Xara Designer Pro X10 Released

[handrawn]

In fact Painter does a lot of stuff that Xara can't do, but it's not a general graphics program and doesn't pretend to be and isn't aimed at general graphics, so comparing them is a bit of a stretch.

painter as a program is designed for painters rather than designers, but it is every bit a graphics program as photoshop; people use it for painting, illustrating, cartooning, advertising and more besides

I said Xara is better than Adobe's suite of bloatware, hype-ware and menu-diving-ware

that might be what you meant; it was not what you said

my argument here is features+workflow = usefuleness and Xara keeps trying to battle Adobe on 'features' when their strength is clearly artist-centric workflow.

first off xara the company have said on more than one occasion that they are not trying to compete with adobe [serif is with affinity on mac]
secondly - there is absolutely nothing wrong with illustrator as a program [leaving aside the subscription issue] I use it a lot - it's workflow is often a lot better than xara, eg: live trace / live paint

generally speaking:

I can usually draw a cartoon better in raster than vector - vector lines are not as precise when you draw freehand fast; in fact I can get more subtle results [without chopping and changing] using a chisel nib fountain pen for inking than a wacom a lot of the time, they do not behave the same way - I am no fan of technology for it's own sake, and artists come in many different flavours

[speedsterharry]

One feature I miss from Artworks (Acorn's version of Xara DP) is the ability to have "internal" arrows instead of the external arrows we have now. The arrowheads can start at the end of a line (external) or finish at the start of the line (internal). I used that feature a lot for technical design.
I now have to fiddle with the positioning of the line end when I change the line width (because the arrowhead will get bigger and go a bit too far).

[Acorn]

One feature I miss from Artworks (Acorn's version of Xara DP) is the ability to have "internal" arrows instead of the external arrows we have now. The arrowheads can start at the end of a line (external) or finish at the start of the line (internal). I used that feature a lot for technical design.
I now have to fiddle with the positioning of the line end when I change the line width (because the arrowhead will get bigger and go a bit too far).

It may not heelp but if you convert the line to Editable Shapes you have a measure of control as the arrow point is now a control.

Also the SmartShape arrows have a control point at the tip.

Acorn