Can I honestly promote iView?

MLawson · Joined: 25 Jul 2006 Posts: 2

Embarking on freelance assignments for assorted small business in need of DAM. I love iView and have successfully implemented it for a couple different clients. I'm balking at Expressions, for the usual reasons.
But... can I encourage clients to purchase, train, invest etc in iView if it is doomed? Or (ulp) is it time to bite the bullet and try something from The Other Platform? Thank you for your most candid possible replies.

Dierk · Joined: 14 Jan 2005 Posts: 630 Location: Hamburg (Germany)

You can promote what you want but ... iView is no more. Hasn't been for a very long time.

This forum [and the accompanying Web site] belongs to Microsoft since they bought up iView and incorporated program and developers ionto their company. It is only kept alive for two reasons:

- it offers a lot of information valuable to users of Expression Media
- as a quick stop for those keeping with the last iView MediaPro version [3.1.3]

Though I have been rather critical with Microsoft's development cycle and marketing, I now do see a glimmer of hope for the program and its users. The company has been very responsive lately, and although xMedia v2 is still "just" a major bug fix [particularly for speed] with one welcome and one necessary new feature - the former being Virtual Earth*, the latter an almost completely new lighttable - it is a very usable program.

For the time being I am confident the kinks, quirks, annoyances and left over bugs will be addressed within a closer timeframe. That is, I hope for quick patches and minor revisions over the summer.

The last sentence should be mailed over to the devs in bold and 48 pt ...

*But have a look to Pro Photo Tools if you are on Windows.
_________________
xMedia v2 on Windows XP/SP2; 3.4 GHz, 2 GB RAM, loads of storage space.
Other: Nikon D2x, Nikon D200, Breeze DownloaderPro, Capture NX, Adobe CS3 Design Premium

Plexus · Joined: 06 Jan 2006 Posts: 8

2GB

When they remove the 2GB database limit, then I'll consider renewing my license fee. Frankly, I don't consider Expression Media 1 an upgrade from IView, and I certainly don't believe EM2 is worth a fee for what is essentially bug fixes... They've even allegedly had the cheek to remove Expression Media Encoder and make us pay extra for that!

I sorely miss IView. In over 12 months of Microsoft ownership, just how many updates/bug fixes did we have for EM? At least with IView, updates were quite frequent and well documented. As a registered user, I wasn't even aware that EM2 was available to buy! I have the beta installed , as well as EM1, but Windows update hasn't alerted me to any updates.

J

JimF · Joined: 27 Jan 2005 Posts: 23 Location: Lexington, MA USA

I think Microsoft is the kiss of death to iView, and I can't even figure out what the Microsoft product does that iView Media Pro didn't. They take the product, rename it, want to charge you for an upgrade, and make it all as confusing as possible.
Although it's not identical in function, I've moved over to Adobe Lightroom. If you embed metadata and use collections, you can organize your files quite well. And Lightroom can be used for all kinds of exposure and color corrections- I'm using on a PC and a Mac with one license.