Although I find XaraX easy to use, there are areas in the interface where XaraX strays a bit from the standard Windows guidelines. When I first started playing with Xara 2 a few years ago it took me a long time to get used to using it.

Some of the keyboard shortcuts, for example, are non standard (some hark back from the days of Artworks it seems). I also find that some of the dialog boxes are a little cluttered and that some of the more "custom" UI controls are a little counter intuitive.

I'm not sure exactly why, but when I use XaraX it always feels a little unpolished. It does its job very well but doesn't have the same feeling of attention to detail that some of the other software packages I use give me.

My personal pet hate (hate is a bit strong - more like pet annoyance) is that you can't dock the gallery windows. I find myself closing and opening them all the time when playing with a big drawing.

What I'd actually really like would be a custom gallery view (preferrably dockable to one edge) where I could drop in my favourite fonts, colours, line widths, brushes etc. Kind of like the favourites in Internet Explorer but for any type of XaraX "thing". And then I'd like to be able to be able to define an individual custom favourites box for different templates.

I know there are some more important functional things that need adding, but I feel that its worth getting whats there efficient and pleasant to use before adding lots of new stuff.

James