Muse died so why was Xara silent

This is a post after a LONG time but for the past few days I have been thinking about xara web designer. I have not used it in a few years as I moved onto adobe muse, which was amazing upto a year or so ago but then they started getting lazy in it's development, not just features but basic compatibility issues. Anyway the short of it is adobe muse is no longer in active development and adobe really butchered the end of life process for it and pretty much destroyed people's faith in them and many developers out there simply stopped susbscribing to creative cloud.

Now I come to the reason for this post and it's really a question and astonishment at once. When news of muse's demise happened a couple of months back muse users (of which there are tens of thousands) started to look for an alternative, even though the software is still working and will do so until there is a major change in browsers and muse sites start to fall apart. Anyway when this happened many, many companies which offer web design software started posting youtube videos, making posts in muse forums, on facebook groups, twitter, adverts etc etc. to push their own web design solutions, and at the forefront of that is webflow, they have pretty much taken 75% of muse users and are now laughing all the way to the bank.

So where was Xara when all this was happening, I have some sense of loyalty to xara as web designer helped me to diversify my business away from printing to web design, so I'm shocked that this has not been picked up, expecially as both web designer and muse were so close in terms of how one designs a website, they cater to non-coders and now because of their active marketing webflow have turned 70% of muse users (remember there are tens of thousands out there) onto a solution which works completely differently and has a steep learning curve. I have yet to see anywhere xara reaching out to muse users or heard of anyone pushing it in forums or social media.

We were luckly and moved to wordpress a while back and are moving any muse sites onto wordpress. It's just sad that xara have missed out on this amazing opportunity.

Interesting. Magix is supposed to be doing most of the marketing, I believe, and dropped the ball, somewhat. Yes, there should have been proactive marketing from both Xara and Magix on this, targeting Muse users. Maybe they were too busy with Xara Cloud.

However, something was done, but maybe with not enough hype. Magix put up several software products on Humble Bundle. This created a lot of noise, as for 20$, you could get both Xara P&GD and XWDP, along with PhotoStory Deluxe plus its Bonus Content, Vegas Pro Edit 14, Video Sound Cleaning Lab and Vintage Effects Suite. The update service for both Xara products would last until October. I don't know how many people took advantage of this, but there were a lot (I vaguely recall the counter being around the 100k mark). I gave away P&GD to a friend, PhotoStory to another, but no friends wanted WDP. Word of the Humble Bundle offerings was passed around on many forums, but I don't know about web design forums. This should have been done, if not directly by Xara/Magix, but indirectly by us users supporting our favourite programs. It would be interesting to see how many new Xara users this brought in.

Another story, early this year, a popular Digital Audio Workstation program, SONAR, was dropped by Gibson. Magix, probably knowingly, put a big discount on Samplitude Pro X3 Suite, put out the word, but it was mostly users posting about the discount on forums popular with SONAR users. The result was a huge gain in Samplitude users. There was a new sticky thread on the Samplitude forum welcoming new users and asking them to indicate from where they came. There were many, many posts in just a couple of months and almost all new users came from Sonar. Still, users complain about the lack of marketing and market penetration of Magix Samplitude, and rightly so. However, I have noticed a much more concentrated and coordinated marketing effort by Magix over the last year. But, they do have to watch out for opportunities, like the one with Muse, and take advantage of them.

I have raised one marketing issue with both Magix and Xara concerning Xara, and that is the integration of Xara P&GD and DPX with the Magix video editors. Many users of video programs want to be able to draw on the video, add their own overlays including drawings, graphics and annotations, and masks, both static and animated. All it takes is having one of these Xara programs installed. Xara is integrated with the video editors, but Magix and Xara have not been promoting this feature. They should.

Hey Cloud.

This falls under the category, we never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity.

Cloud welcome back to Xara ;)

Xara had there head in the clouds. Still do.

Low hanging clouds I presume.
Also called mist and trying to navigate without a compass,heading where?
They haven't got the foggiest idea

I think they also missed an opportunity when Adobe became a subscription, but then, low and behold they started their own unpopular 365 update service subscription. :-O

I think Xara are in the process of making another mistake with their current website configuration. Where are the desktop apps? (just a link in the footer!). They need to either drop the name Xara altogether or make sure customers actually know which is the real product website. Having the development company and the marketing company both clamouring for attention, both using their own brand names on the product is just confusing. Especially if you then only put the desktop product information on the marketing company website.

My opinion they should not have called their new enterprise 'Xara Cloud' and left the well established name 'Xara' for the desktop apps and website...

