With memories of its glory days still fresh (when it beat the market with CorelDraw), Corel's always got a surefire way to beat the market leaders. Over the years I've watched it fail at entering the CAD (computer-aided design) market, the word processing market (still strong in certain verticals, tho), the technical diagraming market, the operating system market, and now it has declared war on Google's Picasa -- a product so good that I actually paid for it, before it was made libre by Google. (Darn Google, when do I get my refund?)
(A couple of years ago, Corel marketing came to visit the offices of upFront.eZine -- ie, me -- to promote Corel Designer Technical, a nice program for technical illustrations. Have you heard of it? I thought not. In my case, I continue to use Visio 2000 for technical diagramming.)
I read about Snapfire in the Globe&Mail, who unhelpfully didn't bother providing a URL [snapfire]. The 15.7MB file would not download using Opera 9, so I was forced to fire up IE. (You have to provide your email address and country, before downloading is permitted.)
Here's how Corel marketing is positioning Snapfire: (1) free, (2) not-free, (3) and with bolt-ons. In addition to the free version, there is the "Pro" version for $40, plus add-on modules for $10 each. The theory behind bolt-ons is that you can pick-and-choose features; the drawback is that the full-featured version gets expensive.
After option-free installation, it hunts for all JPG photo files on your computer. Photos are not segregated by date; the thumbnails appear as one giant listing. Photos you may have rotated in Picasa appear unrotated in Snapfire, meaning I have to rotate them all over again -- a tedious job when you think that I have tens of thousands of digital photos.
The control bar on the left lists Home (seach photos, etc), Enhance (adjust and apply effects), Create (print, select layout), and Message Center (tutorials, updates, etc).
The lower-left corner has a section labled NEWS, but provides tips and runs ads for other Corel products. I used ZoneAlarm to block Snapfire from accessing the Internet (and presumably calling home).
The emphasis is on ease of use, but the sluggishness and fewer-features-than-Picasa put Snapfire at a disadvantage. I suspect the primary not-going-to-use-this-software-anymore problem is that photos are not segregated by shooting events (aka date). It's just all one big mess'o'fotos.
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