Questions to Xara Ltd ... please reply

[gwpriester]

Kate says most of the techs are on holiday after the last minute crunch getting WebStyle 2 out the door but promises someone from Xaraland will respond in the very near future.

Gary

Gary Priester

Moderator Person

<a href="http://home.earthlink.net/~garypriester">
Be it ever so humble...</a>

[Ross Macintosh]

I had been advised by Thomas as well that they would review this thread and respond.

Regards, Ross

<a href=http://www.designstop.com/>DesignStop.Com</a>

[Eric]

I have sent drawings off to Xara by e-mail weeks and weeks ago but got no reply whatsoever. I wonder if any others have had the same experience with their correspondances?

eric

[katemoir]

Well, that's a pretty broad sort of question.

Starting at the bottom: 'are there any suggestions/complaints posted in this forum or sent to tech support that you are taking seriously'. Yes, we take them all seriously. All emailed suggestions are copied to the project managers and support staff and these posts are read by the project managers and many of the programmers. Unfortunately we can't answer them individually, that would take all of us all of our time.

Ultimately we have to decide what's going in and what's staying out of the next version. Past the first few bullet points we often don't agree in-house. We always have a huge list of ideas, but the question is what weight should we put on the particular features, what do our customers really want given that we can't do everything. Do you really care about SVG? Is it time to re-do the animation? Should we concentrate instead on improving the bitmap support? How many people would use the Webstyle wizard if we worked on that instead?? In that situation the number of emails we've received from our user base requesting a particular feature or improvement can be the single most important factor in our decision. Individual emails and threads can get produced as evidence for and against.

New features aside, these forums are the biggest source of bug reports and feedback on the UI. That's a bit painful in a public forum but in many ways the most useful aspect. It is very, very difficult to be objective about our own UI and also quite difficult to judge how much weight we should put on individual beta reports. In that context it's very useful and interesting (and sometimes a bit upsetting) to watch a discussion about the UI among broadly experienced designers who have not been involved in the product design (you were asking about disappointments - well I guess we have to face the fact that some of the UI on some of our new features isn't as good as it should have been.)

'Popularity': There's no such thing as 'selling enough'. What can I say - we're selling more than my fairly cautious forecasts, less than my incautious hopes! We did in fact receive more international press coverage than we were expecting and one of the benefits is a wide geographical spread of our user base, which is good news in the current rather difficult economic times. The other good news is that we have a patently very loyal and enthusiastic customer base, which means that we are gaining a lot of word of mouth sales - very important for a company of our limited resources, limited brand recognition and limited channel (relative to our competitors). I am sure that this forum helps considerably in that respect .. despite the public criticism!.

Yes, there have been quite a few things that have surprised us, mostly pleasant. The use of brushes springs to mind, there have been some incredible examples of effects we didn't anticipate (stretching bitmaps around paths, that was something). Ditto with the use of some of the other new features - profiles, feathering, bevels. We're a bit disappointed that more people aren't using the button bar tool (we think) though there have been some great examples and some unanticipated ones (who was using the navbar tool for flowcharts?). There have been some techniques that perhaps we should have anticipated - for example the use of the brightness transparency type for bump mapping. And I think it was Big Frank with his creation of new shapes out of multiple intersecting lines. You are the designers who are using this tool in anger and so we would expect you to come up with the unexpected, if you see what I mean, but still your invention has surprised us and it gives us enormous satisfaction to see people spending so much time, effort and enthusiasm on a tool which we struggled with for so long.


Kate

.................
Kate Moir
http://www.xara.com
http://www.buyfonts.com

[roman]

All I can say is. I wish you a lot of energy to be able to distinguish the Improvements from wannabe improvements. People ask for many things but everyone from their own point of view. Xara is on a good way just look behind. Great versions and this one is not an exception.

Bars
As far as bars are concerned. I've got that feeling that the trend is to use styles & dhtml scripts to produce menus and buttons. Rollovers are used less and less.

Named Objects
As far as name gallery and cutting to pieces is concerned, it's wery visely thought out as everything in Xara, just it would need more control over what is cut out. And also more "transparent" way of editing. To use invisible layer with "named polygons shapes for export" or name only some shapes and leave the rest on Xara's exporting algorithm is too tricky and not very easy to work with later. It produces a lot of unwanted cuts sometimes. It would be great to somehow display the EXPORT GRID where user could define which shapes could be exported in which format/compression ratio and even join some shapes together (even when they otherwise would be exported as separate).

Maybe that's why I think these two new web oriented features aren't so used.

[Clements]

Kate, thank you so much for your thoughtful reply!

Personally, I appreciate feedback. I believe it helps both those who give and recieve the feedback a sense of where one has been and a glint of the direction where one might go.

An occasional (quarterly?) "state of union" would be very helpful [img]/infopop/emoticons/icon_smile.gif[/img] .

Regards, John

P.S. As far as the button bar stuff goes, I believe the user interface may be part of the popularity issue. Updating/editing existing bars was not that intuitive to me (I was looking for common terminologies for commands in info bar like "copy from")... HOWEVER, the movie did help make things easier.

