Thank you and good bye! I'm no longer Xara's target audience.

[Xcellent]

ss-kalm, well it's simple:

Xara (old statement! *)
"Xara Xtreme, the fastest vector graphics program on the planet".*

Illustrator
"Adobe Illustrator CS4 software is a comprehensive vector graphics environment that is ideal for all creative professionals, including web and interactive designers and developers, multimedia producers, motion graphics and visual effects designers, animators, and video professionals."

People compare everything (not only software) to find a ranking and see what value things are worth.

Illustrator is based on postscript, Xara has their own custom engine - so there will never ever match.

Don't get me wrong, i love Xara and always will! Illustrator can simply be not be compared to Xara. I can see easily how people like to compare since the broad word 'vector' is the only thing in common.

*this is the statement that has made Xara popular (on so many reviews on the net) - so it's branded in people's head as a vector tool.

[jonnycross]

I found the problem with adobe CS4 stuff was that they are too big and take up too many resources. but by sticking to the old CS3 stuff and using Xara to use as my drawing program things work out fine. we all have to admit that Xara is the better drawing program don't we ?? but I do agree that for someone like me that as no interest in the website stuff the update was disappointing.
Compromise seems to be the keyword here.
just my 2 Cents worth LOL

[Xcellent]

I found the problem with adobe CS4 stuff was that they are too big and take up too many resources.

Not disagreeing there. It's because (like microsoft) every 2 years you need to buy a brand new, kick ar*se machine to be able to use the latest Adobe updates and the latest Windows OS.

I just bought a brand new computer (spare the details), all the latest Adobe CS4 Software is working smoothly as(!), no complains there - but the money i've spent is beyond Xtreme (no pun intended)

[JokeArtist]

Good Luck Mate ... and I know how you feel. Calls for vector improvements have just fallen on deaf ears for too many years. I'm slowly learning Illustrator myself and will make the switch at some point.

[Bob Hahn]

Illustrator can simply be not be compared to Xara. I can see easily how people like to compare since the broad word 'vector' is the only thing in common.

For the price between Illustrator and Xtreme when buying new, it is unfair to compare the two.

Xara themselves demonstrates Xtreme's graphics performance to Adobe Illustrator, complete with visual aids. Of course this is only based on speed. But once Illustrator's name is brought in, it is easy for people to start comparing the two on other aspects as well.

[JonH27]

Not relevant to the thread, I know, but I just had to say that Bob H's avatar has just made me laugh out loud. Nice one

Jon

[sgiff]

Since I've been in the mood to bitch about Xara lately I'll throw my two cents in on this thread.

No body really gives a flying flip about what gets put in as long as it stays lean and mean and loads quickly and stays uncluttered and so far I think Charles had done a pretty good job of that.

Let's not pretend that everything Illustrator does is based on postcript either. A lot of it's functionality now is just a hack because Postcript still doesn't support Alpha transparency as far as I know. It's on-screen rendering sucks for the most part. It creates huge files and requires tons of memory just to run.

Also, you can't say that xara was only designed to be a niche tool. A lot of people can't afford Photoshop so the photo editing tools are a good move i.m.o., and I think most would agree. A lot of the other features are really cool like the web export and I for one love the fact that all of this was integrated into the app, and yet the interface is still very clean and simple like it was in the beginning not cluttered like Adobe apps, and yet the program is still super fast and loads files far quicker than it's competitors.

Not having a version for the Mac was a really poor move on Xara's devs part. Right now they would be kicking Adobe's tail if they had done so years back or Adobe would possibly have bought the program, either way it would be taken seriously in the pro design arena.

Our biggest complaint and I think this thread echoes so many others is that Charles has long ago stopped listening to the user base and decided to ignore what most of us want the most and some of those things like zeroing out rotations and other basic vector stuff would be quite simple to implement. Gone are the days when Charles and Kate actually had some interaction with this forum and listened, although compared to some other more progressive developers they have never really been that close to it's user base. I mean it would have been really cool if they had put up a poll or something about the new Object Manager to get some initial feedback of what people wanted but no, it's just "here is the way it's going to be and you have to live with it". I think that's what really has most of us upset that have been loyal customers for years and years. They put in all of these cool features but rarely do they do anything specifically that the users have asked for.

And finally if they would have created an sdk for plugin developers that would integrate directly into the core app so we could have vector manipulation tools none of these bitch and moan sessions that come up every release would even exist because somebody out there would have created the features we want by now as a plugin.

[MarkMyWords]

I'm not sure if it is a case of not listening, the object gallery has many functions that have been requested before by lots of people. It may well be just too expensive or require too much time and other resources to implement new vector tools.

Covoxer tries to explain these things, but some of what is said goes way over my head.

[handrawn]

and I would add :

something that I specifically asked for after the release of xtreme 4 has appeared in xtreme 5

thread here:

http://www.talkgraphics.com/showthread.php?t=32193

it had support [and to be fair had been mentioned before] and it was implemented, and I for one am grateful,

this is the sort of thing that can really help me - not some unspecified airy fairy 'new vector tool' but making a basic tool work better

the same can be said of the multi-stop transparency

[MarkMyWords]

I'm sure I could specify some vector tools if you like steve?