Originally Posted by
hseiken
I'm going to chime in this 'evolve' business and use the other profession, of sorts, I'm involved in and that's music.
One thing I get extremely annoyed with in the graphics community is that there's no MIDI for graphics despite the fact SVG exists and could be that. Vector is vector is vector. Except when it's Illustrator or Xara. This is annoying. There's PDF, but then it's proprietary and thus not really SVG, it's not MIDI. MIDI was developed between competitors! It was a way so that each company could actually make money working their niche while supporting other companies making music gear. No one in any medium wants to compete when they're on the 'working side' of things. Even with audio, which would be the 'rasterization side' of the things, like PNG/Gif/JPG, there has been some semblance of normalcy but this goes out the window when using layers. I don't blame Xara for this one, but Adobe. They continue to manipulate PSD format so that no one else ever can keep up and they lock their userbase on an every shrinking, ever price increasing, base.
As for 'features'...I find this be absolutely asinine in terms of complaint. With export, we're not making music, we're stuck in the backwards graphics world, where there's no MIDI, there's only every company trying to control the market rather than create a uniform format and then compete on workflow and cater to different styles of people's methods of creating graphics. In that world, you'd probably have a really awesome page layout software that could load up vector graphics from *any* other software, i.e. a universal midi. But no...that said, in the music world, also, the guitar never ages. People get better at playing it, find new techniques, discover their favorite tone, and claim it as their own. Even with samplers and synths, people will return to an old synth and find it had locked away in it sounds they never thought of because they simple never used it the way they tried years later. Art software is very much this. All of that. And so I say, it's not the art software that sucks, it's the industry's inability to lay down their swords on format and concentrate on make the artist COMFORTABLE. For me I put up with the format problems because the comfort is unmatched for me. I don't need things to MOVE FORWARD, because that's so arbitrary these days with everything that involves workflow. Again, in the music analogy, you've all listened to legendary tracks that were made with a simple 4 track system. You have, trust me. It wasn't 'tech' that made that album work, it was working the artform. The more people pay attention to that, and work with what feels good, the more you can both evolve as an artist and also buck the 'you must use this tool' attack against US, the USERS of software by locking us down to formats. I put out all my stuff in png format and if I absolutely have to work with others, I go that extra mile to make a PDF work with any version of whatever people I'm working with use to open and edit a PDF. If they're using photoshop, i export all my layers in Xara into pngs numbered with their correct layer order and instruct my partner in crime to put them with transparencies in that order.
But I've tried multiple tools even after buying xara, and I won't switch, even though I hate how it keeps bugging me to upgrade, I hate the cloud, etc. I have what I have and it works great. I don't think others using 'new tools' is anything other than 'grass is greener' syndrome in most respects, and the biggest problem that faces any xara user and in fact ANY graphics tool user is the stupid, absolutely abysmal state of format interchange.
You don't hate Xara, you hate formats. Because in the better world, you could load up the same file xara made in the 'newer cooler' tool, edit it, then bring it right back in to xara and keep working, just like I do with my music files. But that's not our world, and that's the problem that NEEDS to be solved. And it wont because Adobe is too fat to fail and too pig headed to cooperate.
EDIT: I'll also add that the video format BS is also problematic in the same way. This prick waving to control markets garbage hurts us as artists.
