Luke, I really understand what you say about developer time and efficiency of sharing fixes and new features. Sadly, although I doubt that you intended it that way, as I read your response I got the feeling that XDP is being positioned as a useful web authoring app that has some excellent graphics tools rather than as an excellent graphics app that has some useful web authoring tools. Those of us who don't use the web tools can tend to feel left out, especially if Xara has been our go-to, right hand, best friend graphics app for years.

I don't use the web features because I'm only responsible for two sites. The main one is now a couple of hundred pages (and growing). For a number of reasons in addition to its size, there's no possibility that I could maintain that site in XDP. All the graphics work, including photo manipulation, is done in XDP. I wouldn't have it any other way.

When it comes to "enhancements" in XDP, it can be hard not to ascribe those that get in the way to the perceived focus on web authoring. For example, favoring page level over layer level in the P&L Gallery. (Bless you for giving us the ability to turn off the page thumbails!) And the multi-layer clipboard that arrived in v5. (Bless Bill for giving us a way to turn that off.)

OTOH, when we do get new vector capabilities (such as Magic Snap, which is great, and the new Paste capabilities, which don't look exciting but can be very useful), they look like small potatoes beside the web focus. And they're not promoted as "vector" or "drawing" enhancements. On your website, they're promoted as "Design and Useability Enhancements".

BTW, Mike, sending the customer base an email still won't provide a full picture of who's using Xara and the direction they want it to take. Only a fraction of the users will respond, and they may not accurately represent the whole.

Allison