Xtreme Pro 4 way too big!

[jens g.r. benthien]

As sad as it is, only Gary understood what I meant. What's wrong with an installer that'll give the users a choice of the installed components?

I really give a damn on what you think about the code or if the storage space is just a cent or less per MB - all I want is to be able to have it MY WAY.

I guess none of you superheroes would accept glibbery kidneys as a breakfast in a 5 star hotel - you want a CHOICE, and you certainly wouldn't debate with the cook an how to prepare kidneys.

Nobody likes being forced to do what he doesn't like, not even you.

Got the idea now?

[pauland]

Jens, most, if not all of us understood what you meant. It's not as easy to do as you might imagine and I'm pleased Xara haven't wasted their time on it.

Yes, we get the idea. As the stones would say "you can't always get what you want". I'd move to another hotel, but then again I don't frequent five star hotels, nor are Xara charging five star prices for their software.

There are several features I'd like in Xtreme, several features they've put in that I'm not bothered about. I'll live with it because it's the best at what it does even if it's not as good as it could be. When something else comes along that's better and I can afford it, I'll go with that.

BTW I'm not upset about html generation, picture editing or 3D extrusion despite having a raft of Adobe CS3 software that does those things, plus a dedicated 3D modeller.

For some reason I use Xtreme rather than Adobe Illustrator. I wonder why?

Paul

[steve.ledger]

Jens - fair enough, and we got it honest.
But well, you've posted on a public forum and looks like you've opened a can of worms

Discussion is free and provided no-one get's way out of line and starts abusing others, I think it should continue as it is, but with a little more tolerance and objectivity from everyone agreed?

[willdean]

What's wrong with an installer that'll give the users a choice of the installed components?

What's wrong with it is it has a cost - it costs money to develop and it costs money to support. Every time Xara spend time and money on one feature they're not spending it on another.

Every on/off option you provide in the installer DOUBLES the number of different configurations people have. The application would also have to cope with funtionality which might or might not be present.

You might think that such costs are trivial, but supporting software is fantastically expensive, and one way to try and control this cost is to keep all your users' installations as similar to each other as possible.

Engineering is all about trade-offs, and however much you wish things to be different, I seriously doubt you're going to persuade anyone that trading a cent's worth of your customers' disk-space against even a single support incident is worthwhile.

[BONES]

As sad as it is, only Gary understood what I meant. What's wrong with an installer that'll give the users a choice of the installed components?

Because it might mean some other new feature doesn't get done. You think its trivial but there is no way to know as installers are often tied to licensing systems, which will be different for 32-bit and 64-bit, etc, etc. I understand your point completely, I just wouldn't consider it worth starting a thread about, let alone devoting very precious resources to implementing.

I really give a damn on what you think about the code or if the storage space is just a cent or less per MB - all I want is to be able to have it MY WAY.

And you do. You have Xara when you could have chosen any one of dozens of other applications instead. You installed it exactly where you wanted it installed [if you bother with stuff like that] and, as a percentage of you overall storage capacity, I imagine it takes up far less room than the first version you ever installed. In effect, Xara already takes up far less space than it once did, yet you want to be able to configure it in ways you were not able to previously.

I think there are far more pressing issues around installation. I still have to go through and re-do all of my preferences every time we get an update. I used to complain about it here but nobody else seemed to mind so I never pushed it. Now I just do it and don't let it get to me, but I still see it as a more pressing issue than an insignificantly small amount of potentially useful extra data that I might never use being copied to my HDD during installation.