Why take off on Micro-Art

Nobody asked. The Micro-Art guy doesn’t need any bad publicity, he is only trying to make a go for himself, right?

Well, let me tell you something. In the first place this blog only sees about 125 hits a day. That’s small beans in terms of anything I say having any kind of impact on him at all. Less than a blip on the radar. In the second place the owner (or someone at Micro-Art) has seen fit to scab up all of the email addresses from the Yahoo groups that I frequent and has begun spamming them all with his product promotions and support topics. Here is the example from this morning:

From: Micro-Art <jgcote@micro-art.com>

Mailed-By: sympatico.ca

To: support@micro-art.com

Date: May 29, 2006 6:54 PM

Subject: Event Users

Reply | Reply to all | Forward | Print | Add sender to Contacts list | Delete this message | Report phishing | Show original | Message text garbled?

Changes were made to Event over the weekend, including some corrections in the setup and processing functions. Please uninstall the old version and re-install the new one. If you are using a LAN environment then you need to install only on the “server” since the viewing stations execute Event from there.

Package Creation and Load to Photoshop were corrected in Order Processing (F5)

Package input and tax edit functions were corrected on set-up (F2)

1. Folder copy (F8) was added to the program. This allows you to copy folder structures of full sized images to the display drive and resample the images to a smaller size.

2. File Rename (F9) allows the renaming of files in a folder. Adding and removing prefixes etc. Facilitates renaming files for different events.

In the interest of full disclosure, I did sign up to download his demo software. Once. From a single email address. Not from every single address that I have ever used to post on the ExpressDigital Photoreflect group and others.

Now, here is how I see it. He put himself in my face. My customer didn’t find him from this spam, he found Micro-Art from another forum that he frequents. I didn’t ask for his messages, so even though he didn’t ask for my opinion of his software I gave it anyway. I think that he has done a very good job of creating a simple, affordable solution for people who may not need or may not want the ExpressDigital software. It looks terrible. It really does. I think on some level that the way that the software looks will have a negative impact in the face of the customer. I have worked events where I have heard with my own two ears remarks from customers about how great the software (both in a local web server setup and ED setup) looks. It does matter to some people. Some things are not implemented very well in my opinion. If your needs are simple, this program just might be for you. For me, it is useless.

From this email I can see why we were not able to change drives in the program window. You can only use images that are stored on the drive where the program is installed. You have to manually copy images from one drive to the next when you have something stored elsewhere. Just another strike against this software.

I hope the developer keeps it up and continues to listen to his customers and improve his product. In terms of features and functionality he is right there for the things that he is trying to do. Looks? Well, let’s all hope that he gets himself some help there. I do think that until the software appearance improves Micro-Art has an uphill battle in terms of selling to people that are always trying to present the best product.

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