Also, although transparcncies are the essence of many of the special effects, I don't think the various modes are really understood, except perhaps by the more experience/capable designers/digital artists. Its my belief that a more indepth MOVIE on transparencies illustrating the differences and nuances of mixing transperencies would be helpful and enlightening to potential customers.

[This message was edited by John S. Clements on September 03, 2001 at 12:38.]

[Klaus Nordby]

Thank you, Kate, for your response. You Master Xarans have been rather absent from this forum for a while, so I wondered if you had all boarded the mothership and returned to your home planet! (I just prayed you would not use the infernal NavBar tool to do the navigating, or you would end up in Kansas . . . )


K

[Sheff]

Thank you for the response. It's good to know that Xara reads the forums.

My question is, where would you like us to respond to your questions about what we would like to see in new features?

Should a new thread be started?

But since I'm here, I'll respond with my requests:

1. I would like to see photoshop format output with layers intact. I spend a lot of time creating transparent PNG's then put them back together in order in Photoshop for conversion to CMYK and then client delivery.

2. I have never used Webstyle. My method is to prototype the page layout in Xara, export the elements and assemble them and add links and rollovers in Dreamweaver. I will usually create the mouseover states in layers so i don't worry too much about that. Often I will put a box around the graphic that has no fill and no outline so that whatever changes I make to the graphic, the export is consistently sized.

If webstyle can do this without having to deal with too many dialog boxes or being stuck in templates then I would be open to using it.

3. I'd like to see improvements in animation. Like avi export or swf export with motion and interactivity. I would like to have animated objects retain their web link information in an exported swf. I don't care about SVG. I've never used it or seen in implemented with any level of practicality. If anyone knows of a kick butt site using SVG I'd like to see it.

4. I'd like to be able to import some 3d objects, and do more with them than just extruding a shape or font. If Xara could import Lightwave objects or Max objects, maybe rotate them or apply the basic bevel attributes to them, maybe move and control the lighting like in Xara 3d, that would be great as well. What I end up doing is export single frames from the 3d software and import the alpha channel and image into Xara. Then I do a monochrome trace bitmap of the alpha channel and then use the image as a fill.

5. Multiple pages. I get around this by creating multiple pages in layers then export each layer individually and they try to reassemble it in Freehand. This is a hassle, I'd like to forgo that last step and export a PDF directly from Xara.

6. Bitmap painting features. I use Painter 7 do do bitmap painting, but I only use a few brushes to do what I need to get done. If Xara had bitmap painting with different types of brushes, that would be a tremendous boon.

7. Warp grid. It would be nice to be able to bend a bitmap to fit a shape without having to open the original app used to create the bitmap.
I would like to see the profile editor used to control acceleration/deceleration of a stretched bitmap or fill.

8. Scanning. Often times I open Photoshop just to scan something and import it into Xara. I would like not to have to open Photoshop.

9. I'd like a separate browser program that's not part of Xara, like ACDSee to browse my Xara files. I used to drag them into Netscape with the plug in to see them without opening them in Xara. Now that the browser plugin is pretty moot since X, I use Compupic to do this, but I'm not wild about Compupic.

10. I like the combination of bitmap and 3d in Pixologic's Zbrush. I think Xara would be awesome if it could combine vectors and 3d just as smoothly.

I don't know if all that can be incorporated into one program, but if can be done I'd buy it. I think it's either page layout or animation. If both can be done, then that would be fantastic.

I still think Art Center in Pasadena is ground zero for kicking the door open to sales in the US.

I love Xara and use it constantly, more than any other piece of visual creation software. I push it pretty hard and it keeps up with me. That's why I love it.

Sheffield Abella
sheff@sheff.com
www.sheff.com

[Sean Sedwards]

The accessibility of the Xara staff and the personal replies we often get definitely contribute to the loyalty of the users. Long may it last!

I've found in the world of 'real' products (as opposed to virtual / software) that technical people or those involved with production are not the best to decide new features. They tend to make choices based on ease of implementation and don't have enough familiarity with the rest of the market. Although users tend to request features they like in other products, thus preventing innovation, they are much more in tune with the market and, IMO, should always be taken seriously (I've learnt that lesson the hard way!).

To get the best from user feedback, I recommend that users be allowed to vote for their top five, say, most valued upgrades. The list wouldn't necessarily include the secret, innovative new features and the results need not be made public if it was felt they were commercially sensitive. Feature requests are often made with the assumption that all the existing bugs and problems will be fixed as well. A vote would ensure that the most important things get done first.

Regards - Sean

P.S. to Sheffield: How about importing 3D objects to X3D, with improved export to XX? This might be a more efficient way of doing it since the 3D technology is already there.

[This message was edited by Sean Sedwards on September 04, 2001 at 02:30.]

[roman]

I don't see voting very convenient for this. I think a huge list of suggestions, reports, improvements, and even wannabe improvements is the most efficient. IMHO, Only technical people and programmers can prevent Xara from not being big and slow piece of bloated sofwtware. I wouldn't underestimate the positive power of the ultimate programmers preference of comfort and easiness.

[img]/infopop/emoticons/icon_wink.gif[/img]