The future of Xara

[RedWombat]

By his Avitar, I thought Gary had been assimilated by the Borg!

I couldn't resist, had to bring up Star Trek!


Not to change the subject, but I had an interesting thing happen the other day. I found and old book of mine called Corel Draw Studio Techniques. Something I picked up quite a few years ago. I was looking through it and realized one of the guys that wrote it was a Gary Priester. Hmm, I thought to myself, he has the same name as that guy who has over 9,000 posts on TG. Then it occurred to me, wait a minute, it is that guy! Looks the same too, except the hair is in a pony tail.

Just wanted to say thanks to Gary for putting out so much great work over so many years!

[Josie]

Thanks Gary, that's great

[gwpriester]

Yes, I confess, I started out writing about CorelDRAW. For years I wrote the Makeover Maven column and a monthly tutorial for Corel Magazine until the dork publisher, Dave Beserki, as we called him, decided to see how long we writers would continue writing without being paid.

But the first time I used Xara, about 15 years ago, it was love at first site, and soon after I switched to Xara for good.

My two computer graphics books, Looking Good in Color and [/I]CorelDRAW Studio Techniques[/I] co-authored with Dave Huss, a real character, were a lot of fun but never sold enough to produce a profit.

On the other hand, Eye Tricks - Incredible 3D Stereograms has sold over 140,000 copies. And all I had to do was supply the images.

Gary

[BONES]

Let's say a designer designs a business card and needs to prepare a sheet populated with cards for printing. He/she could want to use something like the Transform tool to duplicate cards in increments by specifyng horizontal and vertical offset and number of copies.

CTRL+D, SHIFT+arrow, SHIFT+arrow, etc. It's easy in Xara because the application is so damned fast you wouldn't bother changing tools to position things. You'd only need a specialist tool for that kind of thing if it was hard to do otherwise.

ok, but can you distribute the cards on a page this way with exact offsets in milimeters? And using snap to guides, imagine how long would it take to make manual copies of cards when duplicating on a A0 format page (including making guides first, and perhaps also including cropmarks).
Copying/moving/rotating in distance increments is a basic feature IMHO.

And Xara has it. All you need to do is set up your nudge value to something meaningful. I work in TV/film so mine is set to 1 pixel but if you were doing print work you might try 1mm. Holding down SHIFT gives you 10x the nudge value so its really easy and very quick. No guides, no grid, just common sense and making the best use of Xara's strengths. To make it fast you duplicate and position the second version, then repeat for both, then repeat for all four, etc. Once you have one row, you just duplicate it and move it down, then duplicate both rows, etc. It's trivial, even for business cards on a sheet of A0.

[TDolce]

All I can add is this: Don't under estimate the importance of simplicity! Xara Xtreme is the ONLY graphics app that I actually downloaded, and grasped the nature of it's interface and functionality in an afternoon!

I was a HUGE Corel Draw user from V4-V9,..and it was NEVER efficient or fun to use! I too have little wishes for XaraXtreme,...but I also don't want to "rock the boat" so to speak and make this an application so bloated and complicated that it loses it's BIG advantage of efficiency, power and simplicity that brought me to it in the first place!

There is no other graphics app that I use more than Xara XTreme Pro.

I will also like to say that I have ALWAYS been made to feel welcome and valued by the forum people here whenever I did or do come up with a question. What a fantastic group here!

[gwpriester]

My man! Well stated.

Gary

[Josie]

Simplicity - that's ok. Adding new features is not necessarily against simplicity. Things like support for OpenType would not have an adverse effect on simplicity.

[MarkMyWords]

I agree, care must be taken when adding new features that; the core software does not slowdown or the interface becomes less intuitive.

The nested layers thing (displaying objects, inside groups, inside layers) seems to me to be O.K. on the intuition front; you need not expand the nesting if you don't want to, so no difference until the user chooses to use that feature, but will it affect speed, there is a lot of information to display?

[pauland]

I wouldn't expect it to affect speed at all. It's not really a big change from what we have, nor is it being continually updated.

Paul