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Comment by slantyyz | Hacker News Reader

These days it seems like basically acquire software companies. They own Winzip, Paintshop and Painter, for example.

They own Winzip

Some were shocked to learn Corel was still around, whereas I'm shocked to learn Winzip is still around. Especially since Windows finally got around to adding native zip64 support in what...XP SP3 I think it was?

For the most part, Corel seems to acquire software that are near their end of life and/or relevance.

IIRC, they kept Kai's Power Tools alive well past its usefulness.

Yeah, but Windows built-in ZIP support still blows a number of goats, which is why I use 7zip... and the latter is the real reason I'm gobsmacked that Winzip is still around. 7zip's not as pretty but it does support every archive format I've ever used or needed.

EDIT: Even more shocking: they own both WordPerfect and Quattro Pro both of which are, apparently, still around. Absolutely stunned.

I've seen WordPerfect on the shelf at a brick and mortar Fry's Electronics somewhat recently -- within the last year, I swear. I definitely did a double-take.

WordPerfect use to be favored my lawyers. This is a group that tends to stick to their tools. I dunno if their still using it but that's probably a pretty nice niche.

I recall reading that the reason it was (is) favored by lawyers was because WordPerfect did more accurate word counts in documents than Microsoft Word did. When lawyers submit briefs to some courts they have restrictions as to the maximum number of words contained in the document. Microsoft Word did things like count page numbers as words, thereby inflating the word count and reducing the number of actual words that could be in the document.

I installed WinZip on my PC a few years ago because it's the only archiver i'd found that let you view image thumbnails without extracting the whole ZIP, pretty cool feature.

A decade ago, one client at an old job required ZIPs be 256-bit AES WinZIP encrypted, which at the time meant WinZIP was the only option.

The employer was so cheap that they they didn't want to pay for WinZIP, so we'd wait n number of seconds before the file would zip. Then we'd wait n+1 seconds until it was an hour and a half wait.

My dads office (attorney) uses it because they’ve used it since it was popular in the 80s. There’s not much reason to have them switch as long as WP continues to get support... it does everything they need.

It's where programs go to die. Corel today is what Computer Associates was twenty years ago.

Took the words right out of my stdin. Had I not caught your comment out of the corner of my eye, I was about to post word-for-word the same.

It worked for CA for a while, and then...it didn't? I'd have to go look up what happened to them, because they one day just weren't on my radar anymore.

The renamed themselves to CA Technologies and were bought by Broadcom recently for $18B.

> Took the words right out of my stdin.

Don't you mean stdout?

Given that it is a play on “took the words right out of my mouth”, you’re probably right.

RIP VET Anti-Virus :( CA Anti-Virus was so bad.

They also own two competing video editing products. With very similar feature sets. One of which has forums with logins going over unencrypted connections. :/

It's been a long time since I've heard of an acquisition that was actually positive for the aquired/their users - can anyone working on any of these groups share such a story?

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...

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.

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.

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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