What is a 'professional' tool?

[Doug]

What are some of the professional features that are missing? And how would they make Xtreme (& Pro) more professional?

You know-PRO features-like a cappucino maker, the Shiatsu massage on Friday, the long weekend mountain retreat.

The usual PRO stuff!

[Odat]

In terms of a thread about professional tools I don't really want Xara going down that route - the competition from Flash is just too hot.

I agree with this 100%. Though these sorts of improvements would be nice, I'd much rather have other enhancements than these sorts of changes. Even if they were easy to implement (and I imagine that they are), they still take development time away from features like an improved layer gallery, and better import/export of EPS files which would make a much better inclusion in a "professional" tool.

[MarcT]

A better layer gallery would be a good thing but not one with a 'object preview' or 'Layer content preview' featurette, it would make the interface sluggish.

A way to isolate a layer's visibility (right click maybe?) would be great, the same with layer lock.

Then again the named selections is a one of a kind feature that I like very much.

-Coco

[Egg Bramhill]

I'm not a great fan of Illustrators over the top layers gallery, but I do like the Flash layer gallery.

If you click on a layer it highlights all the shapes on that layer. Equally if you click on a shape within a drawing it will highlight which layer that shape resides on.

You can click on a coloured icon for a layer and it shows everthing in that layer as a wireframe in the colour identifier of that layer.

You can left click - sweep over layers to select or deselect (or show / hide) them, which is far quicker than Shift clicking between 2 or more layers.

[Xhris]

Yes, I'd go for any changes that provided more feedback to the user.

[aridzone]

On a serious note:
I believe if XARA wants to go from pro to professional they need to add a script recorder! If I am creating something and it takes 40 steps why would I want to do that over and over again when I only need to change something as simple as text