Xara Designer Pro X10 Released

[jon404]

Kate, perhaps in aid of throwing oil on the troubled waters, you could add more vector Smart Shapes at no extra cost, as quickly as possible, to the online Content Library. You could get them made rapidly and inexpensively in Bangalore or Hyderabad. Beyond that, I don't know. Will try to think of DPX10 the same as my Mazda Miata, which in 2012 was in its 23rd year of very careful product improvements.

DPX10 will be my last Xara purchase. Am older now, and getting back to just sketching with pen and pencil. Please pass along my thanks to your programming team for all their years of work on Xara, and let them know that it really was a Godsend back before I retired, and still a pleasure to use now, all that Font Awesome and Photolooks stuff aside.

Yours, Jonathon Donahue

[MarcT]

Thanks for the heads up Kate.

(but we are throwing more people at it!)

Throw them hard!!

Marc

[angelize]

Thanks Kate, for putting things into perspective for us. And you know, I've been spending some time delving into the Photo looks plug in and it actually is a useful addition to the program. Having the ability to run all my plug-ins in the 64 bit version is a great time saver for me and I appreciate the work that went into making that happen.

[mwenz]

I’m sorry many of you sound disappointed.

Well sound and are disappointed are two separate things. I do appreciate what must have been a difficult post to make. I thank you for making it.

...There were not the same glaring fix-or-die weaknesses in vector features. Plenty of suggestions, yes, but no consensus on ‘must haves’. We understand that means that many illustrators will understandably decide not to upgrade this time, and we have to live with that.

As for the bolded part of the quote. There are simple reasons for that. It is because XDP has long languished in updating, fixing and enhancing its vector capabilities. The various lists would be shorter and more concise if there was steady, gainful advancement in the vector capabilities. Not that there can be actual consensus, but the only real way to rank needs among a small subset of your customers (us here at TG) would be for members to be able to vote/rank individual requests in a massive poll type of system. Probably impractical to do such a system. But with so many areas/industries affected by vector capabilities in so many different ways, there cannot be true consensus. there can be steady improvement and enhancement, however. This is different from web authoring enhancements/capabilities where there is not such a broad spectrum of needs.

I don't know which list(s) you read, but yes, there are obviously items that need fixed, need updated, need...whatever in the vector side of things too. An easy for instance. Have you ever done packaging design or known someone who does? One needs to put crop marks, die lines, cut lines in the page area. This feature alone keeps people who do packaging design that I have recommended using XDP from using XDP for this. Why? Because the "Print on all plates" does not hit a PDF and it is a hassle to make such marks hit all plates. The simple solution is to do what every other design application on the planet does and that is use a special named color (Registration) to appear on all plates. This applies to the screen printing work I do as well.

Further, the biggest deal to me is the library for PDFs y'all use. As far as I can see on their web site (I could have easily missed it, though), they do not support PDF/X-4 and XDP really needs to do so. One of the things in XDP that can (and does) fail at is the flattening of transparency when creating the PDF. Things can go terribly wonky and the PDF is not fit for purpose. Why is this a big deal? Because a design application is only as good as its PDF creation. If XDP cannot reliably output what one can design in it, what's the point? I consider this pretty much a fix-or-die weaknesses.

The list of features, or the lack thereof, is a big deal IF Xara desires to grow its market among people doing vector work. Build it and they will come.

...Our surveys suggest that a typical Pro owners uses all of them – we have after all promoted it as a one-stop graphic design solution for many years! Plus we have a new project in the works too, directly related to and hopefully guaranteeing the long term future of Camelot (the engine that drives the whole Designer suite) which has been taking our resources for over a year. All of this we try to balance, at least over the life of several upgrade cycles. Nothing has been abandoned (but we are throwing more people at it!)

Surveys can say a lot of things depending upon how questions are asked and of whom.

Again, I thank you for making this post I am responding to. I wish Xara and its employees nothing but the best. My motive in writing this is because I do care what becomes of XDP, now and in the future.

I shall await version 11 and see what the difference a year makes.

Best regards, Mike

[handrawn]

There were not the same glaring fix-or-die weaknesses in vector features. Plenty of suggestions, yes, but no consensus on ‘must haves’. We understand that means that many illustrators will understandably decide not to upgrade this time, and we have to live with that......

.....Plus we have a new project in the works too, directly related to and hopefully guaranteeing the long term future of Camelot (the engine that drives the whole Designer suite) which has been taking our resources for over a year. All of this we try to balance, at least over the life of several upgrade cycles. Nothing has been abandoned (but we are throwing more people at it!)

