyone will have occasion to enjoy the Navigator window, inherited from PHOTO-PAINT. With a single click, you can invoke a tiny window representing the current page. Pan a small rectangle across that page, release, and you are instantly taken to that portion of the page.
Customize freaks, like this reviewer, will devour whole the improvements in this department. Adding elements to the interface is now much easier, more elements can be added, and best of all, you can now import and export entire workspaces for use on other machines. Lists of commands are better grouped, and you can customize toolbars and menus simultaneously. Look for a complete article on this topic in early 2001.
And undoubtedly, the most popular addition in this category will be the Page Sorter view, shown here in Figure 3. From this new view, you can insert pages, delete pages, rename pages, change orientations of pages, and YES, reorder pages, just by dragging them in front of or in back of others. PowerPoint and Presentation users have been clamoring for this for years.
PERFORMANCE ENHANCEMENTS
As you reach for familiar effects, keep an eye on the property bar: you will see a new drop-down of presets for each. Blend, Contour, Drop Shadow, Envelope...each now sports a list of presets which you can pick from and add to.
Several effects now offer Corel’s RealTime Preview, the most salient example of this being Fit Text to Path, where few of us can actually remember what all of the various options and commands do. Now as you browse these options in the drop-downs on the property bar, the effect is actually applied. It would be distracting to have this feature implemented too often, but CorelDRAW architects applied it intelligently, to commands whose outcomes are not always predictable.
Just about all users will appreciate the new color sliders, which make it much easier to choose on-screen colors (especially RGB, where even tiny adjustments required infinite trips to the dialog or to a stab-in-the-dark on-screen palette). From a diminutive docker or floating dialog, you have instant control over an entire palette. Notice the little padlock in Figure 4—when closed, use of the sliders will apply color changes instantly.
DRAW 10 offers better and more useful feedback when you import an image: the Status bar declares the color model and resolution. This is a simple but valuable addition.
The sleeper in this category needs a bit of describing—if it has a name attached to it, we don’t know what it is. Let’s say you have set three individual strings of text, one in Times, another in Helvetica Black, and a third in Futura Light. Now you want to set all three of them in their italic variants.
Or take the situation of three different lines, each of different outline weights. You want to make all of them be dotted lines, but you want their unique thicknesses to be preserved.
In all previous versions of DRAW, you could handle neither one of these scenarios with a single trip to a dialog. In the case of the lines, the one selected last would impose its line weight on the dialog box setting, and all lines would change to that value as they become dotted. In the case of the text, DRAW would not recognize that you selected any text, and would think you are changing the default.
But in 10, DRAW gets it. It understands that unique properties of selected objects should be kept that way, unless you consciously change them. The three strings of text would become italic, while keeping their respective typeface characteristics, and the three lines would become dotted, while remaining at their unique weights. This used to require a wrestling match with Find and Replace; now it is a much simpler proposition.
But the showcase new feature in the Performance category is the Undo History that DRAW has pilfered from PAINT. DRAW has always been able to reach far back in time, with 99 Undo levels. But now with a visual history of your actions, you can weild far more power over your experiments.
For instance, Figure 5 represents a happy accident with the Distortion and Extrude tools that I would probably not be able to replicate. But with the Undo Docker visible, I can see each step that I took and I can remove each step (in order, you can’t Undo out of turn) to witness its effect on the object.
Finally, you can save an Undo list to a VBA macro for later playback. I have had limited success playing back these macros, but I can’t say whether it’s a bug in the software or my own lack of expertise with Visual Basic. We would appreciate hearing from others on their experiences with this.
COLOR MANAGEMENT
The most extensive changes authored by Corel’s engineers will be found in the new Color Management engine. Your ability to take advantage of it just might depend upon your proficiency with rocket science.
Kidding aside, Corel’s new color manager is a sophisticated labyrinth of variables and relationships between hardware devices and color models. If you have felt that Corel has not put enough effort into color calibration, you might welcome this new engine. If you have barely understood the dark science of color calibration, this new engine will serve to put even more miles between you and the promised land.
