Xtreme Pro 3.2 & Xtreme 3.2 Released!

[Peter Prewett]

Why indeed.
I don't think it is Magix policy to give free demos on their software - such faith they have.

As for which to get - what do you want to do with them?

It is interesting when they offer a free trial and then leave out part of the package.
How can one appraise what is for sale when you cannot see what is being sold.
Like taking a car for a test drive and being told you cannot see the dashboard until you buy it.

Just a bit more than the photo editor does, do not need Photoshop, perhaps have to get my head around Gimp.

[handrawn]

It is interesting when they offer a free trial and then leave out part of the package.
How can one appraise what is for sale when you cannot see what is being sold.
Like taking a car for a test drive and being told you cannot see the dashboard until you buy it.

Just a bit more than the photo editor does, do not need Photoshop, perhaps have to get my head around Gimp.

Not sure gimp will work as xara external editor on windows. Quick test shows it will open when double clicking in xara, but a question mark over whether it will save back correctly.

That said gimp is a very good editor indeed and can always use .png to transfer.
I use photoshop elements a lot - even though mine is version 2 it still does most of what I currently need [channel splitting being an exception].

[Odat]

The release notes say "This feature has been tested with Adobe Photoshop CS, Corel Paintshop Pro X and Gimp".

From the description of the feature, what's happening with stuff other than XPE (and probably Magix) is when it edits, it saves the jpeg to disk for editing, then invokes your editor, and watches to see when the file changes to automatically bring it in again.

In fact I recall mention that in order to support this the image is converted to a PNG if it's a jpeg, so that it doesn't suffer generation loss, with the side effect that it can make your Xar file tons bigger if you use a lot of large jpegs.

My assumption would be that this would work with anything that's capable of working with a PNG file.

[handrawn]

Hi Odat

Yep I read the release - that's why I said question mark because it apparently should, but for me it didn't when I did a test.
Using the long suffering xara cat clipart - exported to gimp 2.2.14 removed background with transparency/color to alpha, and saved - but it didn't load back into xara.
May be a path thing but I have it installed as windows default [+ gimp gap, with GTK 2.10.6-1].

Seems to work fine with PSE2 and PS6.

[remi]

Oh my, the new Update brings Albacore problems with PDF import, the PDF export isn't compatible with Corel Draw, there is this ominously layer bug, the progress bar error isn't repaired, the SVG export is not complete and SVG import isn't available in the year 2007, I don't see necessary improvements to the text tool, the text antialiasing problem isn't addressed, named colors aren't automatically added to the color bar, and all in all there are no new vector features available (no, I wouldn't talk about the missing scripting functionalities, because it seems to be utopian to expect such a thing from Xara).

All in all I'm really willing to support the further development of Xara Xtreme Pro. But I'm not willing to support these strategies to sold $49,- updates and increase the price tag for Xara Xtreme Pro from $199,- to $249,- and try to argue this with a bundle of (in my eyes) not so professional tools like Xara 3D there and another old MAGIX tool there. And that means, that I'm not willing to invest money in such kind of "progress".

I need a professional product with new vector tools and some of the discussed new feature ideas in this forum.

I will wait for the next upgrade/update, in order to see whether the Xara developers are really listen to the needs of their professional users and their tons of suggestions for a better Xara Xtreme Pro - postead already here in this forum.

Remi

[tonylondon]

I've decided to miss this update too.
It would appear also that Win 98 SE is no longer supported, so I guess I ought to wait until I get a new computer, and that means waiting for Vista SP1
Tony

[NeilH]

Thanks for all the comments (so far!) guys.

Here’s some information relating to several of the points that have come up in this thread:-

- Using Gimp as photo editor. This should work. Try changing the file format that’s used to transfer images to and from bitmap editors (Effects & Plug-ins tab of the options dialog). Try selecting png if you’re introducing transparency into an image that doesn’t already have some. See the “Effects & Plug-ins tab” help page for an explanation of the different bitmap transfer options. If you still have problems, please submit details of the Gimp version, example bitmap, etc.

- Win 98 SE support. We’ve officially dropped support for W98, but that’s only really because we no longer test on that platform. It will probably work fine, so try the trial version.

- Trial does not include Magix photo editor. This is only because Magix don’t yet have a time limited trial version of their editor that we could include. And because we include the very latest 2007 version (not an old version as implied by someone in this thread above), we couldn’t just give it away for free with the trial.

- Regarding Remi’s list of problems. The “ominous layer bug” seems only to be a problem with the photos in the downloadable clipart. We’ll fix that soon. You also say “named colors aren't automatically added to the color bar”. Can you explain that comment please? Named colors are no longer created implicitly by 3.2 as they were in older versions (they should never be), but when you create a named color explicitly it appears on the color bar, just as always.

- To ugrade or not to upgrade. As I mentioned in the announcement at the start of this thread, 3.2 is only a point upgrade for Pro users because 3.0 is only a few months old. So some owners may not want to upgrade. But because we’ve made so many general improvements while preparing the release of the new consumer product “MAGIX Xtreme Photo & Graphic Designer”, we wanted to make those improvements available to Pro users as well as Xtreme users now, along with the new filters that have been developed such as XPS and SVG export. There is quite a list of improvements and we expect that many Pro owners will want to have the best version of the program that's available, and that's now definately 3.2.

Thanks

Neil