X4 'Panacea' Or 'Pan Of Something Else' Poll?

[BONES]

That this appeals to hobbyists more than professionals, is perhaps not surprising, but that is where it is going. And the broader audience will likely do more to keep the product alive than a few features that some pros would find useful, but would never make it an Illustrator killer.

We should try to overcome the "Hobbyist" vs. "Pro" discussion. There are already two Xara Xtreme versions available and it's really no problem, if some users have greater expectations/higher demands on the "Pro" version.

I think anyone who thinks of their needs as the be-all and end-all of what constitutes a "Pro" is a tosser. I earn my living entirely from my work as a graphic artist. Surely that is the very definition of a "Pro" user, is it not? So, speaking as a "Pro", this is the most exciting release of Xara since X1. All of a sudden a whole new field of use has been opened up by the HTML export feature. Of course, if I was a "Pro" web designer, I might see it as less than useful but I only do web design for my own band and this is perfect. Awesome even.
The new text features were the main selling point at the recent Corel X4 launch event I attended and there were plenty of "ooh"s and "ahhh"s from the mainly print "Pro"s in attendance.
The 3D tool might seem a bit gimmicky but if you're a "Pro" designer you will appreciate how something that is as much fun to just play around with can be incredibly inspiring.
Colour correction is one of my big stock-in-trades and the new histogram based colour-correction tool [known as "Levels" in the Adobe universe] is very much a "Pro" addition and will mean I won't have to go to Combustion nearly as much as I have previously. Of course, being a "pro" I will still prep images in Combustion before I use them in Xara but if I need to tweak something once its embedded into a design, I should be able to sort it out without having to leave Xara. Brilliant!

I've voted for the "Some nice minor improvements" option, but I'm also not happy that new vector tools are so far down on the priority list.

What kind of new vector tools are you hoping for? What kind are there? I work in a pretty cutting edge industry, or so I thought, and from what I can see Xara has it all covered. What's left that isn't just a time-saving auto-generator type of thing?

Besides UltraEdit, Xara 4 was pretty much my fastest upgrade ever. I installed, decided I like the new features and bought it.

I didn't get that far. I read the "what's new" list and hit the "BUY" button immediately. I'm fairly confident it will be the best $57 I spend this year.

neodeist - yes it is a two way street. Treating non-professionals as less important or inferior users isn't appropriate either.

That's very true. Certainly in my case, I do at least as much work in my own time as I do whilst on-the-clock [probably more because I don't have to attend seven meetings and sit in on five conference calls before I get to work on my next project]. So whilst I am a "pro", I also use Xara extensively for my own work, which also makes me a "hobbyist", I suppose. I think any "pro' who thinks that every new feature has to have some application to them personally is ignoring the fact that different professions have different needs. e.g. I have no interest whatsoever in anything to do with print, as it is the one area that I studiously avoid in my work [and I have ways of getting around the blockheadedness of printers when I do have to deal with them] but I fully understand that the Xara guys would be shooting themselves in the collective foot if they didn't address the needs of print artists. If I had the attitude of some of the so-called "pro"s around here, I probably wouldn't have seen the value in Xtreme PRO over the normal version, yet I find plenty of very handy uses for some of the supposedly print-oriented features it contains. e.g. I have used Xara to take information from several PDFs and combine them into a single resource for customers. Without Xara's PDF import/export, I would be passing them three or four PDFs and leaving it to them to find the relevant details for themselves.

From X2 onwards it's clearly said Vectors are no longer important to us or Xtreme as a product.

How do you figure this? From my point of view, they have it well covered and are justified in putting other features in place to complement the already robust vector tool-set. A perfect example is the new HTML Export. I've been using Xara to make all my web graphics for 10 years or so now but it has always been a fairly tedious effort of exporting things one element at a time and then laying it all out in PageMill or whatever, and I could never really get it exactly how I wanted it to look because affordable web "design" packages really don't let you be too creative. Sure, I could spend up big on Dreamweaver except that 95% of my web work is for my band, which makes it hard to justify the expense [Dreamweaver costs more than my entire music software suite]. I'd also have to devote considerable time and effort to learn it. But now I can create entire web-sites using the most creative, design-oriented application I know. When I'm done, I export the lot in one go. Brilliant!
Better still, where I might once have passed a client on to someone with the right tools to do their website, I can now offer to do it for them and be fairly confident of doing a bang-up job. People who close their minds are bound to miss out on lots of opportunities that this sort of diversity offers up.

Most professionals create flash animations in FLASH, do image editting in PHOTOSHOP, use DREAMWEAVER to create html or better still handcode.

