Illustrator CS is much faster than previous versions at some things - like loading the saving. And they deserve credit for that.

I've been doing some tests with some very simple bitmap loading and saving. Load two digital camera jpeg photos. Make a copy of one of them and crop one of the bitmaps to blend over the other. I tried a bit of transparency blending - but the lack of grad transparency and feathering prevented me doing exactly what I want.

Anyway, saving the file on the old version took 3 minutes 30 seconds. The file was 450 Mbytes large. Yes seriously.

Illustrator CS can save the same file in 36 seconds. The file size is now down to 118Mbytes - a huge improvement.

So you want to know what it was in Xara X1? 0.6 seconds to save the same file. Yes less than one second. And the file saved was 5.6 Mbytes. Oh and of course I could do the grad bitmap blend and feathering to create a nice composition.

So Xara X is at least 30 times faster and produces files 20 times smaller for the same, pretty basic graphics production job. And that's compared to their latest 'new faster' version.

Adobe claim Illustrator is an all round general purpose graphics tool. That, in my opinion is claiming too much, as the above tests show. It is a fine illustration tool in some areas - it is not a general purpose graphics tool it claims to be.

And finally to answer Richards question - no we didn't invent anti-aliasing, but we were the first in the world to implement it in real-time using software on a vector drawing program (a long, long time ago now). The perceived wisdom at the time was that it was impossible - even some of my own developers claimed it was impossible.

I could list dozens of firsts which we've introduced to the industry that have found their way into most competitors. That is not to say they've looked at our code or anything like that. I'm sure they see a good idea, and like most good developers, try to improve on the best ideas out there. All modern software is built on the shoulders of those that went before.

The ability for us to be very smart about bitmap handling, by only embedding the original JPEG and not de-compressing the image in the native file, is a perfect example. We're the first drawing program in the world to do it (as far as I know) and the benefits are huge. Expect the feature to appear in our competitors. It may take years however.