Xtreme Pro 4 way too big!

[willdean]

But to Jen's point, having the option when you install to do a Typical or Custom install is a good thing. And that was the real point of the thread.

Sorry to interrupt. Carry on with the thrash.

Well, if Garry says 'carry on....'

I'm going to try and avoid being tempted into repeating this after this last attempt, but:

1. No feature exists except at the expense of another feature. Nothing which increases complexity to save people USD0.01 of diskspace can be simply called 'good' without deeper consideration.

2. Out of the total costs of publishing mass-market shrink-wrap software, up-front coding is but a small proportion. There is such a long way from 'Hello, World' to a box on a shelf (or, more significantly, 100000 successfully deployed installations). Nobody who's ever shipped a lot of software is as glib as many of the posters in this thread are about installation.

3. Aftermarket support costs are potentially devestating to small publishers of low-price mass-market software. Call or email Xara to discuss any problem with your app or installation, and they'll now have lost money on you as a customer.

Just look at some the struggle people around here have to open a command prompt and run expandxar on a file - then just try and imagine a telephone call where you try and discuss with that person (and one of you is not speaking your first language) why the '3D Extrude' icon doesn't appear on their toolbar since they re-installed Xara software. Don't forget that they won't be using nice clear terminology like button, toolbar, window, cursor, either. They'll also deny having even done the reinstallation or changing any options if they did. They won't tell you that since they 'caught a virus', the neighbours' son who "knows a lot about computers" came around and fixed their computer before they called you.

And they'll have a sense of entitlement which may well be quite some way from what you think 30 dollars buys.

Support is expensive, disk is cheap. Intelligent software vendors trade one against the other.

[The Alien]

I don't want to intrude too much in this thread, but suppose Xara made it possible to deselect the option to install the Magix photo editor... I don't think Magix would be very happy about this. And it wouldn't make the Xara-Magix relations much better I think. AFAIK the Magix photo editor is the only "tangible" presence of Magix in the Xtreme software. Giving users the option to remove this presence is almost like indicating you don't want to work with Magix :\
Making the Magix photo editor part of the "core" install, but making XPE optional obviously isn't going to work for Xara.

I'm not standing in their shoes, but I think these considerations also play a part in this matter.

[willdean]

Xara don't 'work with' Magix, they're completely owned by them.

[The Alien]

Xara don't 'work with' Magix, they're completely owned by them.

Yes. That would make it even worse

[jens g.r. benthien]

It appears to me that the real bug in the Xara Xtreme Pro 4.0 is Magix and not a coders fault

[handrawn]

everyone who wants xara to provide them with whatever it is they want, should remember, as was touched on earlier, that xara is a commercial enterprise and its first consideration is to survive. No survival, no anything new.

Personally I think that is reason to be grateful for magix

[jens g.r. benthien]

Even Magix should be able to honor user requests, particularly with the 'pro' version. I wouldn't mind if the would even pack their lousy sound and video editors into the Xara Xtreme (basic) version, plus 20.000 web templates, 5 gigbabytes photographs shot with mobile phones and all the nine yards.

However, the 'pro' version should be a real pro version without gimmicks the pros don't need.

And if they want their name in the software, they can change the name of the basic version into 'Magix Xtreme' to lure the masses and market it through WalMart, Target, etc.

History tells us that all packages that wanted to 'cover it all' like Canvas or Micrografx finally dried up and ended in the gutter. What counts are the core competences of a company in the professional area, not gimmicks or kinky 'me-too' features other vendors can do a lot better.

just my 2 cents

[steve.ledger]

Just look at some the struggle people around here have to open a command prompt and run expandxar on a file - then just try and imagine a telephone call ...........
Don't forget that they won't be using nice clear terminology like button, toolbar, window, cursor, either. They'll also deny having even done the reinstallation or changing any options if they did. They won't tell you that since they 'caught a virus', the neighbours' son who "knows a lot about computers" came around and fixed their computer before they called you.

