Xara dead - is it true?

[gdavidson]

Serif crossed my mind when this was mentioned as, and I may be worng, they're the only credible UK software company with drawing apps (DrawPlus6, PagePlus - DTP, and PhotoPlus - Bitmap). I've got them all and I still find Xara wins hands down over everything else.

I really hope that if there is any truth to Xara letting its programmers go, that it is not with the intention to extinguish XaraX. Maybe they're hiring "new blood" - who knows....

It begs the quesion though - if Xara3D 5 is still in development, who is doing the programming? Is it a different team and does this explain why every Xara product seems to be made by different programmers?

It would be a very, very black day if XaraX or rather its successor was mothballed [img]/infopop/emoticons/icon_frown.gif[/img]

Long live Xara.

--
Graeme

[Sheff]

Now that I've seen Serif's website and perused their products I'm very impressed. Without having a try before you buy download of DrawPlus I really don't know how it stacks up against Xara, but I suspect that it suffers from the same weaknesses.

On the other hand, I am very impressed by the CONTENT of the site and ease of navigation. I like their online manual. If I were to compare the Xara to Serif, I would say based on website content and consistency alone Serif would be a winner. Their products seem to have a unity that is lacking in Xara's products.

But until I have demo of DrawPlus, I see no reason to switch...yet. Serif is doing now what I wish Xara would be doing. They have employees responding to customers in newsgroups. Xara seems to rely on its community of users to provide support. Xara really should have their own forum on their site rather than a third party hosting it.

If indeed Xara's engineers are now working on Serif's products, one can only hope they will produce something awesome.

Sheffield Abella
sheff@sheff.com
www.sheff.com

[This message was edited by Sheffield Abella on July 10, 2002 at 10:12.]

[gdavidson]

Drawplus is packed with all sorts of nice things but its basic drawing engine doesn't touch Xara's for speed and efficiency. There's no feathering and only basic transparency support.

There's a whole load of other features that are very nice but Drawplus lacks the facilities that gives Xara the edge.

One real gripe with DrawPlus that puts me right off it, is total lack of vector export facilities. You can't even export a rectangle in anything other than a metafile even then it may come over as 300 nodes!

I've bought every version of DrawPlus since 3.0 in the hope that it would improve... then I discovered XaraX! The irony of it all...

--
Graeme

[RAMWolff44]

Hopfully!!!!!!!!

I went out to the DrawPlus site (serif.com) and checked it out, it seems VERY similar to XaraX in many ways and Sheffield is right, very nice navigation and seems really clean and well maintained!!!

Features that look a little too similar to me are:
Auto Trace Bitmap to Vector
Shadow Tool
Mould tool
Fill are very "Xara" in how they were explained
Chain Lines are like the Brushes (hmmm, wonder if they cause error messages and then the program goes 'by-by' [img]/infopop/emoticons/icon_biggrin.gif[/img])
Roll overs and other web features...

It goes on and on and on and on..............

I am having my doubts about trashing this guy so much, maybe he is offering us some info that may be valid. So why not get as much info as we can about this whole situation and if it's true then we need to accept it if it's not then we kill the bastard [img]/infopop/emoticons/icon_biggrin.gif[/img] [img]/infopop/emoticons/icon_biggrin.gif[/img] [img]/infopop/emoticons/icon_biggrin.gif[/img] [img]/infopop/emoticons/icon_biggrin.gif[/img] (Really, I'm a nice guy, reallly I am [img]/infopop/emoticons/icon_biggrin.gif[/img] [img]/infopop/emoticons/icon_biggrin.gif[/img] [img]/infopop/emoticons/icon_biggrin.gif[/img] [img]/infopop/emoticons/icon_biggrin.gif[/img])

As for the transparency limitations and feathering being absent, if they indeed have brought on board the "fired" designers (nothing worse than pissed off geeks!!) they might just do a version 7 real soon!! Including all of that.

So if Xara is bringing on board NEW BLOOD to spice things up and hopfully improve things then maybe this other company will give the fire under Xara that they might need and WANT (sometimes we all wish we were the bigger fish in the pond but then we get bored when it happens)!!! We all need to have a competitivness, that's what keeps us moving forward. You really can't compare XaraX to Draw or other apps. It beats the pants off all those others, AND they are way to expensive, while XaraX and it's commpanion products very affordable. So XaraLtd. really is in a class all it's own.

So here comes DrawPlus with, JUST MAYBE, some X X'ers working on it to build it up. Just gives XaraLtd. more incentive to do better and better!!!

