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MetaCreations and Painter 6.0 woes; MetaCreations replies

MetaCreations and Painter 6.0 woes; MetaCreations replies

CNET staff
2 min read
Even though Painter 6.0 recently won the Eddy award for Best Graphics Software, MacFixIt staff member Catherine Kunicki has had problems using it: "Basic functions such as mask layers and determining the width and height of objects have been crippled."

She spoke with MetaCreations Mac Tech Support about this and they had even more bad news: "They said that there will be no update patch forthcoming at least until the product has been sold (see this press release for related information). The Tech Support person explained that the entire QA department was fired so even if a patch was created, it couldn't be tested."

Update: Tom Hedges (Painter 6 Engineering Lead) replied to this posting. He essentially states that what the Tech Support person told Catherine is wrong:

"I am writing to correct what I feel is a serious misrepresentation of the situation MetaCreations Painter 6.0 is in. First of all, if Painter 6 was 'crippled,' why would it win awards and be so highly acclaimed?

However, there are some bugs in Painter 6.0. The engineering team has been working on bug fixes since Painter 6.0 went gold master in September. We have fixed over 100 bugs since 6.0, and hope to fix several dozen more for our planned dot release 6.0.3. We plan to release patchers for Painter 6.0.3 for both Mac and Windows in March 2000 on the MetaCreations web site.

We have a good QA team in place to test Painter 6.0.3, headed by the lead tester for Painter 6.0.

Regarding the planned sale of Painter, the team realizes the product's future is up in the air; and therefore we all have become extremely committed to Painter 6.0.3 to provide a really solid, stable final MetaCreations Painter that must last for a while."

Resources

  • Eddy award
  • press release
  • More from Late-Breakers