Interview with Charles Moir

[Karateed]

Wonderful article Anthony. I used to own a BBC so I'm familiar with some of his software.....

[Gare]

I have to agree with Mike on several points. Both the Macintosh and Adobe communities have expressed outrage at Adobe's new licensing policy, which is just a logical extension of corporate greed. Which will indeed create an opening, which I really hope Xara can fill.

It's all about marketing, period, forget the false sense of security in the ivy covered walls of pure academia and research. Xara has the goods, now it's time for a successful marketing strategy. Does everyone realize how Illustrator became the #1 vector drawing program? More than 10 years ago, CorelDRAW had almost 90% of the Windows market for vector drawing programs. They stumbled as their CEO had some dirty deal accusations to answer for, and never regained to this day the momentum they had. Adobe, on the other hand, at the same time, saw 54% of their Photoshop revenue coming from Windows, and decided to give a truly anemic Windows Illustrator some serious attention. Since 1996 or so, Illustrator has been basically equivlant on both the Mac and the PC for features, and the company is so serious about the product they recast the code a few years ago to get rid of legacy code crap.

I'd like to see Xara taught in higher education, like Illustrator is, and CorelDRAW isn't these days. That was one monumentally sound move that Adobe wangled: to get courses taught in Illustrator at universities. Because this creates generations of users.

A good place to start with this might be to request a course in Xara at Lynda.com, no? If enough people ask for something, eventually smart merchants get the idea.

My Best,

gary

[pauland]

Lynda.com is only interested in doing work for technology used by people willing to shell out their subscription fee - essentially professionals and serious amateurs. I don't think that Xara's market penetration would make it something that Lynda.com would see as being of interest to their subscribers.

Xara is seriously flawed for working in the existing professional pipeline dominated by Adobe. Established agencies have no interest in a single software product that does a lot of things well, but none very well. Xara software does great static website creation, but is useless for large sites or serious CMS integration. The drawing capabilities are good but seriously falling behind their competitors (and not just Adobe competitors).

Magix's heart is in the consumer/semi-professional market, not the professional market. They couldn't even capitalise on the notion of bringing Xara to the resurgent Mac market where there is less competition.

You are entirely right about people being less than happy with Adobe these days.

[AntonyF]

ting[/B], period, forget the false sense of security in the ivy covered walls of pure academia and research. Xara has the goods, now it's time for a successful marketing strategy.

I agree. I need to tread a careful line on my comments - I worked at Xara, and of course am still involved a bit (hence TG) and I do that because I like the products and many of the people there. But working in marketing at Xara was frustrating because, well, there wasn't really any when I was there. And Charles' disdain for marketing in the article really explains a lot. But I guess if your first product sells bucketloads by word of mouth alone, the value of marketing must be harder to appreciate. Sadly, products rarely work that way! Particuarly in such a competitive landscape as the PC market.

I think anyone that uses is it hooked - I still use it every day. But there's so much potential to get the word out there and make it bigger. An autocratic company can achieve brilliance yet also be limited.

[handrawn]

have a look here:

http://www.talkgraphics.com/showthre...ble&highlight=

so far [20.22 GMT 16 jan12] no reply - ok that's maybe because it's a known issue - but nobody in the true professional market is going to put up with c**p like this, but the 'consumer' market just might - nuff said

[mwenz]

Heh heh, haven't spent much time on the Adobe InDesign or PhotoShop forums lately, have we? The number of stupid issues and work-arounds is astounding.

But I do agree. I just came on the forum and saw the other thread and responded. To add to that post because it is more pertinent here, I don't generally copy multiple objects across multiple layers and don't know if I would have ever noticed the issue without that post.

Xara isn't alone in its issues. While I do not experience many of the problems that are recurring issues with InDesign the Adobe forums that show up everyday, I suspect one day I will. At least if I purchase a Mac. Seems many of the recurring issues are ironically related to the Macs.

Take care, Mike

[Gare]

I don't believe it's any sort of consolation that, "Oh, you think it's bad, just look at Adobe!..."

That mindset reminds me of Microsoft's bumper stickers after Apple did some unusually, above average, trashy commercials. The bumper sticker? "We suck less."

Once I'm done laughing about it, I'm left pretty empty and wondering what ever happened to the pursuit of excellence.

My Best,

gary

[handrawn]

I use CS5 photoshop

I have yet to discover anything as basically crass as this - if you have examples [windows - I don't use mac] I'd love to be forewarned..

[mwenz]

Gare, I didn't mean to express a caviler attitude about the state of software today (or any other day). It isn't any consolation, I know that and didn't mean it in a conciliatory way, either.

I guess all I was meaning to express is that Xara is not alone in having faults, and that it is not a "professional" versus "consumer" software/user issue. Plus I suppose I was reacting to the phrase "nobody in the true professional market is going to put up with c**p like this...".

It is amazing what the "true professional" market puts up with every day regardless of the vendor. I find issues I need to work around on a too consistent basis with Corel, Xara, Adobe CS products (ID, PS, Flash, DW), Serif, PhotoLine, etc. They all should fix the stuff.

Heck, I just posted a message regarding a long-time Xara user asking about exports of JPEGs at 150 dpi not being the same dimensions as the file. What one needs to do to obtain their desired results shouldn't need to happen, either.

I want all the software that I use fixed to the point of being accurate according to what it says on the tin. Being the pessimist (or perhaps realist) that is not going to happen.

In handrawn's example of the copy/paste across multiple layers cropping up in the 7 series, I think the software just wasn't vetted during its beta phase in all scenarios. Some of the people on this board have likely done some complex programming. I have. After making changes in code, especially extensive changes, it is darn easy to overlook something being broken that wasn't previously broken.

Please note that I am not trying to make excuses for Xara. I can find plenty of faults with how Xara makes decisions and how that affects the software (aside from bugs and regressions)--I already posted some of my opinion in this thread.

Take care, Mike