Thanks for the post Kate - I am sure that most of the serious illustrators understand the commercial pressures that Xara is under, and it's good to know that the drawing side is getting on-going attention and will be the focus of the next update

For myself. I started with raster in the days before Painter was bought by Corel and what attracted me to vector was the ability to scale on screen and paste up pages in an object oriented way - in those days screen rendering in raster when zooming was bad news due to lack of effective antialiasing, well that's all more or less fixed now thanks to openGL, and modern 64bit computers with 64bit applications are far better at handling the large images too

it's got to the point where I can draw black raster line-art very quickly and expressively freehand, and if I want it vector then I use vector magic or similar; quicker and less faff than node pushing or using the freehand tool in xara and having to slow down so as not to confuse the screen redrawing and effectively 'falling off the bike' so to speak

the screen redrawing is the really crucial one for me - new layers on either side of current [is there another serious app that does not do this?], modern brushes, absolute nib sizes for shape builder/eraser, flood fill, nested layers, being able to see the rest of the drawing when editing inside a group, all the things I have supported would of course be useful as well and it good news to hear that Camelot is getting serious attention

disappointed this time as last time, yes - but looking forward to seeing what you come up with next time... but for now two versions behind I'm going to have to bow out

[slavelle]

Hmmm. Being one of the "target" pro users - one who uses the product to design logos, create the graphics for website mockups for a client which I then export all the bits out of an create Joomla! templates, creating a few brochure-like things here and again, and occasionally needing to produce a quick and inexpensive non-updatable website - I still came here a bit disappointed that the Pro version ONLY includes the upgrades of the other programs and nothing "special" except the "whole" that those updates create.

More than likely, I will upgrade both licenses we use here because of the RWD features (don't really want to have to leave the application to go to the less-feature-filled WD program) and things like the color replacement, which we have to do often and as much as it has improved in past versions, I'm hoping this new version is a great step forward.

But I sure would like to see some focus on the creation and less bundled add-ons as features. A lot of software manufacturers do this without a lot of "core" change to the program, and it feels like a copout. When something is available stand-alone (like the font awesome stuff), it's underwhelming to see it as a "feature" of the new version on the main page and not just an item on the "by the way we also added this" list. Since I use these font-things in my actual coded sites, it's convenient for them to be easily accessible in Xara for the design phase, but hardly what I'd call a major feature.

And as cool as things like the new "shapes" that you can insert might be, they are limited to me, and scream "amatuer" a lot of the time. These are graphics that I'm only likely to ever use for a quick/cheap site, not for a custom designed Joomla! site. Again, interesting to have added in, but hardly a "major new feature", I think.

Getting some new blend modes, new abilities to create more complex and photo-shop-y images with those blend modes, some additional ways to manipulate gradients and transparencies, etc, would be great in the next new versions.

[tonylondon]

One more thing I’d add; TG has a concentrated core of illustration users which doesn’t quite reflect our total audience. That means you maybe don’t get the sense that I do, sitting here, that similar numbers of owners are making equally impassioned pleas for us to add new web, page layout and photo features. Our surveys suggest that a typical Pro owners uses all of them

Yes, it would be good to have some new layout features too. But I do accept the general tenor of your argument.

[gwpriester]

Luke - Here's a suggestion since I think the wish lists get a bit out of hand and there are too many of them.

The developers know what is possible with the current code and what is impossible or very difficult.

Why not post a poll and list 10 drawing features, 10 web features, 10 photo editing features, and 10 text/dtp features and let the members here vote for their favorite 3 or something like that. It will give more insight into what users/members find of importance.

Does that make sense?

I find it hard to believe that clear trends will not result.

[Big Frank]

there’s Gary Priester’s First Look on the Xara Xone @ http://xaraxone.magix.net/XDPX10/page-1.htm.

I've been wanting to read this first look review of Xara XDP10 for ages and haven't found the time. Well I read it this morning and have discovered some things that I wasn't aware of and some things I'd forgotten were so useful. As always, Gary, a well-written, if slightly over-enthusiastic ( ) review of all of the new features of XDP10. I enjoyed reading it.

[puw]

Hi Everyone.

I've read through all 19 pages, and it saddens me. I'm not a Pro myself (yet), I've a lot to learn and am taking steps to change that hopefully. I don't think of myself as a photographer nor have a job as a web designer (I'm sure it's nice to have a website via drag and drop, but what if something breaks and you have no idea how to begin to fix it - kind of thinking), but there are probably useful tools available to play with and begin to use in these areas. So having everything in one package is not exactly a negative, for someone new when considering buying it.

But for someone like me with a lot to learn about drawing, shadows, perspective, design, colours and so on, that if using Xara - this place is the be all and end all for getting help!

So ................ what 'really' saddens me, and I hope all you guys and gals who have made your views clear in these 19 pages follow my thought process here, is the fact that through the company's change in direction (as I have read and come to understand reading this topic), the actual drawing/vector members with masses of experience and a willingness to help both new and old users improve themselves in the area of vector drawing, could just disappear through feeling undervalued, ignored and unwilling to keep on paying to support Xara to produce the updates they want/need/would like to see/etc & wait any longer when other companies have kept up with the times and are updating their software to meet today's demands. What an ABSOLUTE waste that would be!!!!

I can understand some members may think it is not my place to say the following as I am a new member here, but I truly hope that Xara takes heed of it's Pro's CORE users and drivers ........... or be prepared to lose them and their "INVALUABLE" experience, without whom, since they actually act as such a massive and FREE support system for your products, people will not buy Xara products.

Thank you, to all of you that have helped so much for so long