Amen..
Welcome to my world

[Charles Moir]

Please compare our download / install size to the competitors. Someone mentioned 2Gbytes + for Photoshop Elements 4+ GBytes of hard disc. So relatively speaking there is little bloat here.

The 'disc are larger' argument is of course valid as well.

Yes there are two picture editors that you say you do not require, and our goal, and a major part of the work in V4 is to work toward their removal completely. The Photo tool does almost everything XPE does, better, with no overhead.

And BTW you do not understand the benefits of our photo tool if you suggest your other (bloatware) photo editors are good enough. They may be more powerful pixel editing, but in terms of performance, space, file size and speed, they are not going to get close to capabilities of the Photo tool (i.e. in terms of bloat, the topic you seem so concerned about - we absolutely and totally crush these alternative products. e.g. file size tests doing the same operations in Photoshop can produce files that are more than 100 times larger. That is a truly vast performance and space benefit)

You have a movie player that plays the training videos reliably. The player takes exactly 350Kbytes. a trivial amount. And yes you do need this because there is no other way of reliably playing the videos, often cited as one of the best features of the product. I can't believe you're suggesting a 350K overhead for reliable movie player is significant. Do we really want to try and launch what is surely the very definition of bloat - Windows Media Player. Instead we have a incredibly small, tight, optimized movie player that just works. So it's an absolute no-brainer that we include it, and no we're never even consider making it a user-option, since the costs to do so would be huge.

Extrude - well you might not want it, but again it moves the state of the art on, and those alternative (huge, bloated) 3D applications you mention can not do what we can, as easily as we can. Yes this feature may be aimed more at general user, non-pro market (but of course it can achieve many useful pro results) but are you suggesting that because it's not a Pro feature we should not include it in Pro. I suspect all Pro users would then feel cheated that they had a feature missing.

And the code required to implement the extrude is probably a tiny fraction of (hundreds of Kbytes only) the equivalent of other applications (and CorelDRAW and AI have both had crude 3D extrude tools for many years)

The HTML export feature takes just 228Kbytes. Again this is so trivial to be completely irrelevant, and adding options to allow users to chose whether or not to have the feature (or any of the features described here) in the installer would be an absurd waste of technical development resources and money - for a saving of a measly 228Kbytes. (And if you really do not want the feature, just remove the dll from the Filter folder, yes we do have a modular plug-in system in parts of the program). This feature has been described as revolution, by more than one professional graphics designer. So should we give user the choice not to see this feature - no way.

And more than a few people have said things like "I didn't really think I needed another HTML authoring feature, but wow this is really amazing and I'll use it a lot". So had we given the user the choice, they might never have seen the benefits. In fact the HTML export, even it's just for prototyping, is a really fantastic feature. Why would we ever give the user the option to not have it, to save a few bytes of disc space. That really is not logical, at all.

As to 'optimizing the code' unless you hadn't spotted Xara Xtreme is the most highly optimized application of its type, not by a small degree, but by huge margins. V4 is more optimised than any previous release in fact.

We have, for the entire lifetime of the Xara X product line, had users who believe they do not want this feature or that feature either because they do not understand it, or its benefits. And so we make decisions all the time on behalf of the users, on what we believe is right for the product. I kid you not but in the early days we had regular comments from users saying 'why did we need anti-aliasing, because it just makes things look blurry". So just as you might think you do not want the Photo tool, one day you'll realise just how much a revolution that Photo tool is, and probably come to rely on it.

(OK I realise that your complaint is not the Photo tool as such, but the other separate photo apps - but they are on the way out, so in that sense I agree with you).

Finally the dozens of small improvements, from the fact that zoom now works centered, to the improved path clipping (combine shapes) accuracy, to the much better text tool, to the higher quality anti-aliasing, any one of which might be the key feature you've been waiting for (all of these have been cited as the one reason certain customers have upgraded).

[Ross Macintosh]

Thanks Charles for sharing your thoughts with us.

I for one really do appreciate the time you have been putting into these forums lately. I hope you'll stick around after talk of the new version thins out a bit.

Regards, Ross