What's that old saying from the "book": "Don't judge, least you be judged" Let's see first then decide folks!!!

Richard [img]/infopop/emoticons/icon_wink.gif[/img]

---Wolff On The Prowl---

[This message was edited by RAMWolff on July 10, 2002 at 10:55.]

[gdavidson]

I'm getting paranoid now.... what if it's a merger? XaraPlus7?

DrawPlus definitely needs a some serious attention by experienced artists/programmers in that it needs to get many things thought through/fixed and made more interactive and compatible with other products. It was only in version 5 did the lines scale with the drawings when you resized it!

Are there any other Xarans here that have tried to use Serif Drawplus and liked it?

--
Graeme

[gwpriester]

Last I heard which was very recently, Xara 3D 5 is almost ready to ship. As you all know, Xara does not like to ship until they are satisfied the product is as good and bug free as possible before they release.

Development for Xara X continues, although I have not heard any mention of a release date.

Xara is a small company committed to producing high quality products.

Gary

Gary Priester

Moderator Person

<a href="http://www.gwpriester.com">
www.gwpriester.com </a>


XaraXone

[traceyp]

Hi everyone

I've only just come onto this forum and found this thread and it leaves me more than a little disturbed. However, on mentioning this to my partner, he THINKS that before Xara became Xara and was Computer Concepts, they did a VERY similar thing once Impression Publisher (or one of its derivatives) had been dumped and Artworks had been released in that they fired all the programmers. There was obviously a programmer there to do some tidying up and sort out bug fixes etc, but he firmly believes this to be the case. There was then a long gap before Xara Studio came onto the market. Incidentally, my partner has only a few months ago given up with Impression and started using PagePlus8. Has some very nice features but not the easiest of programs to get your head around from my experience - I'm a Ventura user myself.

In addition, we both met Kate Moir at a meeting in London and certainly, my partner was diffinitely not impressed in that he felt her to be a nasty piece of work. Sadly, although he could be wrong here, he's normally right in summing people up very quickly.

I also have DrawPlus albeit version 5. However, although I tried it (not very seriously) I wasn't impressed and soon removed it as I felt that XaraX was so much more superior to it. I've mentioned this to sales people from Serif a number of times when they've called to see how I'm getting on with the DrawPlus and at that time they hadn't een heard of XaraX let alone what it was!

So what is the truth about this? Well we'll find out in due course but how long will that be? Until something concrete is announced I suppose we'll just have to be patient.

Tracey

[stlewis]

with Serif is that they are a pile em high, sell em cheap company.

I used to have PagePlus and the free Draw tool - before the web appeared so that's 9 or 10 years ago.

And ever since then they phone me every few weeks. They've never (at least the gonks on the phone haven't) heard of Xara.

I don't want to spend two days of my time finding out that Draw is worse than XaraX. Even if it's only £10.

I've started slamming the phone down on them. I just hope the rumours aren't true.

www.bricksandbrass.co.uk

[Gaussian]

Somebody is playing with us, don't you get it.
Here we have a situation that a new user with no profile who is addicted to Xara (I quote "I am a Xara user and a fan for many years so give me a break") visits this Xara forum for the first time, exactly at the moment that Xara is firing their developers, Xara is doing more marketing than ever, Xara just released Webstyle 3 and informed Gary that the future looks bright with more products to be released. Suddenly they don't fire a handful of developers; they fire the whole bunch. Trust me, somebody is laughing his *ss of the way you folks believe his story [img]/infopop/emoticons/icon_biggrin.gif[/img] [img]/infopop/emoticons/icon_biggrin.gif[/img] [img]/infopop/emoticons/icon_biggrin.gif[/img]
Don't you get it...just since after we all got frustrated with Xara we read a post like this [img]/infopop/emoticons/icon_wink.gif[/img]

Quickdrawmcgraw; nice try, but you're not going to have any luck with me [img]/infopop/emoticons/icon_cool.gif[/img]

[RAMWolff44]

I have contacted Serif Inc. and am coorasponding with the US manager right now, who will get in touch with the UK folks and ask "what's up??" and he will be back in touch with me later about this. I asked on behalf of MYSELF to draw no further attention to Xara Ltd. So maybe he can shed some light on this matter. I will report back here ASAP!!!

Hey, it doesn't hurt to ask!! Right??

Richard [img]/infopop/emoticons/icon_wink.gif[/img]

---Wolff On The Prowl---