Tumbleweed Town

[Chris M]

Exactly 24 hours ( and 4 minutes) ago Xara announced the Plus v 23.7 release.
All of 81 views.

Where are the users, the interest, the verve, ...?
Is TG now a backwater?

Acorn

These type of questions always seem to end up as rent vs buy gripes, but I think handrawn has hit the bullseye with his reference to social media. There's tumbleweed in TGsville because the railroad moved its tracks to Tictoc-by-the-sea.

Personally, there has been nothing much in the updates to actually write about, other than adding to the long list of things that don't work properly. Most of the fixes are things I didn't know existed, yet, rarely, do I see a fix for something mentioned here. Matt365 often states something along the lines of 'asked for by our customers'. I would lay decent amounts of money down that those asks didn't originate from a forum. How many times have you read a member state something was asked for/reported not working years ago?

I think I joined in 2018, and here have been some major changes (yes, mostly web) Tables and now blocks, but the usual fluff is just even more templates and 100 different colours of the same thing.

So, Acorn, my answer to where is the verve? I don't see much to get vervey about, and 23.7 had some significant improvements to blocks...but they shouldn't have been released in the first place with such obvious faults. Realistically, I think handrawn has the actual answer.

[bwood]

Thanks to many on TG this winter I took a deep dive into understanding Xara pro, and the use of coding. As I use Pro for everything I can do posters, newsletters, cards, graphics and web. I think it’s the best all round package around.

But … Having come from a broadcasting and marketing career, I think some of the branding has been very confusing. That confusion well documented on TG. Just go back and check all the packages available; many of which do the same thing.

Younger people want something fast and easy. Hence blocks. Plug and play. “I want my website now”, and having brought up two daughters they do not tend to update programs, unless it’s auto updated with apps on phones etc. Having a visit over the weekend I proclaimed what I learned to do on pro+. Crickets. They’re interested in the end product only.

The Xara group on Facebook was left in the dust. Social is a knife edge. You must leverage what you’ve done on one platform, to the next big thing. You have to be nimble.