Xara Designer Pro X10 Released

[handrawn]

ok thanks for that marc - I have the automatic resizing disabled in the registry so I don't think I actually have that problem myself in ver 8 [if it was in ver 8]

mind you, that said, if bitmaps that have sizing tags internally don't have any actual sizing info in them there is like as not nothing that can be done, other than to default to 96dpi

[Peteroz1]

If I would only see a single small feature that would do my work a little bit easier, just something very insignificant and simple, I would gladly pay the upgrade price.[/QUOTE]

I think this statement is very true. $100 for an upgrade dose not need much that you use to justifying the price. Xara would do very well is hearing the comments here and ensuring that all user groups get at least one new toy.

Very strange to leave your pro users to the end of the upgrade cycle this also means that you loose all the wind from the sails. Personally I would love as a current pro user to get the new tools as they come available. And while this update did not add a lot for me would be happy to pay another $100 bucks to start getting the next 12mths of new tools (1or 2 a month - or quartily updates). As I would than get them into my work flow sooner than later. Or as happens the minor ones I miss now and don't find them for a year or 2.



A

[BONES]

For a real professional use Xara has to have a CMYK support.

No, it doesn't. I am a "real professional" with 17 years industry experience and I certainly don't need CMYK support. On the very rare occasions that I have to send things to print, printers seem more than happy to work with high-res, low compression, RGB JPEGs these days. Of course, as a "real professional" I have to have Adobe CS/CC anyway, so if I really need to convert something to CMYK I can do it easily.

There is a new software on the market (from Serif) called Affinity Desingner, but for Apple OS https://affinity.serif.com/. It is CMYK application from the ground. I don't know what is Xara waiting for?

I imagine it would be a market. First of all, MacOS is only about 8% of the total PC market and 99.99% of those users are rusted onto Adobe CS/CC and will never, ever change. But when I look at that website, I see three applications that can't even do everything XDPro can so why would you bother? Affinity Designer also looks very light on for tools. I couldn't see a shape blend or shadow tool, for example. It looks to be very focused on print and if anything is a dying art, it's print. Magazines are going out of business every day and marketing is increasingly on-line. Let's be honest, Serif haven't been able to match it with Xara on the PC, that 's probably why they are looking to Mac. I reckon theyys are doomed to failure.

[BONES]

you sure? currently I'm quoted 79 GBP for a 9 to 10 upgrade, and 119 GBP for an 8 to 10 upgrade - ok the 9 upgrade is special offer, but I don't see it being more than the 8 upgrade and maybe 99 GBP normal price

Think about it - if you pay 79 GBP for each of two upgrades, you will have paid 158 GBP total, where someone who has skipped a version will only pay 119 GBP, or 40 GBP more than we paid each year.

where are these - I can't find them, the new features that do better than photoshop that is

PhotoLooks would be one, a plugin that costs you $199 if you're a Photoshop user or a lot of fiddling if you try to do it yourself. The Shadow/Highlight tools are also simple but very effective. Photoshop can do something similar but it's a lot more effort and I doubt it works as well (although it is more flexible because of it's greater complexity). In fact the photo editing tools in Xara today pretty much make Ps redundant for me. I really couldn't tell you the last time I opened it at home.

[BONES]

My point is: They're at least a decade behind. Demand is shifting quickly. SVG is on the rise.

I don't think so. I wouldn't say I encounter it any more today than I did 5 or even 10 years ago. Really, about the only place I ever come across it is on Wikipedia and even then, very rarely. And I do a LOT of image searches every day for my work.

[handrawn]

where someone who has skipped a version will only pay 119 GBP, or 40 GBP more than we paid each year.

it will be interesting, to see if that is repeated this time round, as I have indeed skipped a version - so far I see no sign of it.... which was my point, in the past the 40GBP has not been routine nor guaranteed to occur...

PhotoLooks would be one,..... ....

photolooks is not part of xara any more than it is part of photoshop; currently it's free with xara, but that may not [and I would say more than likely won't] continue in later versions based on the experience with other bundled paid-for plugins such as Alien Skin - xara's photo editing tools may be more suited to the way someone works; that does not make them better except in a localised workflow sense for the individual, not really what I meant

On the very rare occasions that I have to send things to print.....

well there you go... obviously CMYK is not going to be a major issue with you as you do not appear to be a 'print professional' which is what was being referred to, even though you are a 'real professional' in other ways I am sure - that said acrobat is pretty indispensable for serious professional print work, not sure xara could ever be a replacement


finally on the subject of SVG - I encounter them a whole lot more than I did [discounting their classic use as a vector porting format] especially in the interactive web content fields that cater for non-flash supporting devices [=> HTML5] - just goes to show, eh..

[BONES]

You are welcome JLX. I am switching to Apple as soon as possible.

Really? Have you ever used a Mac? They are bloody awful and every time Apple feels like it, they will break things and make your life miserable. Let me give you an example - the Mac Pros I work on every day were upgraded from Lion to Mavericks earlier this year and one of the new "features" was removing support for all the old Quicktime codecs. Before then, we could browse our library of more than 5Tb of stock footage and see a thumbnail in Finder and we could preview the footage by pressing the Spacebar (easily my favourite OS X feature, now ruined). Now more than half of it doesn't show a thumbnail and won't work in Preview so we have had to install an old version of Quicktime. Now, when we want to see what something is, we have to right-click on it and choose "Open with", then "Quicktime 7". Or there is the really "Pro" feature that means when you do a "Sort by... kind" in Finder, it sees all image files as the same "kind" and lumps jpg, png, tif and even psd files together in some random order. (You have to sort by name, then sort by kind if you want them to at least be in alphabetical order.)

Here's another, even better one. At the same time as we got the upgrades, we also got two brand new, fully loaded waste-paper basket type MacPros at 8 grand each. Apart from all the physical hassles - they don't fit in the bracket under the desks and the video capture card has to be housed separately in a break-out box, leaving cables all over your desk instead of discreetly hidden away below it - these machines are so finicky that we are unable to log-in to them with our own credentials. So instead of getting all my own settings and having access to my email, I have to use the generic log-in and deal with whatever set-up the last person was using (there are 20 of us sharing 8 workstations - from 3am to 11pm, 7 days a week) and I can only access the group email where our work comes in. Mind you, logging in at the start of the day can take up to 20 minutes so not having to do that saves back a tiny bit of the time wasted being unproductive on a generic set-up (none of my Photoshop actions, etc.).

It's a freakin' nightmare and the only consolation for me is that I get paid by the hour and everything now takes so much longer than it did on the old version. It has led me to the conclusion that only a crazy person or a serious masochist would use a Mac of their own free will. I can be more productive on my 8" windows tablet than on the MacPros at work.

[BONES]

well there you go... obviously CMYK is not going to be a major issue with you as you do not appear to be a 'print professional' which is what was being referred to, even though you are a 'real professional' in other ways I am sure - that said acrobat is pretty indispensable for serious professional print work, not sure xara could ever be a replacement

I send PDFs from Xara to the printer on occasion and I never have any problems. Let's be honest, any idiot can be a print professional, it's a fairly simple discipline compared to what many of us are doing. I'm a broadcast designer so I still have to do all the fiddling with typography that print people do plus a dozen other things that are much harder. And whilst print deadlines may seem brutal to you, we have 7 news-related shows going to air every day, so we have 7 deadlines every day and the content is almost never the same. A print professional wouldn't last a day doing what I do.

[handrawn]

I don't think there is anything much I can say to that except good of you to spare the time to visit, and stay cool

[BONES]

I'm on (unpaid) holidays so it's nice to be able to take the time to visit.