...and (in my dreams) stop all development on the cloud and rewrite Xara Designer from the ground up to be the fastest, most superb and innovative graphics and web design app that has ever existed in history! ;)

Quote:

---

Cloud welcome back to Xara

---

It's actually bitter sweet, good to know that the old names are still here but also it seems that not all is well with xara either, if only there were companies who appreciated their loyal customers, luckily we live at a time with so many startups, I have found that there is an alternative for everything and these new companies (initially at least) are happy to look after their new customers. There seems to be a lot of this whole 'prototyping' software, adobe has xd which is for prototyping websites and then handing over to a developer to 'code' I don't know which world these companies are living in but pretty much every developer is using wordpress and page builders and through the use of fairly basic css and plugins able to create pretty much every type of website. I think they panicked about the offerings from companies such as wix or weebly which allow the layman to design a website for their own business, but we have noticed that a lot of these businesses are now looking for professional web design companies to fix the problems that they are getting (SEO etc). Adobe have decided to concentrate on spark, which allows VERY basic websites to try and get into this consumer market. They have also made the decision to buy Magento, which doesn't make any sense at all, the vast majority of ecommerce sites are using woocommerce and magento is overkill for most people, there's no doubt that magento is infinitely more scaleable than woocommerce but that's for the really big companies.

Xara, Adobe et all need to take a breath and realise that they don't have monopolies, adobe's print offerings (indesign) are dying because the print industry is dying (we closed down that business a while back, as have a lot of our competitors and suppliers - the margins are tiny), photoshop has a LOT of competition, including many free ones and illustrator too is fighting online tools which can do just as well. As for subscription (adobe creative cloud); I thought it was a good deal at first, with promises of almost monthly updates, but that fell by the wayside and what they called major updates were a few lines of code to be able to change the UI, because we have move to strictly web development only we are able to use free, open source software to get the job done, Wordpress combined with a free theme such as oceanwp or astra and Elementor page builder plus a handfull of free plugins is all we need, the days of paying to create websites or design logos, illustrations or for print are over. Many companies are doing amazing on the freemium model; a free offering and a premium one for those who need that little bit extra, perhaps xara could do the same.

We as consumers need to wake up and stop being gimps. These companies are nothing without us and they know it, even though they don't admit it to themselves. Loyalty is a two way street.

@CLoud, I cater to small startup business whom the owner has no time or wants to be envolved with the web design work/update. So I tell them that upfront. Just finished 2 sites for my clients and everyone is happy. The ease of use and freedom to place anything anywhere is something that I love about Xara (and imagine you did too with MUSE) compared to DIVI etc... which seems to be just grids and rows. Every freeking website is looking the same, sure everyone is using templates but all businesses are melting in the same sea of identity which is blah and boring. I do branding and with Xara I can carry that out to print which again for my clients is still alive and kicking. I hope you can use Xara again if not, you seem to have enough knowhow about wordpress so keep up the good work.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Cloud

It's actually bitter sweet, good to know that the old names are still here but also it seems that not all is well with xara either, if only there were companies who appreciated their loyal customers, luckily we live at a time with so many startups, I have found that there is an alternative for everything and these new companies (initially at least) are happy to look after their new customers. There seems to be a lot of this whole 'prototyping' software, adobe has xd which is for prototyping websites and then handing over to a developer to 'code' I don't know which world these companies are living in but pretty much every developer is using wordpress and page builders and through the use of fairly basic css and plugins able to create pretty much every type of website. I think they panicked about the offerings from companies such as wix or weebly which allow the layman to design a website for their own business, but we have noticed that a lot of these businesses are now looking for professional web design companies to fix the problems that they are getting (SEO etc). Adobe have decided to concentrate on spark, which allows VERY basic websites to try and get into this consumer market. They have also made the decision to buy Magento, which doesn't make any sense at all, the vast majority of ecommerce sites are using woocommerce and magento is overkill for most people, there's no doubt that magento is infinitely more scaleable than woocommerce but that's for the really big companies.

Xara, Adobe et all need to take a breath and realise that they don't have monopolies, adobe's print offerings (indesign) are dying because the print industry is dying (we closed down that business a while back, as have a lot of our competitors and suppliers - the margins are tiny), photoshop has a LOT of competition, including many free ones and illustrator too is fighting online tools which can do just as well. As for subscription (adobe creative cloud); I thought it was a good deal at first, with promises of almost monthly updates, but that fell by the wayside and what they called major updates were a few lines of code to be able to change the UI, because we have move to strictly web development only we are able to use free, open source software to get the job done, Wordpress combined with a free theme such as oceanwp or astra and Elementor page builder plus a handfull of free plugins is all we need, the days of paying to create websites or design logos, illustrations or for print are over. Many companies are doing amazing on the freemium model; a free offering and a premium one for those who need that little bit extra, perhaps xara could do the same.

We as consumers need to wake up and stop being gimps. These companies are nothing without us and they know it, even though they don't admit it to themselves. Loyalty is a two way street.

---

I never just copy a long post -- only the parts that I want to reply to -- but this time I did because it's such an excellent overview and analysis of how things stand at this moment in time. It all makes sense now, including why Xara suddenly jacked up the update service price for XDP by 30% and not delivering on the goods. It seems we're financing their exit strategy: the frantic development of their new product offering. Clearly, Xara is not going to publicly acknowledge this.

