Vendor Support
Our customers rely on our software for their day-to-day business operations of managing and processing photographs, and excuses such as, "Oh, we get that code from someone else," are not acceptable. Once we ship a library, we need to stand behind it and ensure it works at the customer site. That means we rely on our vendors not just to support their products, but also to provide workable solutions to customer problems on a timely basis. In fact, I think one of the reasons component vendors continue to thrive despite the increasing functionality built into platform libraries is this support. After all, if the Windows .NET library doesn't read a particular TIFF file at a customer site, we're unlikely to get a Microsoft patch for our customer in real time.
The Selection Process
Given the small size of our team, our selection process needed to be efficient and quick. But at the same time, a mistake would be very expensive in terms of customer satisfactionif we picked and shipped a library that didn't perform as expected. There was no shortage of Windows imaging toolkits on the market, but by going through our checklist of requirements, it was winnowed down to two. Feature for feature, the two looked almost the same. We decided that before committing to one, we needed to do some prototyping to really see how they would work. When we prototyped a portion of our functionality in each, we quickly began to see that it was only the "marketing hype" that was the same. With dotImage, we were able to implement the functionality we needed with a consistent API entirely in .NET. The competitor required us to use three different API sets.NET, COM objects, and "C" DLLsto get the functions we needed. This was a huge advantage for dotImage and nearly made our decision for us right there.
One of the most important requirements for professional photographers is accurate color rendering through color managementdisplaying images tagged with a particular color profile by calculating how they should appear given a second profile for the display, and optionally soft-proofing how they will appear on a printer by using a third printer profile in the display pipeline. We'd implemented our own color-management code, but it required two steps to display each imagerender it in the vendor toolkit, then color correct it. We really wanted a toolkit that had this functionality built-in. Unfortunately, Atalasoft did not have color management in its products, while the competitor did.
Because Atalasoft's architecture was so elegant, rather than give up, we contacted the company and asked about plans for color management. Atalasoft said they were open to the idea and that if we were willing to give them a detailed specification on how it should work for photographic applications and test the results, they'd implement it in their next release. Obviously, this was appealing. By contrast, we had asked the competing vendor when they'd have a full .NET solution, but still had not received a solid answer. So we began to work with Atalasoft.
Not only did the original effort to help shape its color-management features work out, it also led to several years of productive cooperation on other topics that were of interest to our customers, including reading/writing metadata and viewing raw files directly from cameras. Atalasoft clearly takes customer requirements very seriously.