I own a canon 9900f (I also have attatched a Canon MP780 multifunction printer with a built in scanner) running under leopard 10.5.7 I downloaded your demo :

SFen-6.6.1r1b(CanonSDK-SE).mpkg

It installed ok

When I ran Silverfast Launcher, it said “There is no SilverFast Scanner Module installed.” and would not go any further.

I decided then to uninstall it using the included script :

“Uninstall-SilverFast (CanonSDK-SE).sh”

when i clicked on the above uninstall script it then proceeded to open the script up in my text editor ?

overall not impressed, wouldn’t run and wouldn’t un-install.

Questions :

1: what Can I do to get the installer or uninstaller to work.
2: Is there still powerpc code remnant in the latest version of silverfast, that uses rossetta ?
3: Is the silverfast plugin happy working under twain in CS3 or CS4 ?

These demo issues did not instill confidence in me, Might I be buying a Zombie software product if I purchased Silverfast? The classification to me of a Zombie software product is, where it is still being sold, but theres a large part of the codebase that is frozen and does not get debugged or improved or converted to take advantage of New Cpu’s etc, ie never touched by the coders for fear of breaking something. I own two peice’s of software that are like this and would not like to own more.

Poser 7 , An appalling product which I purchased, part of a collection of dying software, smith Micro is exploiting, in a way similar, to how asset stripping companys work, you take a software that has a good reputation and make the most minimal updates to it, and keep selling it, until you have diminished all brand loyalty in the product. This program in many aspects simply does not function, exporting figure data, applying head changes to body models etc, and did not function straight from purchase. I wasted my money on this zombie product.

Electricimage : wasted well over a thousand pounds on this software, which has lots of bugs which are 5-6 years old that will never be fixed, as openly finally admitted to me by the developers, because the original coder left to work at newtek. They also like some software companys I could mention, keep on developing new products for years, rather than fixing and polishing their core product ? In Electricimages case, god knows how much money they wasted in developing “modeler”, time which could have been better spent perfecting their core product.

What im hoping is that lasersoft is not making similar mistakes, with silverfast (its core product) as I would not like to be burn’t a third time. The vibe on the web about lasersoft support, and silverfast issues in general is not good. And the thing that depresses me is that the best featured scanning software on the market might dissappear through a lack of focus on its core product ? I’m hoping this isnt the case. An another thing to bear in mind is that allthough all problems can generally be troubleshooted. Software usually wins customers, when the software doesn’t need troubleshooting in the first place, ie the solution most users are looking for, is the one that just works without messing about, as most often, time is the most precious commodity in a users life. I can fix most things on my computer since ive been using computers for 30 years, truth is though although I can solve the majority of issues, its not something I get pleasure from or enjoy doing. I like software that just works and simplifys the complexity of my life without removing quality. There was a great quote about interface design that said, the quality of good interface design can be judged by the statement “don’t make me think” ie great software doesnt make the user think, because the software is fundamentally intuitive.

Also looking at your product line, As a potential purchaser of your product im a little worried that my investment might be wasted, As you product lineup seems overly stratified and complicated, and that fact that my scanner software investment is locked into a specific scanner. I certainly would prefer you to switch to an approach whereby I purchase the software as a general purchase to work with any scanner both current and future that I might buy, and then within the program itself can switch/purchase scanner profiles cheaply to work with the current scanner im using or any future one without major re-investment. But as I couldnt get even the demo to function, I guess which retail model you use for your software is pretty irrelevant.