Scary as Crap! If that is the case, it will be like Serif when they stood up their web people and Adobe with Muse. So really web development is down the toilet and so is print and graphic design. So Are you guys saying pro's like myself should start opening a restaurant? What I am saying is use Xara, use Serif for print and illustration, use adobe and do not stick to one platform. Learn wordpress if you have to. So All the bitch... that goes on here and other forums is a waste of time, I know I have been a victim of it but if I want to wait for Xara to come up with a booking system, I can easily switch to a place holder or wordpress. You get my point?

Also Xara should have kept web design to web design and Xara to illustration and vector work, by them mixing the two they screwed up everything for the end user.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by browj2

Interesting. Magix is supposed to be doing most of the marketing, I believe, and dropped the ball, somewhat. Yes, there should have been proactive marketing from both Xara and Magix on this, targeting Muse users. Maybe they were too busy with Xara Cloud.

...

I have raised one marketing issue with both Magix and Xara concerning Xara, and that is the integration of Xara P&GD and DPX with the Magix video editors. Many users of video programs want to be able to draw on the video, add their own overlays including drawings, graphics and annotations, and masks, both static and animated. All it takes is having one of these Xara programs installed. Xara is integrated with the video editors, but Magix and Xara have not been promoting this feature. They should.

---

John,

I use Magix MEP and have XDP. How do they "work together". I use XDP to create and edit images, save them and then import into MEP videos. Is there mo' better integration that I don't know about?

Yes Eric, John has done an excellent video on integration of the two. Perhaps he'll post a link as I can't find it right now.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by onlye

John,

I use Magix MEP and have XDP. How do they "work together". I use XDP to create and edit images, save them and then import into MEP videos. Is there mo' better integration that I don't know about?

---

Hi,

Here is a link to a recent tutorial that I did on creating masks for MEP/VPX directly from MEP/VPX using Xara:

https://youtu.be/rFnM5YdPEGk

and here is another, more appropriate showing how to open Xara from MEP, create or draw whatever, animated or static, and it comes back onto the timeline. I am in the process of redoing this one properly.

https://youtu.be/Xj106sCkXnc

There are instructions in the MEP and VPX manuals to do this. Search for Xara in the help file. Here is an excerpt:

"Create overlay graphic/animation
Create vector graphics or animations in an external editor such as Xara Designer Pro in order to use them as overlay objects in MAGIX Movie Edit Pro. A typical use scenario would be to draw an object in order to darken certain portions of the video, such as a black bar to cover a person's eyes. Overlay objects aren't bound to the source material by grouping. They can me moved and edited as you please."

I am also in the process of doing a tutorial on the various ways that Xara is used with or by MEP and VPX, including Xara 3DMaker. I did a tutorial recently on MEP and VPX with 3D Maker.
https://youtu.be/eapOcYhS--o

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by browj2

Hi,

Here is a link to a recent tutorial that I did on creating masks for MEP/VPX directly from MEP/VPX using Xara:

https://youtu.be/rFnM5YdPEGk

and here is another, more appropriate showing how to open Xara from MEP, create or draw whatever, animated or static, and it comes back onto the timeline. I am in the process of redoing this one properly.

https://youtu.be/Xj106sCkXnc

There are instructions in the MEP and VPX manuals to do this. Search for Xara in the help file. Here is an excerpt:

"Create overlay graphic/animation
Create vector graphics or animations in an external editor such as Xara Designer Pro in order to use them as overlay objects in MAGIX Movie Edit Pro. A typical use scenario would be to draw an object in order to darken certain portions of the video, such as a black bar to cover a person's eyes. Overlay objects aren't bound to the source material by grouping. They can me moved and edited as you please."

I am also in the process of doing a tutorial on the various ways that Xara is used with or by MEP and VPX, including Xara 3DMaker. I did a tutorial recently on MEP and VPX with 3D Maker.
https://youtu.be/eapOcYhS--o

---

Wow, Thanks!

How did this Thread got hijacked?

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by behzad

How did this Thread got hijacked?

---

It happens.

Click the black bang triangle below the first off-topic Post and ask a kind Mod to create a new Thread to as both strands are useful.

Acorn

I agree, a second thread would be good.

See post 2, mine.

The original topic was a lament of Xara/Magix not taking advantage of marketing opportunities to get new users. See the last paragraph about Xara and Magix failing to market the use of Xara with the movie editors and that they work together. Each product should be marketing the other. onle picked up on this and asked how they worked together, and that is how we got off-topic.

More users = more money and, hopefully, more money for program development.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by behzad

How did this Thread got hijacked?

---

Sorry. But, I learned that my 2 pieces of software will play together. I am quite ecstatic. I envision some light night highly caffinated experimenting.

As per the original thread; Xara, please don't leave us behind. Please make me feel like that subscription fee I pay is really worth it. And maybe listen to the compalaints here and take note that just because you said everything is alright 6 months ago doesn't mean your customers believe it. If things really are all right then YOU XARA just might be doing a bad job of communicating that message.

thanks!

eric