Heard Xara canned all the programmers who were working on the drawing products. Can anyone confirm or deny?
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Heard Xara canned all the programmers who were working on the drawing products. Can anyone confirm or deny?
I would like to read it for myself, you link us to that bit of info???
Thanks
And WELCOME to the forums [img]/infopop/emoticons/icon_smile.gif[/img]
Richard [img]/infopop/emoticons/icon_wink.gif[/img]
---Wolff On The Prowl---
where did you hear this rumor? From Xara, Corel, Adobe, Macromedia? Or did you have a bad dream and had problems to differentiate between dream and reality?
BTW, XARA does feature just drawing apps, nothing else, so I guess the little green man in your ear wanted to fool you.
jens
jens g.r. benthien
designer
http://www.sacalobra.de
----------//--
If you don't know how to dream you'll never be a designer.
----------//--
quickdrawmcgraw, yours is the kind of irresponisble posting NO ONE should EVER commit: no facts, no links, just blabbering.
Xara have just released WebStyle 3 and is poised to launch Xara 3D 5 quite soon and I know that development of Xara X still goes on. There are no good reasons to believe they are not still in business.
K
www.xaraxone.com/FeaturedArt/kn/
www.klausnordby.com/xara
to leave by the portal from under which you crawled.
I would never trust any specious message like yours from a person who lists no information about him/herself in his or her profile.
Get a life.
Gary
Gary Priester
Moderator Person
<A HREF="http://www.gwpriester.com" TARGET=_blank>
www.gwpriester.com </a>
XaraXone
Gary: "to leave by the portal from under which you crawled."
For once, you stated the case better than I did. :-)
K
www.xaraxone.com/FeaturedArt/kn/
www.klausnordby.com/xara
Now I can't get in on all the bashing fun [img]/infopop/emoticons/icon_frown.gif[/img]
I already welcomed him to the forums......shame on me, many slaps on the wrists [img]/infopop/emoticons/icon_biggrin.gif[/img] [img]/infopop/emoticons/icon_biggrin.gif[/img]
Richard [img]/infopop/emoticons/icon_wink.gif[/img]
---Wolff On The Prowl---
Richard, that'll teach you to say "Welcome, stranger" to a possibly strange stranger. :-)
K
www.xaraxone.com/FeaturedArt/kn/
www.klausnordby.com/xara
You all really pounced on him quick enough. As unlikely as it sounds, I would like to hear directly from Kate what's going on.
Sheffield Abella
sheff@sheff.com
www.sheff.com
WHAT?? No slaps?? Darnit!! [img]/infopop/emoticons/icon_biggrin.gif[/img] [img]/infopop/emoticons/icon_biggrin.gif[/img]
Richard [img]/infopop/emoticons/icon_wink.gif[/img]
---Wolff On The Prowl---
I wrote Kate, silly worrier I am, and she just brushed the matter off as not even worth commenting on, citing the poster's total lack of any evidence or source. I conclude it's nothing to worry about at all.
K
www.xaraxone.com/FeaturedArt/kn/
www.klausnordby.com/xara
I've got another bit of insider info for you. Microsoft is going to lay off all their programmers, too. But don't tell anybody you got this scoop from me.
Check it out at www.idonothavealife.com.
Back to lurking.
.joroho.
http://www.joroho.com/initials.gif
I'm not worried. Even if that was true I think
Xara is 20 years ahead competition. I'm 41 now, my life expectation is about 65 (I work in advertising and this takes about 15 to 20 years
of life expectation plus the cigarrettes )in normal operating conditions. I'm sure it want be a problem leaving Xara as it is.
At my company we work with Freehand,Illustrator, Corel and Xara. But all illustrations are made in Xara and exported AI/EPS or bitmap format to the others. The "souplesse", performance and "touch" of Xara are unbeatable. I've tried numerous apps
but none like Xara. At least 20 years ahead competition.
emel
Heard it from a competitor who has been interviewing ex-Xara programmers for the last couple of weeks and has hired 3 already. Apparently Xara fired all 15 of their developers.
