ACDSee 8 is my image viewer and editor. One reason I don't usually recommend ACDSee to others is that it has a favorite phrase that it likes to repeat, "ACDSee has encountered a system error and must now close." There seems to be no rhyme nor reason to it. In my opinion, such an error message is indicative of poor programming practices. At the very least, the message should be informative, so that the user can take steps to correct the supposed "system error." Better would be if ACDSee handled the error in a graceful manner, without exiting. Who knows why ACDSee crashes? It crashes just because.
The new version of ACDSee costs $50 to upgrade, which leads one to expect that significant new features have been added. I did try out ACDSee 11 a long time ago, but found it did not have any new features that were of interest to me. Instead of adding features, it seems the developers chose to reconfigure the design and interface, meaning that the user would have to learn a new bag of tricks without gaining any advantages as a result.
However, when all is said and done, I have to concede that there is not a better image manager for the PC than ACDSee. It's quicker to load than Adobe Photoshop and cheaper. I've tried FastStone, Irfanview, and several other shareware solutions, but they all fall short of ACDSee. The developers of these shareware products should merge instead of competing with one another. Teams of programmers can accomplish more than just one individual working alone. As the situation now stands, each programmer is spending his entire career reinventing the wheel, attempting to copy features that ACDSee introduced over six years ago.
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