Xara Xtreme verison 4

[pauland]

Crap, I missed that one!

Is it possible to get this feature without the bloat?

Will there be a Xara 4 Pro LITE or something?

Again, Xara may be able to take on Illustrator, but trying to go after InDesign and Photoshop (and, what? SketchUp and Maya now with the 3D too?) as the same time is simply stupid! "You can't satisfy everybody" goes the saying, but isn't that exactly what they're trying to do?

Xara sits in a difficult place. It's ease of use is favoured by professionals and hobbyists alike. It's missing some features that professionals want and it's had a patchy ride in terms of interoperability with it's established professional rivals (mainly due to import export issues). The non-professionals are particularly price sensitive and happy to have as much 'bang for the buck' as possible via the 'one stop shop'. Now being owned by Magix, the product seems to be embracing the middle ground and still pushing forward features for professional users.

I think the product still has the great features we all love - speed and ease of use in an uncluttered interface. The bloat (as you call it) can easily be ignored.

I suspect (though I don't know) that the enhancements in the middle ground have been as important to Xtreme sales as the more professional features, so in that sense the 'bloat' is helping to finance development of more professional features too.

The DTP, photo editing and web page features that have been incorporated into Xtreme are not a sign that Xara is attempting to make inroads on the inDesign/Photoshop/Dreamweaver markets - it's simply a recognition that the middle ground of Xtreme users has a need for such features at a fairly basic level. The 3D features come from Xara 3D and while I may never use them, plenty do. The 3D is hardly attempting to be in competition to full-blown 3D software.

None of us are imagining that Xtreme is really competing directly with Adobe (except as a vector package), but even those (professionals especially) with access to lots of Adobe software will still use Xtreme as a quick filler for jobs that might otherwise have been done with Adobes larger offerings, but which are now easily within Xtremes grasp.

Xtreme is now fitting into a working pipeline better than ever.

Comparing the development effort we have seen in very recent times compared to what we saw previously, I can only say that the strategy must be paying off. While none of us are going to use every feature of Xtreme, just looking at the forums on talkgraphics we can see that the new features and bug fixes are getting a very welcome reception. Development is getting better and faster.

Good job Charles & Co (but where are those nested layers?).

Paul