<BLOCKQUOTE class="ip-ubbcode-quote"><font size="-1">quote:</font><HR>Originally posted by RAMWolff:
I would like to read it for myself, you link us to that bit of info???
Thanks
And WELCOME to the forums [img]/infopop/emoticons/icon_smile.gif[/img]
Richard [img]/infopop/emoticons/icon_wink.gif[/img]
---Wolff On The Prowl---<HR></BLOCKQUOTE>
<BLOCKQUOTE class="ip-ubbcode-quote"><font size="-1">quote:</font><HR>Originally posted by quickdrawmcgraw:
Heard it from a competitor...<HR></BLOCKQUOTE>
Sure... and I heard the moon's made of green cheese but I can't post a URL to back that up either!
Peter
Peat Stack or Pete's Tack?
PS Perhaps you'd be better off back under your bridge with the other trolls!
Peter,
don't give up so easily, here's a link to prove your theory. [img]/infopop/emoticons/icon_wink.gif[/img]
http://www.yump.com/images/wolfgang_run.gif
Didn't you hear about the moon landing conspiracy theory where it was all allegedly filmed on earth?
Rumour has it that the cheese was plasticine and was filmed in the UK somewhere [img]/infopop/emoticons/icon_biggrin.gif[/img]
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Graeme
What area of the world do you live in, who was the competitor, etc?
Sounds like your are just fooling around.
Hard facts please, not rumor. [img]/infopop/emoticons/icon_mad.gif[/img]
http://talkgraphics.infopop.net/1/Op...&ul=1101906325 [img]/infopop/emoticons/icon_smile.gif[/img] Eye Site Web Design
Why, I’m afraid I can’t explain myself, sir, because I’m not myself, you know...
- Lewis Carroll
I live in London, UK. My buddy works for Serif (www.serif.com) in Nottingham, UK and he says that they have been hiring the ex-Xara guys. I checked up with him today and he confirmed that Xara have fired all their developers. Not sure about the ZY modules but the drawing software is dead.
I am a Xara user and a fan for many years so give me a break.
<BLOCKQUOTE class="ip-ubbcode-quote"><font size="-1">quote:</font><HR>Originally posted by Dale Landry:
What area of the world do you live in, who was the competitor, etc?
Sounds like your are just fooling around.
Hard facts please, not rumor. [img]/infopop/emoticons/icon_mad.gif[/img]
http://talkgraphics.infopop.net/1/Op...&ul=1101906325 [img]/infopop/emoticons/icon_smile.gif[/img] http://www.eyesitewebdesign.com
Why, I’m afraid I can’t explain myself, sir, because I’m not myself, you know...
- Lewis Carroll<HR></BLOCKQUOTE>
If Quickdraw had said this about Adobe, no one would have believed him. But since we're talking about Xara, it's plausible.
Not having heard from Kate and with no updates on Xara's website since May leads one to believe in at least the possibility of Xara going away.
All we've heard from Kate has come from Klaus. No offense, but it's secondhand. I would like to see Xara update their pages. I would like to see this "Xara 3d v5" that we've heard about it seems like months ago.
I don't want it to happen. I'm an avid Xara user, but I've seen abandonware happen before.
I've never heard of Serif or any of their products. I really don't care who makes what. I try to choose the best of breed in software. I will continue to use Xara until something better comes along.
Sheffield Abella
sheff@sheff.com
www.sheff.com
Serif crossed my mind when this was mentioned as, and I may be worng, they're the only credible UK software company with drawing apps (DrawPlus6, PagePlus - DTP, and PhotoPlus - Bitmap). I've got them all and I still find Xara wins hands down over everything else.
I really hope that if there is any truth to Xara letting its programmers go, that it is not with the intention to extinguish XaraX. Maybe they're hiring "new blood" - who knows....
It begs the quesion though - if Xara3D 5 is still in development, who is doing the programming? Is it a different team and does this explain why every Xara product seems to be made by different programmers?
It would be a very, very black day if XaraX or rather its successor was mothballed [img]/infopop/emoticons/icon_frown.gif[/img]
Long live Xara.
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Graeme
Now that I've seen Serif's website and perused their products I'm very impressed. Without having a try before you buy download of DrawPlus I really don't know how it stacks up against Xara, but I suspect that it suffers from the same weaknesses.
