StephaneB hat geschrieben:
I have not been rude.
And they do deserve it.
They ask money for their product, which is of course fine.
But they fail to understand that proper documentation, allowing users to get acquainted with their product is an intrinsic part of the product.
What they are saying is that they don't have the time to deliver a finished product.
That is a flawed business approach.
I suspect the problem is they don't ask enough money to be able to finance the extra bits like the documentation.
Anyway, I think I'll move on. My purpose was not to bad mouth the software, which I suspect to be good, but to stress why in its current state the whole package is not as sell-able as it could be. I think we can all agree that is a shame.
Having before been bitten by going with products supported by very small companies that failed to grow and disappeared because of exactly the same problems, I am not about to make the same mistake again. Really, that post from Mr. Huber told me all I needed to know about what the future holds, or rather does not hold for this software. A good software with an accordingly loyal user base, but very small, with no prospect of growing enough to build a mature business.
I want to thank all the great people who have tried to help. I understand what you're trying to do, but that is not my approach in choosing a tool I expect to use reliably for many years.
Well, here's my take on things.
The documentation suffices to describe (most) of the functionality of Photoline. Use the help tool to click on items to access the help for that function. Anything more than that is, in my opinion, reliant on the user community. I agree parts are missing here and there. The situation is far worse currently for Affinity Photo users: no manual exists at all at the moment. They are still working on it.
Toonboom Harmony is the (Western) industry standard for 2d animation studios. It is very expensive, and you would expect the company behind Harmony to offer good example content and tutorials for their latest version. This turns out to be not the case. They provide three examples on their website. That is it.
One more example: the documentation for ClipStudio is ghastly. Translated from Japanese into rather malformed English, while the layout and order is just a mess. Clipstudio has an enormous user base. This is not a small company we are talking about. They paid good money for that manual, and the result is a mess. Good enough as a point of reference, again, though. Much worse than Photoline's manual.
I am of the opinion a manual should be viewed as a point of reference, and a software manual is generally inherently unsuitable to actually learn to work with the application in question. That is why nowadays more and more energy is directed towards the production of video tutorials.
So, in a nutshell: I have seen FAR worse manuals from FAR larger companies. Can PL's manual be improved? Definitely. Is is the worst I have encountered? Not by a mile. It falls somewhere in the middle.
Now, as for the viability of a software company. I can only relate my own experience here - like you, I have had some pretty bad experiences with software companies - both big and small. The size of the company in question has little to do with the bad or good ones, in my experience. I will let the facts speak for themselves:
1) I have been a PL user for three years. I use it on a daily basis. Often Photoline is running from the morning till the evening when I turn off my machine.
2) in those three years the developers have consistently delivered a new beta every two~four weeks, with sometimes a larger break of an additional week, or so.
3) every single bug I mentioned to them (or by others) was squashed with the next beta, or the one after that. In most cases the next beta corrected it (often within days after noting the bug).
4) suggestions of mine for new features and workflow enhancements have been implemented for about 75% is my guess. In all my professional designer life I have never seen such an uptake (outside Blender). It's been quite amazing, actually.
5) the number of improvements over these three years in regards to the GUI and workflow have impressive. The developers have been extremely accommodating towards their users: for example, they implemented two ways of working with the layer panel and positioning layers in the viewport. The "Adobe" method, and the "Corel/Gimp.etc/" method.
They are actually interested in improving even smaller workflow issues. My experience with Adobe has been rather "less" positive - a distinct understatement if there ever was one. We STILL cannot pan the view with the middle mouse button - something the PL devs implemented immediately after I mentioned it three years ago. Photoshop users have been begging for this option for over a decade now - all to fall on deaf ears.
6) Photoline is one of the most stable running applications I work with. It almost never crashes - and I am working in the latest beta version only! If there is a crash-causing problem found, it is consistently resolved before the next beta comes out.
7) I can directly communicate with the developers/owners and they respond back to me in a timely fashion.
Photoline has been on the market for a quarter of a decade.
9) the devs make sure it also runs under WINE on Linux.
Software business is a fickle thing. No company is perfect. No software is perfect. But based on my personal experience with Photoline, the company, and its developers/owners, I can only say it has been a most gratifying one so far. I would suggest investing some time in Photoline, come to this forum for assistance, and don't worry about the manual so much. Instead, I feel a helpful community (such as this forum) is FAR more important.
HTML I can handle.
I spent 38 years of my professional life in the IT industry and I never knew a single company--and I'm talking the BIG boys, too, such as IBM, Honeywell, dec--to provide enough and/or terribly useful documentation for anything.