Xara Xtreme Pro announced

**Soquili** · 16 November 2006, 11:09 PM

Grace do you have Data Execution Prevention (DEP) turned on. If so try turning it off, I've had that cause symptoms like you described.

**stratocast** · 16 November 2006, 11:13 PM

Holy c**p! I turn away for ten minutes and all hell breaks loose! This is good news indeed. Thanks for all your efforts, the new feature set and tweaks look really good. Downloading the beta now.

Oh! and thanks Gary for the Workbook.

**gracehjs** · 17 November 2006, 03:27 AM

Nope, DEP is not turned on.

**Availor** · 17 November 2006, 04:10 AM

Ok, I'll might as well quite while I still haven't called a war upon myself from all the Xara users in this forum as I see I'm in a non beneficial minority here

Originally Posted by a4hire

Availor,
you will just have to get your priorites straight. Do you want to take girls out on dates or have your new copy of Xtreme Pro ?

Do I HAVE to make this choice? Depends if this is on the long run or on the short run, and it also depends how long I didn't have a date (then my brain will just stop working).

Originally Posted by AntonyF

Xtreme will carry on being a low price. But Xtreme Pro will offer features such as the imagesetting and PDF/X. People who need these features will generally be professionals who need it for their work and it will be a small investment for them to be more productive.

I just wish I could add a 30$ and get a multipaging feature and a better text handling without the need of paying 120$.

Originally Posted by Doug

FYI: Adobe lists the price of AI at $499 on their site:
http://www.adobe.com/products/illustrator/

But it's fair to quote that price as Xara's was quoted direct from them as well.

And someone could also have a previous version of
AI-in which case an upgrade would cost them 'from $169' to quote the web site. ($499+$169=$668) Also, new users have not paid for previous versions of Xara. Do you somehow feel that you didn't get your money's worth out of your previous Xara products?

It's one thing if you can't afford something for whatever reason. But that does not mean that Xtreme Pro is overpriced. It also doesn't mean that you are obligated to purchase said product. Did Xara Xtreme suddenly stop working on the day that X Pro was announced? Did it loose functionality? Please explain.

Hold on a minute-what plugins? Any extra plugins for Xtreme are bought at your discretion, no one makes you buy them. And do you know for a fact that all of the plugins won't work with XPro?

I'd love to have an Aston Martin-but they cost $200,000; so I make do with a Honda Civic. So it goes, that's life.

FYI: Product pricing has nothing to do with being fair.

How long did you have Xtreme? Divide that $80 by the number of months that you had it. I have had Xtreme for almost a year now, so $80 / 12 months = $6.6 per month or $1.60 per week. I spend more than that for a bus ticket or a cup of coffee!

And there are no new features in Pro that you like-nothing at all? I find that rather hard to believe. But if that is so, just stick with Xtreme. Problem solved! :-)

Ok, I just came back from work so arguing with you about math is not the best of me right now. I didn't know that some of the plug ins might not work with Xara Xtreme Pro, since they are being advertised in the Xara website (that might be very disappointing to spend money on something you realize doesn't work).

What I meant by the high price was the following: The upgrade to Xara xtreme was 29$ if I remember correctly. It contained new pdf export, plug ins, a better picture editor and.... that's about what I recall so far.

Now, the new Pro version has (The major features): Multi - paging, some minor changes and a better text handling (yes I know it has panton colors again but for those who upgraded from Xara X to Xtreme they had the panton colors as well), which is still far from being perfect, not to mention that it doesn't help me since it does not support right to left typing (Middle Eastern fonts).
I know there were more changes made, but they are not so drastically seen (like there is still no mesh tool which could be very useful, no better brush handling, - like in Corel Draw, Illustrator or Freehand, or a better bitmap retrace tool).

Flash export is nice, but Xara is not really an animation software. You can make a frame by frame animation (and we all know our animation gurus here) but it lacks the timeline, key frames etc to become an animation software. It's nice for small little frame by frame animations.

So... 29$ for two major upgrades, or 120$ for about the same two - three major upgrades. Yes multi paging is nice, but not 120$ nice.

