Xara Xtreme, news?

[covoxer]

You forget the spellchecker.

[remi]

And the customers are waiting for new vector tools another year (or two or three)...

[cbutton69]

Seconded!
But at the end of the day I wouldn't hold your breathe, they seem to be working on pointless stuff that they thinks will make them money rather on their core project.

XARA is a business, and making money is why they are in business.

For many years I worked for a large computer company, and they closely guarded the secrecy of their development efforts to prevent being one-upped by a competitor.

[Egg Bramhill]

John, you forgot to mention that was a Vector spellchecker

[covoxer]

John, you forgot to mention that was a Vector spellchecker

Indeed.

[Sheff]

The school where I work had an Adobe rep come down and show us what was new with CS4. I was most interested in Photoshop, but there was too much to cover in one day when the guy had to get to Flash, Indesign and Dreamweaver as well. When he got to Illustrator, I was pretty underwhelmed. It had like a *******ized version Xtreme's transparency and gradient controls, but they were nowhere near as intuitive or easy to use. Illustrator just got multiple artboards(pages) and you could custom size and position each one. This is nice as Xara forces you currently to zoom out to see all your pages as only a vertical stack. The open area to the sides would be useful if not for the warning you get when moving objects off the page. The other cool thing the guy showed was the blob brush. This is the only tool that might make me want to create something in Illustrator before exporting it to Xtreme. Other than that, there wasn't anything about Illustrator that would inspire me to make it part of my workflow.

[Giovanni]

For sure there are some important improvements Xara could make.
For example (but not only) about layer management and brushes.

What I ask is: is Xara reinventing the wheel?
If not, why don't they just show us some bits of the improvements?

I think there is no mistery about other challengers: Illustrator CS4, Serif DrawPlus X3, Mediachance RealDraw Pro, Inkscape, ACD Canvas X.

Each packge has strenghts and flaws, but I don't see any *magic* feature that must be hidden to avoid other softwares 'borrow' it.

Am I wrong? Is it so important to keep the secret?

[handrawn]

it is if you want to be innovative, otherwise someone may beat you to it

[steve.ledger]

I think we've already seen a lot of what to expect in Xtreme 5.

Any brand new feature which is unique to Xtreme 5 will need to be throughly tested by the developers before hinting that it even exists.

Remember the WinFS (an advanced storage subsystem) promised for Longhorn ? Never happened because MS couldn't make it work in time for Vista.

Makes good sense to me to keep new things under wraps until release.

[covoxer]

There are more important reasons than competition.
The programming process is greatly unpredictable. When we set some plans to develop features A, B and C, we can roughly estimate how much time it will take. But when this time runs out it may become obvious that while features A and C are ready for release, feature B is not stable. In this case we have 3 choices:
1. Release product with not stable feature B.
2. Delay release date until feature B is ready (new date is unpredictable again).
3. Make release without feature B and leave it till the next version.
Now, if we announce the expected feature set we lose the option 3.
If we announce date of release, we lose option 2.
And we do not ever want to opt for option 1 (unlike some other developers who are forced to it due to the announces they make).