On the other hand, I am very impressed by the CONTENT of the site and ease of navigation. I like their online manual. If I were to compare the Xara to Serif, I would say based on website content and consistency alone Serif would be a winner. Their products seem to have a unity that is lacking in Xara's products.
But until I have demo of DrawPlus, I see no reason to switch...yet. Serif is doing now what I wish Xara would be doing. They have employees responding to customers in newsgroups. Xara seems to rely on its community of users to provide support. Xara really should have their own forum on their site rather than a third party hosting it.
If indeed Xara's engineers are now working on Serif's products, one can only hope they will produce something awesome.
Sheffield Abella
sheff@sheff.com
www.sheff.com
[This message was edited by Sheffield Abella on July 10, 2002 at 10:12.]
Drawplus is packed with all sorts of nice things but its basic drawing engine doesn't touch Xara's for speed and efficiency. There's no feathering and only basic transparency support.
There's a whole load of other features that are very nice but Drawplus lacks the facilities that gives Xara the edge.
One real gripe with DrawPlus that puts me right off it, is total lack of vector export facilities. You can't even export a rectangle in anything other than a metafile even then it may come over as 300 nodes!
I've bought every version of DrawPlus since 3.0 in the hope that it would improve... then I discovered XaraX! The irony of it all...
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Graeme
Hopfully!!!!!!!!
I went out to the DrawPlus site (serif.com) and checked it out, it seems VERY similar to XaraX in many ways and Sheffield is right, very nice navigation and seems really clean and well maintained!!!
Features that look a little too similar to me are:
Auto Trace Bitmap to Vector
Shadow Tool
Mould tool
Fill are very "Xara" in how they were explained
Chain Lines are like the Brushes (hmmm, wonder if they cause error messages and then the program goes 'by-by' [img]/infopop/emoticons/icon_biggrin.gif[/img])
Roll overs and other web features...
It goes on and on and on and on..............
I am having my doubts about trashing this guy so much, maybe he is offering us some info that may be valid. So why not get as much info as we can about this whole situation and if it's true then we need to accept it if it's not then we kill the bastard [img]/infopop/emoticons/icon_biggrin.gif[/img] [img]/infopop/emoticons/icon_biggrin.gif[/img] [img]/infopop/emoticons/icon_biggrin.gif[/img] [img]/infopop/emoticons/icon_biggrin.gif[/img] (Really, I'm a nice guy, reallly I am [img]/infopop/emoticons/icon_biggrin.gif[/img] [img]/infopop/emoticons/icon_biggrin.gif[/img] [img]/infopop/emoticons/icon_biggrin.gif[/img] [img]/infopop/emoticons/icon_biggrin.gif[/img])
As for the transparency limitations and feathering being absent, if they indeed have brought on board the "fired" designers (nothing worse than pissed off geeks!!) they might just do a version 7 real soon!! Including all of that.
So if Xara is bringing on board NEW BLOOD to spice things up and hopfully improve things then maybe this other company will give the fire under Xara that they might need and WANT (sometimes we all wish we were the bigger fish in the pond but then we get bored when it happens)!!! We all need to have a competitivness, that's what keeps us moving forward. You really can't compare XaraX to Draw or other apps. It beats the pants off all those others, AND they are way to expensive, while XaraX and it's commpanion products very affordable. So XaraLtd. really is in a class all it's own.
So here comes DrawPlus with, JUST MAYBE, some X X'ers working on it to build it up. Just gives XaraLtd. more incentive to do better and better!!!
What's that old saying from the "book": "Don't judge, least you be judged" Let's see first then decide folks!!!
Richard [img]/infopop/emoticons/icon_wink.gif[/img]
---Wolff On The Prowl---
[This message was edited by RAMWolff on July 10, 2002 at 10:55.]
I'm getting paranoid now.... what if it's a merger? XaraPlus7?
DrawPlus definitely needs a some serious attention by experienced artists/programmers in that it needs to get many things thought through/fixed and made more interactive and compatible with other products. It was only in version 5 did the lines scale with the drawings when you resized it!
