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A comment on Corel confirms it has acquired virtualization specialist Parallels. Parent comment

Re:Corel confirms it has acquired virtualization specialist ... by SyneRyder on Thursday December 20, 2018 @01:09PM (#18727359)
On the user side, Corel has been okay-ish with PaintShop Pro. I write Photoshop plugins and I still have lots of customers who are happy Paintshop Pro users, some 14 years after Corel acquired JASC.

That said, Corel added a kind of adware to PSP, where it will display promotions for upgrades to the new version of Paint Shop Pro even when you're not using the program. I really wish there was an easy way to disable it, but I'm sure their metrics show it is effective. Parallels are already doing a version of that (but only when you launch the program), and now even Apple itself is using notifications to advertise products & distribute discounts [1]. There's probably no avoiding it now.

[1] https://9to5mac.com/2018/12/18/apple-push-notifications-comp...

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Re:Corel confirms it has acquired virtualization specialist ... by tracker1 on Thursday December 20, 2018 @03:50PM (#18729000)
I loved PSP under Jasc, after I think XII after the Corel buyout, I gave up on the product... Paint.Net or Gimp (painfully) give me the little utility I usually need. I really do miss PSP, but I think 9 was the last really good version, and I don't have a key or media for it anymore.

It sounds like it's gotten a little worse.

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Re:Corel confirms it has acquired virtualization specialist ... by SyneRyder on Thursday December 20, 2018 @11:52PM (#18731499)
v9 was good, but I still prefer 7, the version just before JASC switched to .NET. v7 is lightning fast, and nearly 20 years later it's still the version I use first for Photoshop plugin development, because of its speed.

From memory, v9 isn't compatible with Windows 10 (the installer won't work properly), so don't feel you're missing anything.

Serif's Affinity Photo is giving PSP real competition, but Affinity is still quite buggy in some ways on Windows. I'd probably recommend Corel PSP 2018 / 2019 over Affinity for the moment. Paint.NET is great too.

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Re:Corel confirms it has acquired virtualization specialist ... by tracker1 on Tuesday December 25, 2018 @04:09PM (#18759233)
I haven't really looked at anything since XII... I do mostly development, and my image work is mostly relegated to slight color shifting and/or cropping/scaling. I do wish Paint.Net were a better cross platform option... I've used Pinta, but it's been kind of buggy and isn't nearly as well flushed out.

It's a shame that so many tried to re-bundle Paint.net in sleazy ways... though the ads on their own site are horrible, and I don't fault the main dev(s). I just would love to see Pinta or anything else become as easy to use. I may try to dig up PSP7 and see if I can find a key for it.

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