Ok There's a slightly better photo editing feature (the curves). If I remember correctly the free version of Xeus did pretty much the same. With little more investment in that project and Xeus, blended with the existing photo editor might have become a wonderful small little pixel editing program - a great stand alone or a complimentary program to Xara. Add a mesh fill tool to that and then - Xara would be priceless!

Again, please don't shoot me for this post I know you might totally disagree with me and that's your right.

I just get the feeling that there are too much valuable resources that are not being used. If you take a look at XaraXone.com there are some very nice shareware and freeware software. I'm sure those could be blended with Xara to create a truly powerful application.

**michaelbuddy** · 17 November 2006, 04:27 AM

Originally Posted by Joe Skeesick

My only negative so far is, who ever came up with the name 'Xortcut'. Good lord what were you thinking? :P

I initially thought that was a bad choice of names too. Oh well, at least all logic isn't throw out because, when chinese is expressed in english, X is used as a Sh. XinXhing is like ShinShing.

that helped cushion the cheesiness for me. =)

**Wolfgang** · 17 November 2006, 07:07 AM

Originally Posted by Charles Moir

Wolfgang, you'll be glad to know that pdf import is in development and we hope to ship it with Pro, but that current Betas do not have this filter. (My internal version does and loads that file fine). Secondly it does load that eps file as well, as demonstrated earlier (although not by drag and drop - we can look at that).

And yes we do regard file interchange a priority and are doing what we can - and the answer to your question is yes, we will load both eps and pdf files.

Yippeee !!!
Thank you so much Charles, I am sold!

You made me go from "whatever" to "when can I buy it??" in seconds !!!!

Wolfgang

**Squeaky** · 17 November 2006, 07:41 AM

Hurray for improved import!
I agree that .ai and eps import into Xtreme have been a problem. I even had to download a trial copy of Illustrator to get client supplied artwork into Xterme. (still recovering from the experience) After a bit of research I discovered that Coreldraw and Serifdraw pro could both open the same file too. - Either of which were on my shopping list should the client come back after the 30 days.

Fingers crossed that the final version of Xtreme pro can come up with the goods. It would be nice to be able to import ai's and eps' from swift 3d too!

**MarciaB** · 17 November 2006, 08:41 AM

So far everything new is great and I'm very glad (since I live in France) with the support for accented caracters. But I can't make the flash animation backround transparent for the web. I had this same problem with the animated gifs, but Egg solved that for me (us). See thread http://www.talkgraphics.com/showthre...286#post170286This trick doesn't work with the flash animations though. What am I doing wrong?

I see that there's a forum for XtremePro, so I post this there also...

**Intbel** · 17 November 2006, 08:45 AM

Originally Posted by a4hire

Wow! Intbel , I think the file you posted here might be inappropriate , dont you think? This is a family type place , maybe you need to remove the file.

It is just a line drawing - an amusement and in context with the text.
It is a fun thing ... there are full-colour posters on billboards which are far more specific and you only have to turn on a TV to view even more 'innappropriate' material in full colour.

'Tis just a fun thing which can offend none, I think, so unless there are some serious complaints I'll let it stand.

**Albacore** · 17 November 2006, 09:08 AM

Well I am sold on it! To think that I will be able to all but get rid of Illy from my computer is a wonderful thought because of what Charles stated back a few pages. He stated the following "Wolfgang, you'll be glad to know that pdf import is in development and we hope to ship it with Pro, but that current Betas do not have this filter. (My internal version does and loads that file fine)." Just think, I will be able to have only three programmes up on my desktop, Xtreme Pro, PhotoShop and Indesign and thats all I will need to get my work done.

Xara to PhotoShop (with Layers) and do any colour correction there either with PDF or PSD
Xara to Indesign as PDF, superb
Illy at Work back into Xtreme Pro, no problems
Xtreme to Printers without having to think about it through PDF

How cool is that

What I like about this development is that Charles and his team have listen to this forum and have come up with the goods, Thank You. If anyone moans about the price and folk will, just tell to be quiet and list what this forum ask for during the summer into Autum.

Multi Page, yes
PSD, yyes
Improved Text Engine, yes
Better swf control, yes
Beter Animation, yes
Pantone Colours, yes
PDF import, looks like yes
The Ability to use Transparencies for Printing, yes
PDF with Layers, not sure about that one, will need to investigate?

Well done to the team and I hope that the PDF import gets sorted.