Thank you and good bye! I'm no longer Xara's target audience.

[sgiff]

Since I've been in the mood to bitch about Xara lately I'll throw my two cents in on this thread.

No body really gives a flying flip about what gets put in as long as it stays lean and mean and loads quickly and stays uncluttered and so far I think Charles had done a pretty good job of that.

Let's not pretend that everything Illustrator does is based on postcript either. A lot of it's functionality now is just a hack because Postcript still doesn't support Alpha transparency as far as I know. It's on-screen rendering sucks for the most part. It creates huge files and requires tons of memory just to run.

Also, you can't say that xara was only designed to be a niche tool. A lot of people can't afford Photoshop so the photo editing tools are a good move i.m.o., and I think most would agree. A lot of the other features are really cool like the web export and I for one love the fact that all of this was integrated into the app, and yet the interface is still very clean and simple like it was in the beginning not cluttered like Adobe apps, and yet the program is still super fast and loads files far quicker than it's competitors.

Not having a version for the Mac was a really poor move on Xara's devs part. Right now they would be kicking Adobe's tail if they had done so years back or Adobe would possibly have bought the program, either way it would be taken seriously in the pro design arena.

Our biggest complaint and I think this thread echoes so many others is that Charles has long ago stopped listening to the user base and decided to ignore what most of us want the most and some of those things like zeroing out rotations and other basic vector stuff would be quite simple to implement. Gone are the days when Charles and Kate actually had some interaction with this forum and listened, although compared to some other more progressive developers they have never really been that close to it's user base. I mean it would have been really cool if they had put up a poll or something about the new Object Manager to get some initial feedback of what people wanted but no, it's just "here is the way it's going to be and you have to live with it". I think that's what really has most of us upset that have been loyal customers for years and years. They put in all of these cool features but rarely do they do anything specifically that the users have asked for.

And finally if they would have created an sdk for plugin developers that would integrate directly into the core app so we could have vector manipulation tools none of these bitch and moan sessions that come up every release would even exist because somebody out there would have created the features we want by now as a plugin.

[MarkMyWords]

I'm not sure if it is a case of not listening, the object gallery has many functions that have been requested before by lots of people. It may well be just too expensive or require too much time and other resources to implement new vector tools.

Covoxer tries to explain these things, but some of what is said goes way over my head.

[handrawn]

and I would add :

something that I specifically asked for after the release of xtreme 4 has appeared in xtreme 5

thread here:

http://www.talkgraphics.com/showthread.php?t=32193

it had support [and to be fair had been mentioned before] and it was implemented, and I for one am grateful,

this is the sort of thing that can really help me - not some unspecified airy fairy 'new vector tool' but making a basic tool work better

the same can be said of the multi-stop transparency

[MarkMyWords]

I'm sure I could specify some vector tools if you like steve?

[handrawn]

I'm sure I could specify some vector tools if you like steve?

I just don't think it helps to say 'give us more vector tools' and leave it at that as some do

Where specific requests are made that's good, especially if it is supported by a work flow example that demonstrates how it would be useful in
xtreme

Far more helpful to Xara too

There are some on these boards who say loudly that Xara is not listening to them, but I wonder if they try putting themselves in Xara's place?

@PHILT good post

[a4hire]

Im sure that Xara is doing what ever is best for business, and when the conditions are right for them they will make a Mac version , or add more vector tools or what ever seems to be the best business decision at the time.
There must be more market or demand for the web designer functions.