Part 7: A New Hope?

Seeing how there aren't many Star Wars references out there, I thought I'd start off with the very original title "A new hope?" that I'm sure no one's ever used before. Sure, it's a tiny theoretical speck of hope and my realistic prognosis of PSP's chances of survival remains poor. I mean, no one's ever survived the bloatware-spyware stage (if you know of a remission story, please let me know). But anyway, I was contacted by Corel a few days ago and there seems to be a desire for change in the way PSP is managed. It may have something to do with the management overhaul going down at Corel, or PSP's inevitably plunging popularity, who knows. This is part of my conversation with PSP's marketing manager, G.W. (I don't know if he wants me to reveal his name) :

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Hi Max, I'm G.W.

I work on the PaintShop product team at Corel. Having discovered your blog, http://improvepsp.blogspot.com/, for the first time a few days back, it is with admiration and concern that I introduce myself.

Admiration, for the impressive depth of knowledge you've demonstrated and analysis you've made over the past few years. Concern, for the deep impression that your analysis has made on me - especially the fact that you've declared it time to wrap things up for a product you've had such a long relationship with.

This is definitely not the experience that we want PSP customers to have, and clearly you think we haven't been getting it right in recent years. We don't want things to be this way, and we're working to change PSPP for the better.While we have learned a lot from your blog already, we'd really like the opportunity to speak with you sometime soon - if you are willing to spend some time with us to hear everything you want to say to us about PaintShop and to ask you a few questions about how you think we can make PSP better. Our product manager for PaintShop is out of the office right now, but if you had some time next week to chat, we'd really appreciate it. Let me know what day/time might be good for you and what time zone you are in.

Sincerely,

G.W.

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My reply:

Hello, G.,

I'm pleasantly surprised that my blog has reached Corel and it makes me happy that your company has contacted me personally. That said, as experienced as one single user can be, nothing can replace a direct, open contact with the community, so my main and most important suggestion would be to open a freely accessible official forum on Corel.com, where users can directly contact a representative of the programming team, or an active programmer. You will immediately notice a torrent of fresh ideas much more comprehensive than the ones I can give you.

Using PSP in my profession, I'm noticing three main problems:

- The brush engine - outdated, unsuitable for proper work with a tablet.
- The growing size and heaviness of the product, mainly due to unnecessary bundled software and background services. The core program could easily fit into less than 100 mb.
- The product is being marketed towards photographers only, but what makes a product like Adobe PhotoShop successful is its ability to manipulate (to photoshop) images and create stunning digital paintings. My suggestion would be to hire professional artists to build a gallery with creative photo-manipulations and paintings, and also use their feedback when building new versions.

I'm also assuming that you will ask me to take down the blog, as it may give your product a bad name, however I'm not willing to do so. I promise to take it down, or better yet - start writing positive reviews as soon as I test a new version of PSP that's not worse than the previous one.

Sincerely, ....

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Their second reply:

Hi Max,

It’s great to hear from you! Sorry for the delay in replying, I’ve been out of the office. I too am pleased that we’ve been able to connect and I’m also pleased that we share a similar perspective on the need for open and direct contact with the PSP community.

Over the past few months, we’ve been changing the way we manage PSP and I think these changes are for the positive. Specifically, we are getting much better focused on the community as you suggest we should be. It feels good to be doing so.

In terms of some of your suggestions, I can’t speak for specific feature enhancements at this time – that’s my colleague Craig’s department, but in terms of the way we need to engage the community, I think you are right on the money. You’ll see some action from us on some of these items this year – for example, the official forum you’ve suggested is something we’re working on enhancing right now. We have PSPP forums online today at forum.corel.com (we’re working to update these existing forums in the near term ahead of a larger overhaul/upgrade later in the year.) And in addition, we have plans in the works for a new blog and community platform. I’ll email you about those when they go live.

In terms of taking down your blog post, I have no such expectation. We really are keen to have open and honest dialogues about how we can make PSPP truly awesome and we value the feedback (even when it stings). That said, we really want to be your next post! (And hopefully positive!)Let’s keep in touch. Craig and I would be happy to jump on the phone with you at any time.

Yours sincerely, G.W.

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end.

So as you can see, there's nothing concrete about any actual improvements or about getting PSP back to its clear-cut, non-bloated origins. But there ought to be plenty of that on the new forum. As soon as this new forum emerges, I urge all of you to go there and directly give them the advice that you've been keeping to yourself for so long. When and if that will ever happen, and most importantly, whether there will be genuine contact with the developers, is still uncertain, but let's keep our fingers crossed.

Please, leave your comments and opinions