What is a 'professional' tool?

[Xhris]

...I would like to see progress with new professional tools within Xara Xtreme...

Remi

Remi's thread got me thinking as to what a 'professional' tool actually is? What do different people consider to be professional tools (within a software application like Xara), and more importantly: why?

[aridzone]

Something that you have to pay more money for!

[Xhris]

hehe, quaint. Xara's price is always likely to steadily rise. It's just a law of the universe.

[Kiwi]

Interest question!
The answer could be, "How long is a piece of string?"

We may have to first consider, "What is a professional?"

Then again we can ask, "What is Xara Xtreme?"

I am not a "professional" but I have always consided Xtreme to be a "Vector" based drawing program and believe that any and all future developments/improvements need to be of a vector nature.

Of course, if one is a "Professional designer" and your client requires that you produce a bitmap based product then you would want something entirely different out of Xtreme

Very interesting question but the string is getting longer

[Josie]

I would say, a professional tool is software that provides state-of-the-art features and solutions for typical activities, with professional and reliable results (in other words, to work quickly and efficiently) Typical activities include creating, editing, and arranging graphic components (text, photos, vector art, ...) - for screen or print. So we have vector-based illustration programs, bitmap processing programs, page-layout programs, and some specialty software types (3D effects etc.)
I think Xara progresses in the right direction. Illustrator may be ok for artwork, InDesign or QuarkXPress for very long documents, but IMHO for a wide range of graphic design tasks a multipage software with illustration capabilities and various effects is the answer. That's Xara, FreeHand, or CorelDraw. With FreeHand dying and Corel being traditionally buggy and not too fast, hopefully Xtreme will become a new industry standard. And while now it is really pro in many ways, at the same time it is so intuitive, fast and yet not too expensive, that I can even imagine it being a popular text editor or presentation tool!

[jamesmc]

44 magnum with an 8 inch barrell. Pro.

[stratocast]

A professional is someone who gets paid and an amateur doesn't, but what does this have to do with the price of fish? Van Gogh was an amateur for most of his life, 'cos hardly sold a painting.

OK, the word "professional" has been hijacked to suggest higher quality or more capable or heavy duty. But, I think the whole question is redundant. In fact, you could argue, that as a so-called professional, your talent and capabilities are such that you don't need any of the flashy tools.

I therefore present a sneak preview of the toolbar from, the soon to be released, "Xara Super Mega Xtreme Professional Pro", which will allow the true professional unprecendented control. The price of this the new improved version will be $699.

(Note: Amateurs may still purchase the cheapo version with all the bells and whistles, to hand-hold them through their pathetic scribblings.)

[Albacore]

I know here I am stating the obvious, but "tools used by professionals".

Xara was and still great for the web and a lot of people used it for this but is slightly let down by its slicing and maybe its java script is a bit iffy in places but it is a great all round performer for preparing all sorts of artwork for the web.

While in the print area of its work used by professional here it went wrong as if you wanted to take something to print you had to jump through all the hoops to arrive at the correct output. Then Xtreme arrived at it had PDF export and it was nearly right but it had no Pantone and it was still really RGB colour output and to get CMYK there was still work arounds. Now we have XPro which has just about sorted all of our demands made here on this forum it has multi-pages, import & export of PDF and control over pre-press, spot & pantone colours the list goes on and on.

I use Illy at work and most of my work mates only use about 4 category of tools from the main tool menu and as we have the brand new ver. on all machines you would expect to see loads of use of live colour, meshes, small 3D, graphs and the use of complimentary colour mode but they all use the programme as if it was Ver. 8 with only the very limited of transparencies. This is due to many factors, so called illustrators don't like to learn new software, they know from experience that printers don't like transparencies and why slow your output down by doing something different.

The whole point of this non-cohesive ramble is that I think that Xara listens to its users and in most case comes up with the goods. I think now that we have a very fast drawing (vector) programme which just about competes with the best and to have features which are seldom used is pointless as you can see from the recent "Live Effect Poll". What I think that Xara should concentrate on is getting the tools that we use now bug free and improved and the one that I think is the worst is the Brush Tool instead of trying to bust its guts to develop let's say a Gradient Tool.

[minimiro]

..... Corel being traditionally buggy and not too fast, hopefully Xtreme will become a new industry standard....

I think that you are in some mistake Josie.... Now Corel isnt that it was.

And for me bigger concurent is not Illustrator, it is Corel. His way of work is closer to Xtreme than illustrators way

[Rodzo]

I'm guessing that in this context the "professional" tool is the one with the greatest following among industry professionals, thus providing a commonality of problem solving, file sharing and jargon, salvation to any industry where a lot of head scratching goes on.

Sadly, the resultant "industry standard" is not always the best or most deserving, merely the first to achieve critical mass. From my admittedly short aquaintance, it seems to me that Xara, despite it's initial superiority in speed (and a few other things) due to the brilliance of it's original programmers, has made a couple of wrong business turns in the last decade, allowing it's better funded competition to gain an unassailably dominant position.

I suspect also that the fight back has not been helped by the very thing that provided Xara with it's original edge, namely the courageous use of "bare metal" machine code that gave it the aforementioned speed. Those that live by the sword however, tend to die by the sword. Programmers, specially gifted ones, are wont to move on and ten year old indifferently documented assembler must be of the stuff that nightmares are made.

These factors have led to Xara spreading it's substance between professional and hobbyist, trying to be all things to all users and, severely handicapped by the inability to alter fundamentals, limited to rearranging whistles and bells (or deckchairs?).