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

[iamtheblues]

Generally I am not given to making comments in this type of thread as I find them pretty tedious and mostly unproductive. What I will say however, is that given these straitened times,
we are fortunate that Xara is still in the game, which says a lot about their business acumen.
It is up to the consumer to decide if they want to support Xara or not, and it is for Xara to decide how to market their product. Although I'm not enthralled by Xtreme 5,
there are a lot of good improvements, even if they aren't revolutionary.
Until the financial situation improves, Xara are probably in the best position to adopt the best strategy to ensure its survival, despite the disappointment that this may cause to customers.
If this is the biggest concern that we members of Talkgraphics face then we must consider ourselves fortunate. Xtreme is still a great piece of software, which is why we are (mostly) all still using it.
Saludos,
Bob.

[pauland]

Even an apparently simple change such as symetrical bezier node editing is actually a lot more complex than it appears. Not only does the UI need to be updated but all parts of the program that deal with creating or modifying bezier path objects need to be checked and/or modified to handle the changes in a consistent and logical manner. This would all take a considerable amount of time

This is way OT for the thread subject but.. ..would it really be that complicated?

For example, symmetrical beziers just require a tweak to the UI to lock/unlock the handles so they are symmetrical, then adjustment of either handle becomes a double update - with the position of the opposing handle being moved according to how the handle being edited is moved. As a long time software developer, I can't see any great complication. Just something to think about.

In general, I would have thought that the complication involved in supporting the WYSIWYG html generation would make many vector tweaks look trivial, though I completely understand the funding argument that you have put forward.

[haakoo]

This thread has been 101 posts to long,better close it
Let's think of the health of the moderators.
Win some,loose some,nothing more to it,
Go on with life.

[MarkMyWords]

No reason to close it, it isn't causing a problem.

So it is repetitive, so it is boring, so it is ineffectual, move on there are plenty of other active threads. Let people vent.

The thread is on it's last legs anyway, best let it die a natural death.

[covoxer]

This is way OT for the thread subject but.. ..would it really be that complicated?

Yes, it is.

For example, symmetrical beziers just require.......

The main problem is that the new attribute would be added and all the existing core code has to work perfectly reliably with it as we can't risk stability, can we? So we have to go through all the code that works with shapes, and that practically means almost the entire core code, analyse all it's parts and introduce changes where needed. Needless to say this is a tremendous amount of work and resulting number of small changes can be very large thus introducing a risk of possible mistakes (bugs) and additional time needed for testing and fixing.

I would have thought that the complication involved in supporting the WYSIWYG html generation would make many vector tweaks look trivial

Actually, your are very wrong here.

[covoxer]

No reason to close it, it isn't causing a problem.

I double that. No need to close it. Even if we do, soon there will appear another one and all dissidents will move there. Just look how nicely all debates moved here from this thread, initially created for moaning. Now it's on the 4th page and no one had closed it.
If there is a need for such a discussion, it will continue, after all we have a freedom of speech, don't we?

[pauland]

Regarding symmetrical bezier handles, John said..

The main problem is that the new attribute would be added and all the existing core code has to work perfectly reliably with it as we can't risk stability, can we? So we have to go through all the code that works with shapes, and that practically means almost the entire core code, analyse all it's parts and introduce changes where needed. Needless to say this is a tremendous amount of work and resulting number of small changes can be very large thus introducing a risk of possible mistakes (bugs) and additional time needed for testing and fixing.

Thanks for the rather scary insight John. I know Xara started out written in assembler, and it sounds as though the world of object orientation has yet to reach the software (since symmetrical movement of a pair of points is basically two sequential operations that already exist in the software and in an OO world this would be a very isolated change).

Maybe we're paying for Xtremes speed now in more costly development overheads?

Anyway, thanks for the info and for putting up with critics, like me!

Paul

[covoxer]

Thanks for the rather scary insight John.

Nothing to do with asm (it's only used for rendering engine) and all is object oriented as well. You can see the actual code in the XaraLX open source project page if you are interested.

[pauland]

Nothing to do with asm (it's only used for rendering engine) and all is object oriented as well. You can see the actual code in the XaraLX open source project page if you are interested.

C++. Spit, cough. I spent two years working on a project written in C++. The GUI was written in C++ (I was the DB guy) and after spending six weeks hunting down one nasty UI bug, I was allowed to rewrite the GUI in a DB related tehnology (and that took a month).

I haven't written any C++ since (Java and actionscript).

I have my own queue of people wanting updates to code I've written!

Paul

[covoxer]

C++. Spit, cough.

I'm not sure what you are trying to insinuate, but I suppose you are not suggesting to rewrite Xara in Java or actionscript, don't you?