The 2012 Xone: Coming Real Xoon!

Hi everyone—

Okay, it's January 11th here in the States, which means that some of us, including myself, have been wondering and/or asking about the 2012 Edition of the Xara Xone.

The good news is that January is in the can (that's Hollywood Talk for it's done, not that it's in the WC), and the bad news is we're having a tinch of a technical difficulty migrating the new website to its permanent home on the servers.

I think you'll like what you see, I think you'll be able to see in with the next few days, and all of us involved with it thank you for any patience you can spare!

Up front, I'd like to thank Gary Priester for inventing the Xone and setting the tone for it online, and special thanks to Barbara Bouton (my better half, if you ever met me), who has busted for several weeks recasting The Xara Xone as a WordPress CMS system. We wanted the Xone to be easy to manage in the future, so I could spend my time creating content, and not wrestling with code.

See you Xoon,

Gary

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We're all waiting with bated or is it baited, breath.

Good to know the Xone is in good hands.

Hi Gary, glad to hear we can Xoon see the 2012 Xone. :D

Looking forward to zeeing zit.

Great idea to start a separate forum for the Xone! It may make it easier to follow new developments and related talk. Good luck!

What a fantastic idea to have a forum for the Xone! I'm looking forward to what you have in store for us Gare!

What I asked The Management to do, and they were happy to oblige, is to open an area here, where we can discuss the monthly tutorials. Q & A, suggestions for the future, just tying the Xone into tg, you know?

And you'll see some reciprocity when the January Edition of the Xone goes up. We will have live feeds from tg, top topics, that sort of thing.

The Internet is supposed to be one big HTML document scattered over a bunch of servers worldwide, at least that was the thought once it outgrew DARPA.

So let's make it so!

Fingers crossed for the 12th or lucky Friday the 13th to go live,

Gary

Looking forward to it, Gary.

Hi Gare,

Knowing what I know of you, the wait will certainly be worth it. Glad to see it coming to a website near us soon.

Thanks Gare. Good idea putting it on Wordpress. Has there been any tuts on using xara with wordpress? Could be a useful one. Seems more and more people want to use that platform.

Hi Joe—

There's not a lot to teach about using Xara with WordPress, other than how to scale your media for inserting into a WordPress template.

It's been said before, but just to recap: Xara Designer excels at writing static, exceptionally handsome, clever, short HTML documents. It is an HTML authoring tool, but...and here's the big "but"...it has no capability to serve as an HTML editor.

It can write very elegant pages that would take an eternity for an inexperienced person to code by hand. It was never designed to re-import its own HTML export, though, and for that reason, it's somewhat masochistic to try forcing a Xara exported HTML document into DreamWeaver, or WordPress' online editor.

It's not that Xara Designer is doing anything wrong, or it cannot be used to make websites; it just was not designed to write HTML that's easy for an HTML editor to edit.

NOTE: I am not in any way dumping on Xara here. Please read this 3x aloud. Xara does one thing exceptionally, and several other things outstandingly, and a few things conveniently, okay?

The be fair, it's unfair to compare WordPress to Xara, and to extend this idea, it's not realistic to expect WordPress and Xara to be totally code-compatible chums.

The decision we all agreed upon was a structured website that's extensible, seeing that no one can predict if holograms will be the standard for video in 3 months, you know? We wanted something that doesn't require an Einstein to upgrade, add new content, and maintain. So we're using a CMS, and it happens to be WordPress, because WordPress went from being a blogger's tool to a web developer's in several version over the past three years.

But this is all mechanical stuff under the hood. The January Xara Xone does feature new graphics and a new layout mostly because I'm not the artist Gary Priester is, but if you don't know what's driving the pages, all you'll see are some nice Xara illustrations. Cosmetically, for all intents and purposes, the new Xara Xone was designed in Xara.

It's just the plumbing on the other side of the screen we've tinkered with.

And we're having server problems today (the12th), so please stay tuned. We're paddling frantically below the water!

—Gary

I feel as though I'm pacing and nervously practicing my lines just off stage left waiting for curtain call—

If all goes well (which I'd be foolish to expect), the switch should be thrown Friday the 13th at 7am U.K. time, 12 noon in New York, and 3:37pm in San Francisco.

If XaraXone goes live=[yes],
then tg XaraXone area=NewThread

...which I'll open for discussion and be ahead of time for once. We can talk about the tutorial of the month after people have digested and worked on it.

Xooner or L8r,

Gary

I'll be eagerly waiting for 3:37 tomorrow :D

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Gare

... 7am U.K. time, 12 noon in New York, and 3:37pm in San Francisco...

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;))

I'll be eagerly sleeping at that time but when I wake up......watch out....it'll be the Xone factor with Gare....for the first but not last time.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Gare

If all goes well (which I'd be foolish to expect), the switch should be thrown Friday the 13th at 7am U.K. time, 12 noon in New York, and 3:37pm in San Francisco.

---

7am U.K. time?!!!
Some of us are still sleeping at that time of the night!
Better set an alarm clock, then!

I think New York is -5 hours from London time and San Fransisco is -8 hours

Not wishing to sound too sycophantic, but I'm very much looking forward to this :thx

(I suspect His Xaraness Lord Priester is pacing up and down in the wings, itching to see what Monsieur Bouton comes up with)

((Many kind thanks to Madame Bouton for her propping up of both Monsieur Bouton and the Xone during this transitional phase))

wasn't too sycophantic was it? :rolleyes:

Gary you are obviously pacing and practicing because you added rather than subtracted time zones.

7 a.m. London = 2 a.m. New York = 11 p.m. (previous day) San Francisco

Our friends in OZ will be well into the 13th. FNQ will be 5 p.m.

1 hour 10 minutes past opening time ... old decor still in place :eek:

I wasn't this anxious when our first child was born! ;))
I am practising deep breathing exercises and saying to myself; 'be patient'!

Apple polly loggies to all about my sense of time—

I'm left-handed and truly suffer mild dyslexia, not the kidding excuse people use when they mux up numbers or directions.

Kept me out of the Army. :)

It's 6:30am in NY, 11:30 am in London, 10:30pm in Sydney, and we're a half hour away from a conference call. Someone at Xara's going to do a final checklist with the site, we'll do the same here, and if we concur that it's showtime, Xara will flick the switch and we'll be on.

This is what we antiticpate. If all goes well, you'll know it. If not, I'll play apologist here and ley y'all know what's going on.

Thanks,

Gary