Are there any other Xarans here that have tried to use Serif Drawplus and liked it?
--
Graeme
Last I heard which was very recently, Xara 3D 5 is almost ready to ship. As you all know, Xara does not like to ship until they are satisfied the product is as good and bug free as possible before they release.
Development for Xara X continues, although I have not heard any mention of a release date.
Xara is a small company committed to producing high quality products.
Gary
Gary Priester
Moderator Person
<a href="http://www.gwpriester.com">
www.gwpriester.com </a>
XaraXone
Hi everyone
I've only just come onto this forum and found this thread and it leaves me more than a little disturbed. However, on mentioning this to my partner, he THINKS that before Xara became Xara and was Computer Concepts, they did a VERY similar thing once Impression Publisher (or one of its derivatives) had been dumped and Artworks had been released in that they fired all the programmers. There was obviously a programmer there to do some tidying up and sort out bug fixes etc, but he firmly believes this to be the case. There was then a long gap before Xara Studio came onto the market. Incidentally, my partner has only a few months ago given up with Impression and started using PagePlus8. Has some very nice features but not the easiest of programs to get your head around from my experience - I'm a Ventura user myself.
In addition, we both met Kate Moir at a meeting in London and certainly, my partner was diffinitely not impressed in that he felt her to be a nasty piece of work. Sadly, although he could be wrong here, he's normally right in summing people up very quickly.
I also have DrawPlus albeit version 5. However, although I tried it (not very seriously) I wasn't impressed and soon removed it as I felt that XaraX was so much more superior to it. I've mentioned this to sales people from Serif a number of times when they've called to see how I'm getting on with the DrawPlus and at that time they hadn't een heard of XaraX let alone what it was!
So what is the truth about this? Well we'll find out in due course but how long will that be? Until something concrete is announced I suppose we'll just have to be patient.
Tracey
with Serif is that they are a pile em high, sell em cheap company.
I used to have PagePlus and the free Draw tool - before the web appeared so that's 9 or 10 years ago.
And ever since then they phone me every few weeks. They've never (at least the gonks on the phone haven't) heard of Xara.
I don't want to spend two days of my time finding out that Draw is worse than XaraX. Even if it's only £10.
I've started slamming the phone down on them. I just hope the rumours aren't true.
www.bricksandbrass.co.uk
Somebody is playing with us, don't you get it.
Here we have a situation that a new user with no profile who is addicted to Xara (I quote "I am a Xara user and a fan for many years so give me a break") visits this Xara forum for the first time, exactly at the moment that Xara is firing their developers, Xara is doing more marketing than ever, Xara just released Webstyle 3 and informed Gary that the future looks bright with more products to be released. Suddenly they don't fire a handful of developers; they fire the whole bunch. Trust me, somebody is laughing his *ss of the way you folks believe his story [img]/infopop/emoticons/icon_biggrin.gif[/img] [img]/infopop/emoticons/icon_biggrin.gif[/img] [img]/infopop/emoticons/icon_biggrin.gif[/img]
Don't you get it...just since after we all got frustrated with Xara we read a post like this [img]/infopop/emoticons/icon_wink.gif[/img]
Quickdrawmcgraw; nice try, but you're not going to have any luck with me [img]/infopop/emoticons/icon_cool.gif[/img]
I have contacted Serif Inc. and am coorasponding with the US manager right now, who will get in touch with the UK folks and ask "what's up??" and he will be back in touch with me later about this. I asked on behalf of MYSELF to draw no further attention to Xara Ltd. So maybe he can shed some light on this matter. I will report back here ASAP!!!
Hey, it doesn't hurt to ask!! Right??
Richard [img]/infopop/emoticons/icon_wink.gif[/img]
---Wolff On The Prowl---
Everybody,
just to add my tuppence worth to this sad thread: Kate sent me the beta of Xara 3D 5 two days ago (see my respective posts in the X3D forum ..).
She told me that the release date ist to be very very soon. I don't give you any exact time frame here. Not only because I found some bugs that need to be fixed, but the date Kate gave me was not an official one.
Anyway, X3D5 IS EXISTING, I have it in my hands and it rocks!
