The NEW Xara X1 Feature Request List!!

[jclements]

Allison,

Exactomundo. Well said. I have a similar problem with two, 3D apps I use and because of it I can sometimes do real damage.

[Egg Bramhill]

Timo
I can open the Guides layers, select all, and then move them all at once with the arrow keys. Can't you do this?
Egg

[Jup]

Yes, that would be great...
BTW, you can have colour station for some of the other fills too ;-)

[RAMWolff44]

Another one that's really fun from Corel Draw is when you use the Blend tool is that when you are through with your blend you can, at any time, grabe the front object and move it and the blend follows to the new position. I think that's just great stuff there!! http://www.talkgraphics.com/images/smilies/smile.gif

[eobet]

<BLOCKQUOTE class="ip-ubbcode-quote"><font size="-1">quote:</font><HR>Originally posted by joroho:
Actually the mousewheel is mapped to zoom, you just have to hold down the Ctl key while scrolling.

.joroho. <HR></BLOCKQUOTE>

Hah, I didn't know that, but it would be simpler to not have to press control. http://www.talkgraphics.com/images/smilies/tongue.gif

[eobet]

<BLOCKQUOTE class="ip-ubbcode-quote"><font size="-1">quote:</font><HR>Originally posted by Daniel Pead:
5. OK - flamebait! Dump the MDI window and have free-floating document windows and palettes (*cough* Artworks *cough*). I like to use 2 monitors whenever possible, which is fine if you've (e.g.) got Xara on one and Photoshop on t'other, but working on 2 docs in the same app is a pain with MDI. <HR></BLOCKQUOTE>

Very sensible opinion, I think.

Even Microsoft has seen the error in their ways and gotten rid of MDI in .NET (and even its Office applications), so hopefully Xara X2 will do just that as well.

[Fluppet]

Miguel: Sorry, I'll translate (besides, I may not have said what I think I said!)

A2R10G10B10: DirectX 9 has support for 10-bit colour per channel - 1024 shades of grey, or a total of 1073741824 different colours. The eye obviously can't see even the "normal" 16 million you normally get, but some are far enough apart to show banding if the gradient is low enough (white and near-white grey, for example) and the effect can be more pronounced if you're using colour correction (gamma curves, etc.) The extra shades help smooth out the differences. I'm not sure whether Xara dithers at >24bit accuracy, but actually supporting the higher colour mode would allow better colour correction support and avoid any potential moire effects.

Floating point output is the same, but more so (although displaying it may be harder); the idea being that you can represent more colours, and also the range of the colours supported is higher. Microsoft has some DirectX demos which use this to handle reflection maps, light maps, etc. Depending on what you're doing, it's a nice facility to have - I don't know how many people use Xara-modified artwork for this kind of thing, though. It also comes in handy when you're trying to and lens effects (bloom, internal reflections, etc.) to an image.

You get this kind of thing, to a lesser extent, if you use a RAW image from a digital camera: normally there's a couple of stops of exposure which you can adjust while still getting a sensible (8-bit per channel) image, and that's because the captured data has spare bits at both ends. Xara's transparency would make this kind of effect particularly useful - "white" may go dull grey behind a semitransparent window (for example, if you wanted to simulate a grad filter, which Xara does very well), but a "light bulb" would still appear brighter.

As for the "fill shaders"... whenever Xara draws a pixel on the screen, it has to do some calculations (how the colour varies across the object, how to blend with the underlying colour, texture lookup, fractal calculations, etc.)

I'm not suggesting playing with the geometry, because that's potentially much trickier and disruptive to the way Xara renders (defining your own shapes - different kinds of curves, level of detail support, that kind of thing, nice though it would be...), but it would be possible with only a moderately large amount of work to allow the user to specify a program to be run for that pixel, in the way that DirectX allows users to run pixel shaders on graphics hardware (and preferably in a reasonably high-level language). Obviously this is going to slow things down in comparison with the highly-tuned code which is used for the objects Xara usually draws, but some effects are easier to describe algorithmically (for someone with the right mindset) than to do by hand.

The request for a resolution-independent halftoning effect would be easy(ish) to implement this way, as would a gradient mesh (although the interface might leave something to be desired). Think of it as applying PhotoShop plug-ins as an object is drawn, rather than applying them to a bitmap - although it's probably necessary to constrain the functionality somewhat (not allowing access to the pixels surrounding the rendered one, for example - otherwise there's a whole before/after buffer thing which would slow things down even more). It would mean that some effects could be provided retrospectively, rather than waiting for Xara to get around to a new release (or for a plug-in writer to do it).

I'm not expecting this to export to other vector formats, although PostScript would probably cope if you clubbed it hard enough. http://www.talkgraphics.com/images/smilies/smile.gif

But yes, I too would like a gradient mesh tool.

Xander11: Okay, my turn... Onion Skin view?

--
Fluppet

[Albacore]

Just one request now

Export: PDF

[Charles Moir]

I am particularly interested in key short-cuts such as these, or other operations, that people regard as 'industry standard' or at least common one more than one other application. We should certainly be making more use of these, to help users of alternative products be more at home, especially where we have no short-cut overlap (obviously providing user-configurable key short-cuts is a better option, but a lot more work).

So for example I believe it's pretty standard practice that a double-click on the Zoom tool should zoom to 100% (a short-cut that for some reason seems to be missing completely from Xara X). That's not used for anything else and so there's almost no excuse for not using that to mean something useful like this.

Are there other 'standard' key short cuts that people love and use a lot in other graphics apps?

Oh - and we have pan with centre mouse-button (or scroll wheel) pressed. Works at all times - you don't need to be in a zoom tool. In fact it's one of those short-cuts that once you remember, makes the pan tool completely redundant. This is the correct Windows standard (not followed by Adobe of course), but the best Windows apps do use this (e.g. Windows Picture Viewer).

I'm similarly interested in any 'standard' layer operations, such as double-click on layers (although I'm not sure there any standard meaning for this, or is there?). And yes we could certainly put a right click option on the Layer gallery to 'select entire layer'. I like that.

Keep in mind that using standard keys, such as Z for Zoom cannot work when in the text tool, where Alt-Z can.

[Egg Bramhill]

Sorry Risto
I'm still not with you on this one. What tool are you using to create the lines? If I hit the escape key it deselects that line and creates a new line.
This is probably me being thick, but I just can't grasp what you're trying to achieve. http://www.talkgraphics.com/images/smilies/frown.gif
Egg