Bouton's Wish List for 9 and 10

To get my feet wet with Xara and its tools, i tried the Shape tool for a simple B&W tracing of a hand drawn logo.
The Shape tool for my taste is very good for organic freehand work, but for tight tracing, it feels too loose and 'artistic'.
It felt strange to place the points of a shape first and then adjust the smooth shapes afterwards.
Oh Boy, I tried 2 characters with the Shape tool and finally found the Pen tool, to do the other 9 in the same amount of time.
The Pen Tool saved my life in this job (did not want to switch back to AI), but there is a some room for improvement.


1. Add the ability to move an already placed path point by keeping a certain key pressed - in Illustrator this is Space. great too quickly move a point to a different position, without changing the tool.
2. Make it possible to break the tangents while dragging them. This enables the user to adjust the incoming shape and create a sharp angle.

or short: SPACE + drag moves the point, just drag moves the tangents, SHIFT + drag brakes the tangent and moves the outgoing tangent

posted this in another thread already...sorry for double post, but it seemed to be valid in both places

+3

Great suggestions and a good location to put them.

They might never happen, but I like the Pen tool properties you propose.


-g

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Gare

+3

They might never happen, but I like the Pen tool properties you propose.

-g

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Hm - That does not sound too promising....
Seems like the vector tools are considered 'robust' without need for change. Coming from Software development myself, this makes sense.
But also seeing the movement away from formerly loyal Adobe clients to alternatives, there is a chance to bring them to Xara if they feel home right from the start.
Not after a detour to the registry, to find out the beloved pen tool is only doing half of the job they are used to ;)
I see a big chance for smaller apps like Xara there (been using Manga Studio for the last two months and i only open PS to finish off the picture for the printshop).
Anyways, thanks for the encouragement :cool:

We will see.

Speaking about wish lists: could we have just a teeny bit of CAD in the program? Or just an option to label an object with it's properties? For instance: it would be jolly nice to draw a line and give it a label that shows it's length or a square with a label that show's it's area. We know Xara is keeping track of these properties (it's in the tool bar after all) so it shouldn't be too much of a hassle to write a routine whre one can label an object with a chosen property.

+1!

I like that!

It reminds me of the Inspector Panel in Freehand.

-g

I would like to launch a version in Portuguese, for the Brazilian market is the 3rd largest advertising market in the world, I think this xara losing money not to make the version in Portuguese.

Well after many years of upgrading I finally stopped upgrading because so many of the features that have been asked for have been ignored. Now Xara Pro has drifted far from being a drawing app to some kind of weird do everything app that is more focused on doing Web stuff. I didnt upgrade the last time and most likely wont upgrade this time unless of course they actually add some cool features for the people that still like using it for its vector art capabilities. However in the spirit of self torture and misery, I will list some of the features I would like to see:

1. Repeat previous command/function
2. Rotation handles for selected bezier points
3. Illustrators line width scaling from any point on a drawn path.
4. Real vector brushes ala illustrator or DrawPlus, Expression
5. A smooth pixel based airbrush brush that can paint within the boundary of a vector shape for shading etc. so click on a shape, grab the airbrush, paint. Would eliminate the need for a mesh tool which is cumbersome and tedious when trying to illustrate complex blends and shading.
6. Perspective grid editing/drawing
7. Being able to copy a vector shape and paste it into Photoshop as a vector shape.
8. 16 Bit export of tiff images
9. Toolbar widget for centering/aligning objects so we don't have to go into the align menu every time. So annoying because its used so often.
10. Make a setting for contour so that you can set default to one blend instead of 5 because 90 percent of the time when I do a contour its only 1 step that I need.

Darn, Sgiff. Sounds like you actually want them to program something, instead of just adding new bolt-on raster effects.

I guess it is impossible to have a real Swiss Army Knife program that excels in all areas. You want better vector tools; I want better photo tools; I'll bet there are lots of folks out there who want better website processing. And then there's the page layout people, who'd love to be able to publish iBooks and ePub right from the program.

It's a small program from a small company. Not enough money to get a gang of ace programmers in Hyderabad to sort it out. Way it is... enjoy it for what it is. Have to tell you, my P&GD 10 upgrade is an insane bargain at only US $35!