THE WEB
It will be difficult for me to separate my bias from an objective reporting of the facts here, and I won’t even try. I sum up this category as follows:
CorelDRAW 10 has gotten a bit better at something that it has little business doing in the first place.
DRAW 10 offers increased support for HTML creation, assigning hyperlinks, and now even creating rollover effects. However proficient DRAW is at these tasks, we continue to believe that you are better off doing them in your Web page editor. Every day you can find new postings on the newsgroups from frustrated people trying to create Web pages and even complete Web sites, all from DRAW.
This folly is not the fault of the users; they are just expecting the software to live up to its promise. We wish that Corel wouldn’t make these kinds of promises. DRAW does many things well; creating HTML code is not, and should not, be one of them.
From these newsgroup postings, however, came a voice of reason from one of Corel’s engineers, Paul Turnbull. We’re encouraged by Paul’s perspective, which we share with you here:
CorelDRAW 10 is not, nor does it claim to be designed for creating Web sites, but rather the graphics for use in Web design. CorelDRAW, PHOTO-PAINT and R.A.V.E. can all produce HTML, yes, but that is mainly so we can provide additional functionality. Often, it is necessary to go beyond simpler graphics production to produce what I call Web graphic elements or components, including image maps, sliced image and HTML text layouts, javascript rollovers, even HTML-tagged Flash files.
For those who are working in an HTML WYSIWYG environment, this may be of less benefit. However, those who deal with HTML code directly are just a copy/paste away from including a complete Web graphic component in their Web page designs.
This is a much more responsible position than the one taken by Corel representatives at recent road shows who simply declared that “CorelDRAW can create entire Web sites for you.”
DRAW’s best contribution to a Web site is as provider of the graphics, and in that department, our enthusiasm rises. GIF export now offers better palette conversion, and both GIF and JPEG export create dramatically cleaner text at small point sizes. We still object to DRAW’s insistence on anti-aliasing the edges of rectangular shapes (straight lines can’t have jaggies), but Corel’s engineers insist that it is the correct approach and that Adobe Photoshop and Macromedia Fireworks do it incorrectly. It’s not a bug, it’s a controversy—we’re not sure which is better.
DRAW also sports a new Web Image Optimizer, with a drop-down list of export choices and an interactive preview. Figure 6 shows its interface. We’re not wild about the accuracy of the preview window, but we really like the file size estimate, which was correct down to the byte in our tests.
EXPORT
The best news in this category is no news at all:
EPS export didn’t get broken, and as a result, it remains the best in the business.
Everything else is secondary. Among the also-rans, DRAW can now export Flash files without the plug-in that DRAW 9 needed, as well as AutoCAD 2000 files. PNG files can now be created with palette control, and the new and still nebulous Scalable Vector Graphic format is supported.
Publish to PDF continues to evolve; we could not make it break the way the initial version would in unpatched DRAW 9 and its compression is noticeably improved. Plus, you can now specify ICC profiles at creation-time.
Until it can more elegantly deal with the dynamic of oversized pages, bleeds, and pre-press marks, it will not replace the commercial version of Adobe Acrobat on our machines. Still, we really appreciate being able to create quality PDF files straight from DRAW.
PRINTING
As is always the case, the jury will remain out for a bit longer when it comes to print performance—it always takes more time to draw conclusions from users’ experiences with big print jobs. But as of early December, we are encouraged to have heard of no big disasters.
Print Merge is a much smarter tool than all previous incarnations, as you can now perform true database merges—creating and assigning fields, entering data records, importing delimited files, and saving out database files.
Furthermore, you can now specify the order of separation plates and choose to align printer marks to the edge of the object(s) instead of the edge of the page.
You can streamline your workflow by specifying trapping and separations parameters in advance with a full range of In-RIP trapping options for PostScript 3 output devices.
