Painter is a digital art and painting application, from Corel Corporation.
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Google Slides
Score 8.2 out of 10
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Google Slides is a presentation tool that enables users to create, edit, collaborate, and present. It is free for personal use, and available to businesses via a Google Workspaces subscription.
Corel Painter does have a lot of great brushes, and they do emulate real art supplies very well. Especially the thick paint is well done. But unfortunately there are so many functional and UX bugs that overall it is just horrible to work with. When contacting customer support about it, they really seem clueless about the seriousness of the situation, and clueless about what proper UX is in general. They have tried to make it work a bit like Photoshop, which is a good move but then some things are absolutely not intuitive at all and they are definitely missing the mark horribly with so many issues. I would highly recommend using Photoshop instead, though you'll have to download them separately; it also offers a lot of great brushes nowadays and works much much smoother without all those aggravating bugs of Painter. The price of Corel Painter is just not at all worth all these horrible bugs.
Well-suited to working on presentations or PowerPoint-style documents, including setting up templated slides and working collaboratively on presentations. It's less well-suited to setting up printable documents, though I have used it for simple printable documents, you just need to remember to set the slide size to A4 (or your preferred paper size) measurements.
The popularity for Google Slides among the casual technology tool users is so great that we are not in a position to replace this tool with anything else. Every other tool either doesn't have the popularity, or doesn't match the ease of sharing level of Slides. The training needed to learn a different tool is too great. Google Slides is very easy to pick up and master.
If it wasn't quite clear yet, I'll state it again: the usability of Corel Painter is, simply put, horrid. And I am not talking about rendering, lagging, etc., it is not even all that bad there. I am talking about the weird issues like being unable to move a brush into a custom brush palette when you work on a second screen, like being unable to move the software onto the second screen in the first place unless you separate all the palettes and the windows (and if nobody tells you upfront there is no way of knowing because the manual doesn't state this at all), and then having to drag all your separate windows and palettes over one by one every time your computer wakes up again, and they won't really want to move to the other screen but only through a tiny corner of your screen, and the fact that you have to scroll through lists and lists of fonts but can't search and when you apply this font, add another piece of text the font jumps back to the default font of all the text already applied even when you haven't selected any of the text. Just to name a very small few.
Google Slides is very easy and intuitive for creating simple, straightforward presentations. Its limitations make for less decision making. Being part of the Google Suite makes for easy sharing and collaboration, auto-saving, and time-stamped versions/edit history. However, unlike a platform like Canva, there's no icon library, photos, graphics, or elements built-in, so if you're wanting more creative designs, you have to import or create yourself.
It was really hard to get them to understand what I was having problems with. It was hard to get the message through that Painter has an unacceptable amount of functional and UX bugs. When I finally talked to someone who was easier to communicate with, he was very stoic about the situation, like they didn't really care about the awful amount of bugs.
Corel Painter has support to multiple OS and across all the devices. Coloring and multi layer imaging works very well. The new enhanced brush settings and the redesigned brush libraries.
Google Slides works both online and offline, they are free to use if you have a Google account. Easy to share and are supported by most web browsers. A great addition to your arsenal of interactive educational online platforms.
