Quote Originally Posted by iamtheblues View Post
I attach a screen grab from a "What's New" search earlier today and it shows what some of us feared on the forum when Xara unleashed Web Designer.
Not much Talk about graphics these days. Most talk is either about Web design or Magic/Xara's extremely complicated pricing structure.
Bob, there is always web chatter around a new version of Xara Web Designer - the hint is in the name. So Xara has offered up 166 Business Templates and "improved" CSS3 features so it is a big plus for them to drive us all on-line to these resources. This is pure marketing as the numbers people see value in scooping up newbies interested in building for the web. Those of you who are genuine graphic artists just knuckle done and craft wonderful images but keep the tools they know (Xara Xtreme), which has no market revenue for Xara whatsoever. If I had any artistic skill, I probably be working with ArtWorks. Give Gare a burnt stick and he still produce art, but to communicate it he needs the web. Equally, I am in thrall to those who can take images all the way to print, a thing I stab at for my partner's artwork occasionally but it is a skill I have yet to master. I come to TG and somewhere there is a solution from you waiting to cover over my ignorance.

I think Xara has decided Desk Top Publishing is too niche, OpenText Fonts unnecessary and proper line management marginal.
To its credit, there are many features that rarely emerge but the innovation behind them is powerful: presentation sites and WYSIWYG documentation that is not Adobe PDF; anything that knocks down PowerPoint and Acrobat get my vote (bloated and fail screen readers so can marginalise people in large numbers; I work in business with a public-facing aspect).

Xara probably wants to move all functionality to the browser and keep us locked in over a web connection.

My personal wish is for some form of automation.
I still have Acorn's Risc PC running !Draw and being driven by a utility that has BBC BASIC controlling parameters to vector draw bevelled cogs and other arcania.
Xara still imports these outputs but i would prefer a few improvements that would leverage repeatability and productivity.

</rant>

Acorn