While the list is shorter with Corel’s image-editing powerhouse, there are certainly a few sit-up-and-take-notice elements.
Topping the list might be the one that is the least tangible: PAINT’s “Future Expandability.” Version 10 has a new architecture allowing each tool within the application to separate or join the mother ship, so to speak. With each tool its own component, PAINT has more control over its use of resources, since only the components that are needed are loaded into memory.
Furthermore, it will be much easier for Corel to release new features, irrespective of the schedule of a new version. It’s as if the entire application is made up of plug-ins. Only time will tell if this new strategy pays off...
In other news, PAINT now supports live text on a path and automates animations between blends. PAINT users who have had to retreat to DRAW for these purposes are already dancing in the streets.
Several of the improvements we cited with DRAW are actually implemented across all of the applications, most notably the RealTime Preview, more presets, and the Color Sliders.
Improvements unique to PAINT include the following:
Display caching lets you pan and zoom in real time, even on large images.
Better anti-aliasing with text, especially at small point sizes.
Smart Blur offers more control over the degree to which images are blurred.
Interactive Drop Shadow is even more interactive, with controls for opacity and feathering placed right on the drop shadow controls.
Masks are more mobile thanks to changes made to the shape properties of the masks. Masks will no longer automatically clip as soon as they are moved out of the document space and they can be dragged and dropped between open documents.
The new Channel mixer lets you blend color channels by percentaes to give you more color balance control.
And then there is the sexy new Red Eye Removal tool, which promises to automatically remove the universally loathed result of too much flash from too close of a distance. Our first few rounds with it left us wondering where the beef was, as the instructions for the tool essentially had us doing the thing manually.
These observations were confirmed by Sean McLennan, the PHOTO-PAINT 10 Product Development Manager, who described the situation as follows:
Basically, our Red Eye Removal tool needed to be scaled back at the time of release due to last-minute, unforeseen technical problems. We are in the process of working on a new Red Eye Removal tool that should exceed expectations. This new tool will be made available for download from the Web, a function that has been facilitated by the componentization of the application.
We applaud Sean for his forthright response. We are hoping that the increased profile and refreshing candor that Sean and other Corel reps have shown on the newsgroups is one of the signs of Corel’s new management team. We like it...
Three other points to note:
We have DRAW 10 installed on four machines here in our offices, and we have no incidents to report yet of anything more grave than random and infrequent crashing (and in most cases, CARM has stepped in and provided us with a more graceful exit). We already know others have not been as fortunate.
Complaints in the electronic gathering points consist of the standard fare of reports of failed installations, crashes upon use of Open or Import dialogs, pet peeves that were not addressed, and general tirades against Corel and the rest of humanity. Not to belittle anyone’s troubles, but this is no different than the reaction earned by software from other manufacturers, and we see nothing that reaches the level of some of Corel’s more notorious versions of the past. Most precincts report real work being done, effectively, with DRAW 10.
Still, much of the criticism being leveled is valid, and needs to be addressed by Corel soon. Reports that rise above the fray include the following:
The question for version 10 is not whether it represents an improvement over 9; it does. The question is whether it is enough of an improvement, and naturally, that question is not as easy to answer. Version 8 users seeking better output and color support will have an easy call to make, as DRAW 10 answers the bell impressively.
Moving from 9 to 10 is a tougher call, and unfortunately, the most compelling reason to upgrade is not really fair:
Corel needs you to.
The CorelWORLD Letter is on record many times over in its position that Corel should concentrate on its graphics applications, even if that means selling off Linux and its business applications, becoming small again, and perhaps even privately-held. Whether or not that comes to pass, Corel really needs its DRAW users to upgrade, and it would not be too far-fetched for the more loyal users to feel similarly obliged.
But none of us is in the business of charity—we buy software because it is of value to us. Does an intuitive Web animation tool justify the move? What about cutting up bitmaps, sorting pages on the fly, better navigation, and Web image optimizing? It’s not an easy decision, and this is why we intend to distribute a low-cost CD in January that details all of these new features, so you can see for yourself.
