Is "talkgraphics.com" the best place to discuss XaraXtreme ?

[jamesmc]

Hmm OK and how often do any of these hundreds of excellent suggestions get turned into reality?!


Ship
Shiperton Henethe

P.S. I'm unfamiliar with this word "conference" in the online world. What's the difference between a "conference" and everthing else , e.g. a "group", a "bulletin board", "discussion list" etc etc

Well Ship, dunno the answer to that question. Only been using Xara since Jan of this year.

I used to program many years ago, Assembly, Basic, Visual Basic and Pascal (no laughing out there from the real programmers! )

I made some very basic programs that did a few things. It extracted database objects and put them into diagram tree forms. In my case, it was taking GEDCOMS (genealogy files) and making those fancy lineage trees. I was able to add a few functions like choice of tree style, page format and printer options.

However, after get a gazillion emails from people complaining about why it wouldn't do this and that, and it messed up on doing that or this, I gave up on the projects. The main reason is that I didn't have the resources to know every kind of printer there was, nor the complexities of different Window Versions and all those other issues that programming is involved with. It was freeware afterall and I just didn't have time, the knowledge or the resources to support all the requests.

With that long-winded explanation, let me filter this out a bit to what you are stating. Developers have a vision of their product. In Xara's case, they want their programs to be sleek, lightning fast and easy to use. They have achieved this through years of trial and error, blood, sweat and tears.

They most likely have a developer's list of things to do of known bugs, as well as a list of things to do for features not fully implemented or poorly implemented. It's just a fact of life that these things exist.

With hundreds of requests, they have to sort these out, prioritize them and then see if it fits within the vision of their program. Also, there may be other factors, too numerous to mention here.

Now, for the programming part. I think Charles Moir said something like a million lines of code exist for modules of the Xara engine. I would fall over dead just looking at the code, nevermind trying to figure something out to change it.

Program design is one of the hardest thing to do on the planet. There are many excellent programmers out there, but very few good program designers. When you get one that can do both, it is rare. That rarity exists at Xara.

Like I said before, the are other options, plugins (make your own), use software supplements and etc. Use Xara as a powerful tool and perhaps not an endall solution for every software problem that exists?

Anyway, nice to meet you and as you can tell I graduated from the University of Verbose.

[Charles Moir]

certain things still bug the heck out of me after all this time: (e.g. the stupidly short view of font names which ends up meaning that if you have longer font names installed on your PC, then you can't see which they are;...

Yes you are absolutely right, and they bug me and others here as well, but we do have huge numbers of features, both small and large on the wish lists and simply can't do them all or even a reasonable % of them. But hassle us enough about them here, and that's what tends to move them up the priority list.

I suggest someone starts a new thread 'the top five simple things that bug me' thread, and have people make suggestions of the simple features they'd like fixed. If there's any sort of consensus that will tend to make us look at it. And 'truncated fonts names' would be high on on my list. (We have fixed it in Xara LX when we re-implemented this bit, but you guys probably don't want to know that. We do hope to have someone look at this before the next Windows release as well).

But please don't suggest things like 'Full 3D charting tool' as a simple fix. While I really would like a 3D charting tool, it is not going to happen in the short term. (Although now the product is open source it stands a far greater chance of happening than ever before). But suggestions of small things that really irritate people that you think should be a relatively easy fix. That would be very useful feedback for us.

As to why there are so few other online discussions groups about Xara. Well there have been various other ones, on and off, but in the end it seems most people tend to gravitate here, as they find they get great support, questions answered really quickly and this group rarely descends into personal snipes, or flaming.

However as far as Xara are concerned the more third party websites and discussion groups about our products the better, and a Google groups one would be good, if only to get the name about a bit more.