Apple Reviews

A story in an Ottawa newspaper (the Citizen, I believe) recently ran a story that revealed that Corel used Adobe Illustrator to design the packaging for Corel Graphics Suite. And no wonder. The Corel suite is just plain painful to use. A clunky interface, super slow re-draw time and truly wacky text handling make the Corel experience a truly frustrating one. So I, like Corel, will continue to use Adobe.

After years of using CorelDraw (versions 5-9) on the Windows platform, suffering with frequent crashes and quirky tool operations, I assumed that the move to Corel 10 for Mac would be pleasant. Unfortunately, it was not.

Corel 10 for Mac is a dreadful program. It is horribly slow. I'm using a 466 G4, so I'm not expecting lighning, but dear God, it is a painful ordeal to try to edit text. There are a number of strange tool problems which reinstalling several times has not solved, even after downloading the 23-megabyte "patch".

-The Caps-Lock key doesn't work in text editing mode.
-The open and import dialogue windows are too small (only a portion of the file names are visible), and attempting to expand them makes the program crash.
-The program envrionment can easily become corrupted, forcing the user to revert to the default envrionment and lose all of their customization.
-The program appears to be unable to deal with white spot colors.
-The "support options" are awful. The only way to get support is by calling a long distance toll number... there is no e-mail support, and the online support database doesn't have a section for the program. By searching, one can find 3 articles about Draw 10 for Mac. I was unable to access the Usenet discussion groups.

There are also problems with arcing text that go back to the earliest versions of Draw I used on the PC. Corel seems more interested in adding new features than fixing problems with old ones.

On the plus side, the customization options are very comprehensive, allowing the user to do whatever they want with the interface... also the program seems to be able to import any kind of file. Sometimes the results are strange, with Illustrator files sometimes having mysterious white outlines around everything...

Overall, if Corel can speed it up and fix some problems, this program would be a pleasure to use, but don't get your hopes up.

Lightyears ahead Illustrator, Coreldraw came a long way since the first version. Since the hole graphic design industry was based at the time on the MAC, Illustrator became the standard, while Corel got stablished into the Windows plataform.

But now that both plataform got so similar, The truth is that after this unspected shift, Illustrator got so afraid of Corel that they started to pay people to create positive reviews of the software.

Corel was using interactive transparencies, Text envelopes, 3D extrudes & amazing Printing Options while Illustrator was still in dippers. Even more, after so many years of "Illustrator" the program is still incapable of showing Font Previews. It even tried to poorly imitate Corel's Text Envelopes but it does not get even close.

In CorelDraw you have many interactive tools that do the job, while in illustrator you need a many to acomplish the same. This forces you to deal with an interface crowded with useless & unecessary tools, no wonder it was finally recogniced by Macworld as Best of Show at MACExpo.

There are so many features in draw that Illustrator lacks that you'd need a book to enumerate. The only reason the graphic design industry does not like it is just because it comes from windows & they don't like to learn better ways to do the same thing. It's true in the past Corel was unstable but after version 7 the Illustrator got way behind.

The truth is that you can do basicaly anything with any of this programs, the only diference is that with corel you can do it way faster. Besides, you get more for your money, Rave & PhotoPaint, this last two programs do a decent job thou I personally like Flash & Photoshop better. As you can see I' not an Anti-Adobe I just state the obvious.

SLOW SLOW SLOW. We had been using Corel Draw 8 and purchased this upgrade. My only regret was getting busy and forgetting to return it under the 30 day return policy. 10 won't read a lot of our Draw 8 files, and it's SO SLOW.
We are switching to Adobe since we feel there is no other choice from Corel.

You would think by version 10 Corel would be able to get it right? Wrong! This software is SLOW, buggy garbage. This program can't print anything right and will even do a number on your version 8 gems for you. Go to Illustrator or Freehand instead.

As an artist who has used Bryce 3D and upgraded to Bryce 4, I was satisfied with the product's ability to render realistic worlds and 3D special effects, even before I upgraded to Bryce 5. But for all the beauty I have been able to create with this affordable yet powerful software, there has been one increasingly prominent sour-note that may pretty much kill-joy everything else I liked.

I am currently rendering a sixteen-second animation using Bryce 5 on a WindowsME PC. The animation is 320-by-240 pixels resolution per frame, and has a frame rate of thirty frames per second. The PC has a Pentium III, 256 megabytes of RAM, a 40 gigabyte hard drive, and on-board 24-bit graphics acceleration. Nevertheless, because the animation includes six to eight transparent metaballs with a marble texture and the refractive properties of water, Bryce tells me that the animation will take at least fifteen DAYS to finish. To make a long story short, Bryce 5 will punish you in slow rendering time for the same intricacy of creativity the software claims to reward.

