Any interest in Xara adding "connectors" ?

[gwpriester]

I know that. But I don't think it is going to happen. It is not the focus of the product.

[Acorn]

I know that. But I don't think it is going to happen. It is not the focus of the product.

I can see many site designs that could benefit form such a capability.

Web sites do not need to be all flash and fancy.

In my corporate work, I deliver business process and using a web site is far more friendly than most presentation formats.
I have created full Quality Management Systems using a hybrid of SharePoint and Xara embedded web pages with tooltips, pop-ups and navigation using little boxes with navigation flows.
My work would have been far easier to add new flows with dynamic connectors.

I now use Gliffy and Confluence Atlassian tools in much the same way; Xara is well behind.

Acorn

[shiphen]

I know that. But I don't think it is going to happen. It is not the focus of the product.

From a marketing perspective there do seem to be various variations of Xara with different focuses.

From a technical perspective maybe it's time for a fork?

[Acorn]

It is almost a Dear Xara... moment.

A Smart Connector could simply be a curve that when its ends touch two shapes, the end is borrowed by the touching shape so any moves remain sticky.

Looking forward to the Smart Shape API.

Acorn

[pauland]

"proper" smart connectors will have connections that can support curved or angular changes of direction and re-route themselves to avoid other smart shapes. Then you'd like to annotate those connections and maybe decide which way they will run by adjusting them.

You also need to join the connections themselves so two connections from different shapes can join before running into a connection on another shape.

It's no good having a smart connection that makes a dogs dinner and is uncontrollable. Simple doesn't cut it in the world of smart connectors.

[Michael]

I don't want to bang the drum too often but Inkscape has this functionality for years. If needed you can draw the diagram in Inkscape and save it to SVG to import (without a hitch) into Xara.

I still prefer Xara for its fast and functional interface (light gray that is, not the murky depressing dark side ...) but Inkscape is trailing and getting closer ...

[Jonopen]

Not a top priority, but I would also welcome having elastic connectors. The open source LibreOffice Draw has a useful diagramming tool which can also export out to PDF (or SVG) which then import nicely as vectors into PGD.

[pauland]

Considering this is a nice feature to have, but rather a niche usage and that there are workarounds, I suspect many users would rather see Xara do some things for which there are no reliable workarounds - proper CMYK support for example.

[shiphen]

"proper" smart connectors will have connections that can support curved or angular changes of direction and re-route themselves to avoid other smart shapes. Then you'd like to annotate those connections and maybe decide which way they will run by adjusting them.

You also need to join the connections themselves so two connections from different shapes can join before running into a connection on another shape.

It's no good having a smart connection that makes a dogs dinner and is uncontrollable. Simple doesn't cut it in the world of smart connectors.

Yes, all sounds sensible. And considering all the other amazingly complex things that Xara has done over the years, relatively trivial.

To state the obvious, the great joy of course would be that given Xara's power and adaptability one could generate extremely good looking diagrams unlike most of the existing diagramming (e.g. flow diagramming) tools out there.

[Acorn]

All I want is a Smart Shape Line.
The current in-built Xara lines don't cut it as they only have a Head and a Tail.
Also their control points are not at the tip of the line; the current Smart Shape Lines do both of these.

I want to be able to Pin to another shape and to Pin to a canvas / page background.
The pinned (red) end points would move with the shape and the canvas pins (purple) would remain until unpinned.

Smart routeing would be a desirable but not essential.

Acorn