I would love to see most of what "sgiff" listed in #39. But if you come to TG as frequently as I do and hit "What's New?" you will see the large majority of the threads are about web design. Now it's not only me that's going to think, if I was running Xara, I would concentrate on the web bit, to hell with the vector part and that's why we see all of these plugins. I wouldn't hold my breath for proper vector brushes and the rest of your list it's going to be more of the same.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Albacore

I would love to see most of what "sgiff" listed in #39. But if you come to TG as frequently as I do and hit "What's New?" you will see the large majority of the threads are about web design...

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I understand what you are saying about the web crap. It is the same at Serif's forums...the majority of the threads are web-related.

But those numbers don't actually tell the whole story. What these companies are trying to do with their WYSIWYG web authoring software is simply going to generate more need for support than drawing stuff does. It may well be that the web stuff sells more at Xara. Great. Then they ought to devote more to the web stuff.

We as consumers can help Xara devote more time to the web development crap. Stop buying upgrades to XDP when they choose to just string users along with unimportant tid-bits. I'm going to make that choice this time around.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by sgiff

However in the spirit of self torture and misery, I will list some of the features I would like to see:

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Ha!ha!ha!

I would love to see any of your suggestions in the next version.

It's indeed a torture in the sense that xara is still the most stable, ergonomic, fastest A to B vector program available. A couple of well targeted innovations would surely attract more graphic professionals to use it. There is no need to add a million features.

Not much innovation has sprung in the land of vector drawing in the last years, especially in the area of simplicity and clever user interfaces.

Marc

Hey Jon, the thing is the best code written was written 15 years ago or more when they were putting in the initial code for the super fast render engine which still beats anything on the planet for vector, then you had the extremely easy and intuitive tools that were part of the core program like easy corner rounding drop shadows, all stuff which was put in when the company was small so please don't say it takes a gang of ace programmers to make it happen. Also, the fact is they have been putting in features for users that want web design, photo manip and other tools like the ones you want for years while not focusing nearly as much on requests from people that would like to see some time spent improving the drawing/art functionality. Thanks for your comments.

We can now change the title of this topic to: Bouton's Wish List for version x11 (because x10 didn't have them!)...

I'll change the topic and hope someday someone with some spare time will grant one of these wishes!

;)

Gary

You forgot "PRETTY PLEASE" ;)

Perhaps I did, Fred.

And perhaps I didn't.

;)

-g

Personally, I think this thread should be retired and a new one started.

Why? Perhaps those at Xara who actually bother to read these posts get weary of reading through the multitude of long wish-lists, knowing that they mean little or nothing to those in charge. A new thread *might* bring back focus.

I'm with you, Mike. You want to start a new one?

Me, I'd only ask that members refrain from a "laundry list" of personal desires, and present a terse, serious— and from an engineer's point of view. a do-able feature or two, such as being able to make your own Pressure Profile Brush. I like the Painter-like scatter brushes of little images, but sometimes you want/need a calligraphic pen—that has a hidden (underlying) spine you can go back and edit with the Shape tool. Corel, Illustrator, Xara. Only Xara has no such feature.

Perhaps if we keep the posts well-reasoned and brief, they'd be easier for TPTB to sift through them. It's worth a try.

I agree completely with Masque that someone is forgetting Xara is a vector drawing program.


++++++++++++++++++++++Done++++++++++++++++++++++++

The new thread addressing version 11 wishes is


RIGHT HERE


My Best,



Gary

Gary, this is probably a web design feature but it should apply to straight graphics drawings: each composite shape should have a Xara-generated Name that reflects some of its basic attribute in its filename rather than producing a string of numbers for png/jpgs that change on each publish. It is so wasteful having to Name all your own assets manually, especially imported images. Circle-diameter would be the simplest, Grouped_shape-width-height-rotation-live. Some shorthand that gives meaning to a blob. Images would be easy: Picture-name-scale-rotation-live.
I don't care what it is, they simply should not be arbitrary numbers, more usable for humans. After all it is there to do our bidding.

Acorn

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