At first, I wondered whether or not Bryce's rendering engine was software-intensive (i.e. all of the complex floating-point calculations involving exponents, roots, logarithms, trigonometry, and so on are all carried out by the software) or hardware-intensive (i.e. the same complex calculations are passed to and from the CPU's Floating-Point Unit, which is MILLIONS of times faster than the software-intensive method). All Pentium CPU's have an FPU, and since Bryce 5 requires that the PC in question have a Pentium, one would think that Bryce's rendering engine would be hardware-intensive, taking advantage of the FPU's speed and power. Nevertheless, other users have told me that the Bryce 5 rendering engine is only software-intensive, hence the incredibly long rendering times on simple animations that were cursed with having too many complex props and actors in the scene. Other users have advised me to make use of Network Rendering, where several computers sharing a network link carry out the same rendering project together. But it totally defeats the purpose of purchasing an inexpensive yet powerful 3D world-rendering tool when you have to spend tons of extra money on other computers simply to render a scene or animation at a decent rate.

Ultimately, because my work is deadline-driven, I have found that Bryce's dismal rendering times have become absolutely unacceptable. I am already doing research on another 3D-rendering software package that has a considerably faster rendering engine, one that makes use of the FPU. Bryce 5 is excellent for rendering phenomenal 3D worlds and animations, but only if you have a day's, a week's, or even a month's patience, because that's exactly how long it may take.

I have Bryce 4 which I'm running on a 600MHz cpu with 128RAM and I recently got a chance to play with B5 on a 1.8 GHz machine with 512RAM. Incredibly, the new version on hardware with 3x the oomph of my own system was SLOWER to render!!...and boys 'n girls, Bryce's slow rendering engine is already the ickiest, least acceptable part of the package. Okay, so you can supposedly distribute the rendering chores over multiple computers in a network now but y'know, I only have the one machine and it's the same story for most home users, I'd suspect. This is a really inadequate "fix" for the software's worst problem.

Yes, there's good stuff here, too. :) The new tree lab is a significant improvement but again, you'll just add to the rendering nightmare if you use it. I like the new light controls, too, and the terrain editor is better. The disappointment in Bryce comes from seeing the potential for glory, the means by which you can play God and create your own worlds in convincing detail, but not quite being able to get there and having to skimp on the details in an eternal battle to keep down the rendering times. Much of what you'll want to do with it can be achieved if you only do web graphics and keep to relatively low resolutions: go no higher than 800x600 pixels for wallpaper or whatever and a fairly complex creation will take hours to render, but if you want to do a 300dpi file for a 5"x7" print...2100x1500 pixels...you need to keep the composition very simple, no plants, minimal glass, metal and reflective stuff...and you'll probably need to leave your 'puter on overnight, anyway. :( Turn off your wallpaper, turn off your screensaver, close everything else you can (basically, burn all the furniture in your house to keep warm!), whisper prayers and incantations, do whatever you have to do to give every spare ounce of processor power to Bryce while it's rendering. *sigh* Maybe you'll avoid a crash, at least.

Final note: I know this is for the home user, not for pros, but that doesn't mean it can't get a lot better than it is and I'm thinking good thoughts for the next few releases--but saving my $$ for now. I've been a CorelDRAW! and Photo-Paint user for years and I have every confidence Corel will do great things with Bryce, but they're not there yet.

When I purchased Bryce 5, the first 3d graphics and animation program I ever used, it was wonderful. I had no problem creating my own world. Bryce 5 is very easy to use and, once you learn more about how to use it, you can create life-like scenes and animations. About the render time: it only takes a long time if you have complicated scenes with many polygons, reflections, objects that have high refraction, and gasses. Other than that, it's been fast for me. Bryce 5 has only crashed twice in the seven months that I've had it. Corel Bryce 5 is perfect, in my opinion, for beginners. Like I said before, it's VERY easy to use and it's nowhere near as complicated as I thought it would be. I've never used Bryce 4 or Bryce 3D, so, I have nothing to compair Bryce 5 to. However, I'm very happy that I purchased this and I will continue to use it. I've yet to encounter any bugs whatsoever. (The reason it crashed is because I had a virus on my computer.) If you're a beginner, I STRONGLY reccomend this program. If you're an advanced user, well, it's your choice.

This is a bundle of junk. Unless I installed it wrong (and my husband and I are not computer/software idiots) there is no user interface. I couldn't even find the free subscription for a year to clipart.com. What a bundle of crap. Buyer beware, the only good side of this is that it was only $30. But I could have bought my children some Amazon.com books with that $30. By the way, I have Windows XP. And what really sucks is that I had to give it one star. It deserves a ZERO RATING.

This is a terrible collection. Bought it and couldn't actually get to the images. I am a Photoshop user and have some experience with image manipulation etc. and am a long time Mac user. Contacted technical support via e-mail and they told me they couldn't help me. This collection was created by a PC person and adapted to Mac. Don't buy it. Save your money and buy a good Mac collection. Returned Clip Art 2.5 Million and only got back 15 of the dollars that it cost me in the first place.

Although this package is very affordable, I now know why. First off, a portion of the 2.5 million is only accessible online...for a year. Then, as I explore the various files, I find some objects are presented repeatedly, just in different colors. Wow! So, what you get is three CDs with no manual or clip art book to browse. I'll keep looking for a better collection.