That is possibly true only of web "pro"s. In the past I have often had to produce content related to a job for other media. e.g. A promo for a new TV show can take weeks to work through, getting the look and feel right for both the show and the network. As well as doing 15 and 30 second versions of the promo, I would also be asked to provide a strip-ad for the printed programme guide plus something for a web-banner. Should I really have to go to the effort to keep current with Flash just for that [I own version 3]? Or to buy Photoshop [which I haven't found a use for since about 1999]? Again, it is a matter of thinking outside the box and seeing the opportunities that diversity brings with it.

If chasing the hobbyist dollar is what Xara want to do, good luck to them but in the meantime the likes of Illustrator or Expression will catch up to what made Xara the best vector application out there.

Not if the people who are using it are smart. I'll give you another tedious example from my own career. When I was beta-testing version 3 of Combustion, which is a competitor with After Effects, I had the kind of attitude you're expressing about putting a video editing tool in, along with the ability to export vector Flash animations. I saw it as watering down the purity of my favourite design tool at the time. Today however, the two things that make the strongest case for me staying with Combustion, now that After Effects has come so far with recent upgrades, are the video editing tool and the vector paint tool, which I mostly use for its Flash export. The very things I turned my nose up at, I now see are great strengths of the application overall and things that make it indispensible in my work. Same with Xara. I uninstalled Corel a few days ago because its been sitting on my HDD since I got a new computer last August and I haven't fired it up once.

This poll clearly shows it's split down the middle 50% are happy with the new RASTER features and 50% are probably not.

Maybe I'm an idiot but the one and only new raster feature I see is the addition of histogram colour correction in the XPE. That is one new feature out of half-a-dozen of similar importance. If anything, this version seems very focused on vector stuff, particularly text. Again, in the past I've been perfectly happy with the way text has been but the new text features in the last couple of versions give me more opportunities to use Xara, where once I might have gone over to Draw or something else. Now with the new HTML Export, the improved text takes on even more significance.

I think JokeArtist makes some very valid points, Xara should concentrate more on the vector tools, i don't see how anyone could disagree with that, given that the last updates didn't do anything in this direction.

Bollocks! Every "pro" who sees me working with Xara is completely blown away by what I can do in a single application and how incredibly quickly I can do it. When they see me a few days later using it again for some completely unrelated task, they usually scratch their heads wondering why the're stuck on a stupid Mac using Illustrator, Photoshop and Flash to do the same things. Their only saving grace is that we mostly work on a hourly rate, so at least they get to charge the client for more hours than I do [but I can charge more per hour, thanks largely to Xara].
Where are all these raster/bitmaps things you guys are banging on about? All I see is the XPE, which hasn't improved nearly as much as the main application in several versions. Everything else seems to me to be directly related to vector illustration, text [which is vector] and improving workflow [which benefits everyone].

I understand how people here defend Xara's course by saying they need to attract a wider audience with raster tools and that this new version will definately bring Xara more success.

I think this is a really narrow-minded view which shows how limited people's thinking can be. I don't see a new version as attracting a wider audience for Xara, I see it as allowing me to attract a wider client-base because I can do more things without having to outlay money, time and effort learning lots of applications that will not necessarily play well together. i.e. It allows me to be a master of one application, rather than some jack-of-all-trades who can use a lot of things reasonably well [which is where I would have seen myself a few years ago].

If you consider that since X1, they've mainly kept adding raster tools

WHAT FLAMING RASTER TOOLS!?!

Xara do come up with original ways to implement them effectively. An example is text repelling.

It is actually almost exactly the same implementation as Corel X4 [same with the new text previews].

It is not so completely different as you might think. The vector object in xara is actually a extruded polygon in z-depth, if you apply a bevel, it just adds some polygons. It uses the same approach as any other 3D software does.
The lights also already uses 3D space calculations with the target point the center of the object. So, yes ofcourse it will need some programming work but the leap may not be that big as you may think.

First off, bevel and extrusion are both very basic things and of incredibly limited value. Secondly, lights only work because the surfaces are very basic. The Maxxon thing only works because they have a very expensive, very sophisticated 3D engine behind it. Just because 3D is a vector-based process doesn't mean that its applicable to an application like Xara. I can't imagine the support hassles that would come from people who are used to working on crappy graphics cards who suddenly find that Xara Xtreme3D PRO expects them to have a 512Mb QuadroFX card in order to do real-time lighting and shadows. It would be a nightmare for Xara and would suck up too much development time for a very small reward.

Sorry [sort of] for the incredibly long-winded post but I am appalled at the incredibly narrow-minded attitudes displayed by some people here. The bottom line is that if you can't see value in this upgrade then you really need to take a good, long look at yourself and wonder why that is. This upgrade opens up more opportunities for me as a full-time, professional designer than any previous upgrade [and that's a lot because I started at version 2.0]. I looked at the list of incredible new features and was amazed at how quickly they had turned all this stuff around after 3.2. I fully expected teh upgrade to cost $99 and was completely blown away that they were offering all this cool stuff for half that! Why anyone who uses this application to earn even a fraction of their income would hesitate for even a second is completely beyond me.