I can't see any reason why she would have sent it to me if it was not going to be released pretty soon. And to finish it completely they will need ... programmers, right!
My opinion to this case (and I am NOT an insider, it's purely personal):
Gaussian is right when he says that Xara is doing more marketing than ever.
Right because they did not do ANY serious marketing at all before. And my guess is that Xara did not sell THAT much of their products in the last years. Which is a shame but just due to this non-existant marketing.
That may be why Xara was concentrating on getting distributors in the past and this may be as well the reason why Xara is focussing on easy-sell consumer products like WebStyle.
Maybe they are running out of money (no insult, just a guess) and they had to fire SOME programmers ??
What would they (the programmers)say at their new job ??
Offended and sad as they would be ??
Maybe something like "We were just the first to go, others will follow soon" ???
And wouldn't such a rumour spread well under competitors ??
To Gaussian: I was a lurker in this forum myself for the longest time and I am using X since Xara Studio 0.99. I did not have a reason to register/post until "my time" for it had come. I would not count this as evidence against QdMcG. He is responding to us and even if this is a hoax, maybe he fell for it himself.
Finally to QdMcG: After your initial post, people here used pretty strong words agains you. You never hit back, stuck to the subject and kept friendly. Apart from the Xara-case being right or wrong, this shows character. Two thumbs up for that !!
http://www.yump.com/images/wolfgang_run.gif
Of course Gaussian is right. This is so obvious that I just didn't want to reply earlier.
Makes me think of these Bob Dylan lines:
"Cares not to come up any higher but rather gets you down in the hole that he's in."
http://www.photoshopgurus.info/forum...ine=1019851685
I have had an almost-done version of X3D5 since Monday, and as late as yesterday Kate assured me that the release version was coming very soon - she even gave me a date, but as it's NDA I can't say anything more than what Wolfgang did. But trust us, the program really exists, it's great, and it will be released VERY soon.
I am a bit concerned now about the issues relating to the "Serif situation." As a wild guess on my part, it would not be illogical to assume that since Webstyle 3 has just been released and X3D5 will be very soon, that they have let some programmers go who have worked on these now-completed products. But I stress that I have no knowledge about this!
But I have emailed Kate this evening and I'm hoping to get a clarification tomorrow, Thursday.
K
www.xaraxone.com/FeaturedArt/kn/
www.klausnordby.com/xara
and I am with Wolfgang on not assuming that this Quickdraw person is the devil incarnate, just relating what he heard through his friend. So I am sitting here at work on my crapy computer that has NO virus scan and my account that I have registered here at TalkGraphics has been inundated with virus activity lately so I have to wait to get home in order to see if Serif.com US got back to me or not. Sorry I can't get to it faster, client just walked in the door on top of it all.............
Later
Richard [img]/infopop/emoticons/icon_wink.gif[/img]
---Wolff On The Prowl---
OK, OK, I give in. I was not going to comment on this story since it involves a business issue, and a sensitive one at that. But clearly my email intray will know no peace until I give you some reassurance, so here's my one and only comment on this thread...
The computer industry is a hard place to be at the moment, but software development is the business we've been in since 1981 and it's the business we intend to stay in.
Yes, Xara Group made some redundancies in May but NO, we have not laid off all our developers and yes, we are continuing to develop software, including client side graphics software.
I think our webmaster will be a bit mortified to hear you think the web pages haven't changed since May. But then again he is working very hard on the new X3D5 pages (and that's the only clue I'm giving on future releases!).
Kate
.................
Kate Moir
http://www.xara.com
http://www.buyfonts.com
Regards, Ross
<a href=http://www.designstop.com/>DesignStop.Com</a>
Thanks from me too !!!
Friendly,
ivan
That's made my day - fantastic news!
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Graeme
Thanks, Kate - we needed to hear from you! Pestering works. :-)
K
www.xaraxone.com/FeaturedArt/kn/
www.klausnordby.com/xara
Sometimes it's so easy, once the right person comments on it.
Thanks Kate, that was all we needed to know to close this case ..
http://www.yump.com/images/wolfgang_run.gif