How To Make Your Product Update Look Suspicious, Courtesy of Corel
Step 1: Have an unnamed Product Update screen display by the system tray on product startup:
Given how long the newer version I have (Paint Shop Pro Photo X2) takes to load, I often click its icon and then go back about my business so it can show its splash screen for 30 seconds while I work in an active application.
Step 2: When I click for More information, show me yet another screen that doesn’t tell me any information.
Well, what can it hurt? By this time I’ve figured it’s probably PSP since I can sometimes get to this screen and sometimes I can get to PSP. So I start the download, hoping I’m not getting Weatherbug 2009.
But here’s the thing: in the middle of the download, I decided to lament to it to you guys, and I clicked Cancel to stop it so I could get those lovely screenshots for you. The Updater dispelled the progress bar window, but it left Paint Shop Pro in a modal form so I could not actually get to it. I had to kill it from the taskbar.
Eventuallly, though, after I mucked around with those things enough, I got to the installer, and it finally, finally identified the product:
Corel should have branded each and every of the preceding screens, but for some reason did not. Poor form, Peter. Now, maybe some day they can un-screw-up a great product that they had to tart up and, more inanely, change keyboard shortcuts that had been part of the product for a freakin’ decade. Yeah, when I get wed to a product, I get wed to a product and its custom shortcuts.
