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

[gwpriester]

Sorry to see you go but Xara Xtreme is not for everybody.

Good luck.

[MarkMyWords]

I understand entirely. For many of us, it does seem like Xtreme has been standing still for some time now. Clearly their priorities, for whatever reason, are not what they once were and they have chosen to concentrate on low-to mid-level web capabilities. Those of us who don't use such tools feel somewhat neglected, but we have to live with their decisions, they owe us nothing.

That's life.

[behzad]

I totally disagree with your post. It makes no sense. I have been using xara in the commercial industry for years. I love it. Sure it is not photoshop and it is not meant to be, but i can tell you that it is for me better than illustrator.

Xara is a great compliment to adobe products. Professionals use a number of different products to create their work and you really don't make much sense.

The addition of the web features does not take away from what xara already has. Sorry but good luck.

[eobet]

Ok, one final note, because I want the discussions here to be constructive:

I totally disagree with your post. It makes no sense. I have been using xara in the commercial industry for years. I love it. Sure it is not photoshop and it is not meant to be, but i can tell you that it is for me better than illustrator.

You can't just say "it's better for me" without providing an example, otherwise you aren't adding anything to the discussion.

For example, in my middle drawing above, I used the live trace (with tweakable levels of tolerance) to instantly convert a scanned drawing to objects, and then I used my wacom tablet to correct a few lines (Illustrator intelligently reconstructs any line you draw near) and finally the live trace to color it (again, Illustrator intelligently finds gaps in the drawings which prevents color from spilling over into other areas if you've missed a small gap, and I can just fill any object like a paintbucket tool in Painter and even do hue changes to the entire drawing like in Photoshop).

That's at least five examples of features Xara lacks, which makes this process several orders of magnitude faster in Illustrator, and in your comment you chose to ignore commenting on any of those. That is not how you do constructive criticism or have a meaningfull discussion!

Xara is a great compliment to adobe products. Professionals use a number of different products to create their work and you really don't make much sense.

Again, that's the second time you said that I didn't make any sense, and you can't say that without properly explaining why.

I'm a professional and as I explained I do use different products, and that is my point, not yours! That is why I argued that in the little niche where I find Xara useful, not much has been done for me in all these years. Instead, Xara has branched out to many other areas, instead of trying to be very, very good at the one thing it started out as: a very slick and fast object editor.

You are arguing directly against what Xara seems to be trying to accomplish. With the photo editing, page layouts and web editing, Xara clearly appears to be going for an all-in-one package, rather than a compliment to anything else. And on top of your logic being flawed, you don't even provide any evidence of the contrary!


-

Over the years, I've tried to hold rational and structured discussions on this forum, but the blind fanboyism of some Xara users have sabotaged this, and I have to admit that that is also one of my reasons for saying good bye.




EDITS:

Soit Photoshop est hautement supérieur, mais au prix stupéfiant où il est proposé, il faut faire partie des nantis ou alors économiser sur la nourriture et les vacances. J'exagère, mais à peine.

If Google translate has this right, thank you for reinforcing my view that Xara is mainly for hobbyist users.

@ eobet, Does this mean you won't be buying version 5?

I didn't buy version 4 either. I managed to succesfully argue that the company I was working at should provide me with a license. I don't think that would work for version 5.

Personally, I just bought Adobe CS4 because the GPU accelerated realtime rotation of the Photoshop drawings is something I could really use.

[MarkMyWords]

The addition of the web features does not take away from what xara already has. Sorry but good luck.

Actually, the point is that, for non web designers, little, of note, has been added for quite some time now. Sure there have been more tweaks, but from my point of view these have made almost no impact. The 3D extrude is nice, if limited, the object gallery is long overdue and very good, but these amount to small beans as far as I am concerned.

Where are the floodfills, the (proper) masks, the natural media brushes, mesh fills, mesh distort, extrude along a line, live vector effects, actions, (I'm sure others can think of much more)? A lot of this stuff is fast becoming standard in vector software. For vector illustration, Xtreme is leading the way in speed and lagging behind in most other aspects. Even then the above mentioned productivity improving tools really eat in that advantage.

Personally, I think the shape editor is vector graphics best tool for clean linework (which is 90% of what I do in the program), though this is not a universal view, it is an added draw for me and I will use it for linework until something better comes along, but I would be reluctant to create large and complex full colour work in Xtreme (I have tried), regardless of it's speed.