Draw+ looks interesting and I downloaded the starter edition trial to take a look see. When I went to install I was asked is I wanted their toolbar that I declined.
-bob99
Probably sensible.
I've been using Serif products for what seems like millennia. (15 years or more, I think.) The Starter Edition products are okay but are clearly intended to suck you into paying money for their non-free software. I expect the toolbar's just another attempt to stop you running away too far...
Serif do a lot of marketing, much of which is ignorable but my strategy with them for ages was to wait until the product I wanted was sent to me as a special offer email -- they usually are, eventually -- and buy into it then. I have NEVER paid full price for anything Serif do, as a result, and even if that means I don't always have up-to-the-minute latest product, they still provide a lot of bang for the buck. It IS worth letting Serif send you emails: sometimes they're even worth reading!
This is the 1st time ever I have had this happen when installing a program. I re-booted yesterday and I haven't installed anything since.
Any ideas on why this is happening? I've heard this is a quality product and don't want to be paranoid about it, just never had it happen before. Anything else that could cause this?
I cancelled till I decide what to do.
There's a registry setting somewhere that doesn't always get properly cleared, that says "xyz has been installed and really needs a restart before it'll be properly in place." All the Serif software looks at it and suggests a restart if it's needed. (Serif worked hard to get to some level or other of Microsoft certification, they told me some years ago, and this may be related to that.) Sometimes -- although I haven't seen this recently -- the setting won't clear however often you restart, and for those cases Serif have a workaround (check their forums if you get stuck in the same loop: I think it's a commandline switch, something like "setupdrawplus.exe -norestart" but I don't remember exactly.
DrawPlus is pretty decent software. It takes some getting used to if you've never done vector graphics before but they put up some good tutorials online (if you buy physical product there's a good printed manual too). It's probably not quite as powerful or as fast as Xara but the DP interface is much easier to use, in my view, and its capabilities don't lag far behind anything most ordinary mortals are likely to want. I built the animated gif I use as an avatar here with it, and (as you can probably tell from its lack of excitement levels) if I'd spent more than ten minutes on it I could probably have done something GOOD.
For what it's worth: Serif's best products are DrawPlus, PhotoPlus and PagePlus. I can't comment on MoviePlus (video editing and animation) as I've never used it but most of their other products are at least okay offerings in a relatively crowded market.
They also sell on software from other providers, and odd bits of hardware (my first graphics tablet came in a bundle with an older DrawPlus and I've used them in preference to mice
Spoiler
I've never been sure if the correct plural of the computer mouse is the same as the, er, biological mouse so if I should have said "mouses" I apologise but my fingers generally refuse to type things that the dictionary area of my brain objects to!
ever since...)