CorelDRAW gets better with each release, and version 10 appears to be no exception. How much better does a program need to be than its immediate predecessor to induce single-version upgrades? Of all the mail we will get from this review, we expect that to be the question most addressed.
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Copyright 2000, All rights reserved. Have an opinion? Share it with the Corel community at the CorelWORLD Forum. There is already quite a bit of discussion about this story. Join in...
May 2007: As simple as possible, but not simpler... · April 2007: Killer Keystrokes · March 2007: Resolution Confusion · January 2007: Fearless Forecasts for 2007 · November 2006: Epiphanies at PowerPoint Live 2006 · August 2006: Escaping Death by PowerPoint · July 2006: Notes from the Floor of InfoComm · June 2006: Beyond PowerPoint--Making Movies for Business and Pleasure, Part II · May 2006: Beyond PowerPoint--From Photos to DVDs · April 2006: It’s Your Music!--Overcoming the oppressive restrictions of iTunes · March 2006: CorelDraw X3—A few must-haves and a few missed opportunities, all in all, a credible upgrade · February 2006: Making Windows Inhabitable · January 2006: Fearless Forecasts for 2006 · September 2005: Just What is a Background Anyway? · August 2005: Meet David Dobson, Corel's New CEO · July 2005: Community, Blind Dates. and Albert Einstein: An Interview with the PowerPoint Live Conference Host · June 2005: CorelWorld 2005: Image Editors, Executive Appearances, and Krispy Kremes · May 2005: As Adobe's Shadow Grows, Is Corel Better off or Worse? · March 2005: Delivering Your Presentation: How Close to the Source Can You Get? · February 2005: Digital Photography: The Killer App of this Generation Part II · January 2005: Digital Photography: The Killer App of this Generation · November 2004: A Killer Deal for Corel Or Another Distraction? · September 2004: The Scourge that is Kazaa and AOL Instant Messenger · August 2004: The Golden Triangle: Presenter, Audience, and Slides · July 2004: A Blast from the Past: How Fast is Fast Enough? · June 2004: Guilty Pleasures · May 2004: A Personal Wish List for PowerPoint 12 · April 2004: Eyedropping: Version 12 makes a good tool even better... · March 2004: Deadly Sins Of Modern PowerPoint Usage · February 2004: Is the even-numbered curse finally over? · January 2004: Another take on Achieving Absence of Ugliness · November 2003: What can we do it again??--Debut of PowerPoint Live Leaves Unquenchable Thirst with the Host · September 2003: Corel Corp. Has a New Custodian · July 2003: Candor and Contrition at CorelWORLD · June 2003: What a Long, Great Trip It’s Been! · May 2003: The Boat that Corel is Missing · April 2003: No Fooling...Is Corel Breaking Up? · March 2003: The Annual Design-a-Brochure Contest · February 2003: Symbolism is Everything · January 2003: Mania, Our Semi-Annual Pilgrimage to Holland · October 2002: On Creativity, Problem-Solving, and Paper Bags · July 2002: CorelDRAW 11: Surprise, Surprise... · May 2002: The Sound of Silence: What does it mean when a company plays its cards so close to its chest? · April 2002: The Art and Science of Presentation Graphics--Creating for the Screen Has its own Challenges · March 2002: CorelDRAW 11: What kind of personality and attitude should a software program have today? · February 2002: Oy, my aching fingers... · December 2001: Digital Photography · November 2001: Can we say goodbye to the Rolls Royce Mentality? · October 2001: An Unforgettable Week: The drama that unfolded around CorelWORLD · August-September 2001: The Art of Paragraphics: New-age ingredients for success with Corel VENTURA · July 2001: Your Very Own Interface: How to make Corel applications read your mind · June 2001: Fighting the Font Wars: How to stay sane with your sans · May 2001--Turning the Key at Nicholas-Applegate · April 2001--A Modest Proposal for Reviving VENTURA Publisher
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