I don't want to conform please help!!!!

[Michael]

I'm so sorry Jens, but being a Xara-fan as I might be, I do have to give Adobe it's credits when mentioning Illustrator.

Illustrator CS is a vast improvement over the older versions. It's relatively speedy (but not as sleek as Xara) and most important: is's a standard on it's own.

CS has some nifty transparancy options and features that come in very handy. (like resizing objects without moving their centrepoints or selecting objects with a given colour)

It may be hard for some of you (and those Xarans who don't want to read somber thoughts about their beloved program should stop reading now) but I find myself drawing more and more with Illustrator and even in the same amount of time get the same production. I must confess that it's a steep learning curve and yes, one needs to have a good memory and 8 fingers on the left hand to make use of all the keyboard shortcuts. But once mastered, the program realy pays off and you're never bothered with "Sorry, but the Ripper couldn't handle the Postscript-file, Oh, and the colours were a bit weird ..."

[AlexL]

<BLOCKQUOTE class="ip-ubbcode-quote"><font size="-1">quote:</font><HR>Originally posted by Michael:
<snip>(like resizing objects without moving their centrepoints or selecting objects with a given colour)<snip> <HR></BLOCKQUOTE>Try holding the shift key down when resizing for your first point.

If you open the name gallery, open the "used colours" folder, you can select all objects that have a specific colour - should resolve your second point.

Does that help!?

AlexL

[Charles Moir]

Illustrator CS is much faster than previous versions at some things - like loading the saving. And they deserve credit for that.

I've been doing some tests with some very simple bitmap loading and saving. Load two digital camera jpeg photos. Make a copy of one of them and crop one of the bitmaps to blend over the other. I tried a bit of transparency blending - but the lack of grad transparency and feathering prevented me doing exactly what I want.

Anyway, saving the file on the old version took 3 minutes 30 seconds. The file was 450 Mbytes large. Yes seriously.

Illustrator CS can save the same file in 36 seconds. The file size is now down to 118Mbytes - a huge improvement.

So you want to know what it was in Xara X1? 0.6 seconds to save the same file. Yes less than one second. And the file saved was 5.6 Mbytes. Oh and of course I could do the grad bitmap blend and feathering to create a nice composition.

So Xara X is at least 30 times faster and produces files 20 times smaller for the same, pretty basic graphics production job. And that's compared to their latest 'new faster' version.

Adobe claim Illustrator is an all round general purpose graphics tool. That, in my opinion is claiming too much, as the above tests show. It is a fine illustration tool in some areas - it is not a general purpose graphics tool it claims to be.

And finally to answer Richards question - no we didn't invent anti-aliasing, but we were the first in the world to implement it in real-time using software on a vector drawing program (a long, long time ago now). The perceived wisdom at the time was that it was impossible - even some of my own developers claimed it was impossible.

I could list dozens of firsts which we've introduced to the industry that have found their way into most competitors. That is not to say they've looked at our code or anything like that. I'm sure they see a good idea, and like most good developers, try to improve on the best ideas out there. All modern software is built on the shoulders of those that went before.

The ability for us to be very smart about bitmap handling, by only embedding the original JPEG and not de-compressing the image in the native file, is a perfect example. We're the first drawing program in the world to do it (as far as I know) and the benefits are huge. Expect the feature to appear in our competitors. It may take years however.

[RAMWolff44]

Thanks for the inf Charles, you really are a wealth of information and your at a 109 posts now. I'm happy that you are continuing your participation on the forums. I'm sure you are having some fun and it's informational to you as well as it is to us having the head of Xara Group Ltd. paying some attention. Truly, so thank you again! http://www.talkgraphics.com/images/smilies/smile.gif

[roman]

Good points Charles. http://www.talkgraphics.com/images/smilies/smile.gif

[jens g.r. benthien]

Charles,

<BLOCKQUOTE class="ip-ubbcode-quote"><font size="-1">quote:</font><HR> The ability for us to be very smart about bitmap handling, by only embedding the original JPEG and not de-compressing the image in the native file, is a perfect example. We're the first drawing program in the world to do it (as far as I know) and the benefits are huge. Expect the feature to appear in our competitors. It may take years however. <HR></BLOCKQUOTE>

Hm, I have to apologize if I have to correct your opinion here: Satori Film FX and their picture editing software had been the first - some 3 or 4 years ago. Another fine British code factory by the way ;-}. They used 64 bit internally, which produced extremely smooth transitions. Compared to that beauty even Photoshop results look blocky.

I don't know what happened to them, but I think they didn't survive the Internet hype.

[James Loudon]

Can I bring up the dreaded imort question again, while we are sort of on the subject?
I recently had to build a website from components made by the company designer using Freehand. He provided the files in fh and ai format and I found that Xara couldnt import any of them. I think that the ability to import other formats is at least as important as the export tools.
Note: I havn't tried to import in the new version yet. Maybe I'll be surprised.

[Klaus Nordby]

Charles: "The ability for us to be very smart about bitmap handling, by only embedding the original JPEG and not de-compressing the image in the native file, is a perfect example."

That is very smart indeed, and you are to be complimented for it!

But even smarter _still_ would have been to just _link_ to external bitmaps on disk, so by updating these with any bitmap editor outside of XX the XX art would also have been auto-updated - and the XAR file would have been _truly_ tiny, if it contained _no_ bitmaps but only links and vector operations.

I started asking Ollie at Xara for this feature back in 1995 - how time flies, and no results still!

Now, I ceratinly don't claim such linking to be a new invention of mine: in principle, this feature is something which page layout programs, PageMager and QuarkXPress, have had for, say, only fifteen years.

Maybe time enough for Xara and others to "steal" and implement it - or what?

[Charles Moir]

No James you won't be surprised. See my comment earlier in this thread about our the inherent difficulties of supporting ever advancing file formats for an ever wider range of programs. But we're turning more attention to this area next.

[jens g.r. benthien]

Klaus,

brilliant idea. You are so smart I'm really impressed:
<BLOCKQUOTE class="ip-ubbcode-quote"><font size="-1">quote:</font><HR> But even smarter _still_ would have been to just _link_ to external bitmaps on disk, so by updating these with any bitmap editor outside of XX the XX art would also have been auto-updated - and the XAR file would have been _truly_ tiny, if it contained _no_ bitmaps but only links and vector operations. <HR></BLOCKQUOTE>

And if you move the directory with the images / pictures, the links are broken. And guys like you will be the first to scream the hell out of your chest about this feature. But I don't blame you - all you know is your single machine in front of you. Have you ever considered what this means if you are connected through a LAN or even WAN to a Linux server where the linked files are located? And what will happen in this scenario when the Linux server will be reconfigured (or just relocated to another IP) some day?

<BLOCKQUOTE class="ip-ubbcode-quote"><font size="-1">quote:</font><HR> I started asking Ollie at Xara for this feature back in 1995 - how time flies, and no results still! <HR></BLOCKQUOTE>

Of course not - we've all been waiting for you to hit the keyboard and code this feature, because nobody else but you had been smarter 9 years ago. Man, you've missed you chance to become a millionaire with your brilliant ideas, just because you fell asleep after pooping out your brilliance.

But rest assured: all of us still believe you will churn out the super ultimate hyper vector app in the next weeks because of your superior ideas and over-the-top coding experience. Really, I mean it. Believe me, with your extraordinaire ideas and insight you'll be nominated CEO of Adobe very soon.