Version 23.7 Blocks

[Chris M]

The creative mind is out weighing what blocks actually can do, which is what I’m finding. The creative mind is far ahead of Blocks 2. The creative mind is already on Blocks 3 or 4. Blocks 2 as Gary mentioned is plug and play. The YouTube instructions are elementary Blocks 2. I want my flexible and creative blocks to echo what my creative mind wants.

I couldn't agree more. I've been struggling to find a way to express exactly that.

This whole exercise was to see how close reality came to the marketing. I was slightly surprised. With more practice and knowing the limitations, it wouldn't take too much on Xara's behalf to have this producing simple sites quickly and easily. I do think, in our minds, we need to separate Xara's traditional site building and the Blocks system. They aren't designed to be mixed and matched. Like SuperSites. Never the twain shall meet...unless you employ iframes. I've used iframes for both SuperSites and Blocks with good results.

Going back to Bill's creative mind. At the moment, we have Xara's offering of those giant Lego blocks (Duplo or something). You can build a square tower as high and as wide as you like.
I'm looking for the full Lego version where not everything is up, down, left or right.
Acorn prefers Play-Doh that can have sticks and pipe cleaners stuck into it.

What I would like to avoid is a tower of Duplo with a fancy section of Lego stuck onto it with Play-Doh and sticky tape.
I'd like the Block system to actually work, with limitations, of course. In other words, at least try and make the marketing a little believable.

Employing Bill's creativity: I picture each block as being a tiny site all on its own. Complete with layers, backgrounds, web animations et al. These tiny sites sit on each other shoulders and can be moved up and down, carrying their layers etc with them. Want something sticky to travel the full height of the stacked tiny sites? Pop it on the outside. Want a universal background? Pop it on the outside.

I would like to know the reasoning behind the forced mobile site. The other problems all seem to be fixable niggles, but the forced variant???

[Chris M]

Okay, we're now on version 28.3 and another problem has been fixed. I can no longer make images disappear, but others still remain.
Disappearing images - fixed
Marquee select - not fixed
Moving multiple objects - not fixed
Snapping to object inside a block - not fixed
A few more updates and Blocks may be ready for release.

General usability has some workflow problems that I think deserve a look at.
The forced variant is awful, but if it's here to stay can we have it a little more consistent please? A few examples:
Skewing/Rotating does not transfer to the variant.
Adding Reveal Animations, Stretch Full Width and Sticky do not transfer.
The Fill Tool doesn't transfer...well, it does, just not properly. Try it.
Linear Transparency behaves in the same way as the Fill Tool.
Repeat On All Pages doesn't work at all.

There are probably a lot more, and all can be fixed by Stop Sharing With Variants, doing the edits, then sharing again. ORRRR, not force the variant in the first place!!!

Looking forward to Xara actually testing before releasing the next update.

[Acorn]

Chris, I personally would not want my variant being randomly changed by alterations in Main.
I too would prefer the variant not to be linked until I chose.

SFW and Stky are probably identified in Main by an ID, which will not therefore register in the variant.
Xara has awkward issues to address with Names across variants still.

When Xara went forward with SmartShapes, the traditional and solid Snap to Objects went West.
Same for Web Blocks. You have to knife and fork inside to achieve the simplest of tasks.

RoAP necessarily cannot work as the WBs are Shared and RoAP & Share do not mix.
Be interested to see what a Live Shared object could do.

Acorn