RE: Food for Thought: Xara Designer Pro Positioned Between One Note and Adobe CC

To Whom It May Concern,

I have been using Xara Designer Pro for several years now --- perhaps going back to about 2013. I initially saw it as an Adobe CC replacement, albeit somewhat less full-featured. It has grown to be an everyday app for me. I consider it somewhat essential to my work processes at this point, and I also enjoy using it. But Xara does not fill the role in my work processes that I envisioned. Xara Designer Pro functions for me a bit like a cross between Adobe CC and Microsoft One Note --- like Microsoft One Note on steroids. I keep many tabs with many notes, I draft abstracts and articles and research ideas and product ideas, I create custom graphics for presentations and publications and as part of research and design, I develop full presentations in it, and I take notes for a variety of reasons. It is way more powerful than One Note, in my experience, and I love One Note. It is a great tool for concept development and communication.

In my experience, some production graphics work is done Xara --- especially vector graphics and presentations. I can also see doing a fair bit of website work in it in the future. But as often as not, I do image editing/compositing work still in Adobe CC or Serif Affinity Photo, if I am not required to use Adobe CC but I need to do something that Xara does not do, or does not do in a straightforward way.

I mention this as food for thought. I suppose I have two final thoughts. First, as a thought experiment, consider what it would mean to develop the idea that Xara Designer Pro exists somewhere between Adobe CC and Microsoft One Note (pros, cons, questions, opportunities). I think that this thought experiment wouldn't fundamentally change what Xara is or how it functions technically, but rather how it is thought of, how it is marketed, and how it is integrated with cloud services. It also provides an interesting and coherent vision for how Xara's desktop Designer Pro app may be seamlessly integrated with its blossoming cloud-based infrastructure and interface. Second, as a thought experiment, if I extent this line of inquiry, then I think that if Xara Designer Pro also incorporated cloud-based collaborative work features, it would be approaching a killer app for creative collaboration for designers, engineers, scientists, artists, analysts, and others whose collaborative work spans text and graphics. As a point of reference, look at Bluebeam Revu, which has become a dominant PDF editor. 10 years ago, it was a little known upstart. But it was less expensive than Adobe Acrobat Professional with more favorable terms, had a unique mix of graphics, measuring, and collaboration tools, and so for a certain, large market sector, it was a better fit as a PDF editor than Adobe Acrobat. I think that Xara has the same potential. It may not do 100% of the functions that any one given Adobe CC app can do or that Microsoft One Note does, but it does about 80-90% of these functions in a very fast, fluid, integrated way, and this translates to time saved and more ideation/development done in a unit of time.

Anyway, I hope that this feedback is useful.

Please let me know if you have questions or comments.

Best,
Joe

Thank you, it is nice to have an upbeat analysis for once.

Acorn

FYI, I should say, I'm not saying that Xara's photo editing tools aren't useful. They are. I watched XaraChris' tutorials, which were great, and was I impressed with the power and versatility of the image editing tools. By saying that I use the image editing tools less, I meant that some of Xara's image editing workflows are unique, and so if I want to edit an image in xara, I usually have to figure out how to do it and watch or read a tutorial, so there is more time involved in using the photo editing tools in xara because of needing to learn new workflows. Conversely, the vector graphics tools have some unique workflows, but for the most part, I can figure them out on the fly without need of watching/reading training. This is important because often the image editing i do is supplemental to another activity and so i need to open an image, spend less than a couple minutes on tweaks, and then pop the image right into another document. For these fast little edits, even watching a 3 minute video to do 1 minute worth of editing becomes disruptive.

I will also say that I make a lot of renderings using 3d rendering tools (modo, cycles, maxwell), and the output files are typically layered PSD or TIF or exr, and I need to open them and then do post-processing of the image in an image editor. Xara typically does not open the files, whereas photoshop and affinity photo do open the files. So better layered PSD support and exr support would be greatly appreciated.

Photo editing is very different in Xara. Especially in terms of transparency. Creating a gradient transparency is as simple as one click and drag in the direction of the linear transparency. This is what initially attracted me to Xara in 1995. The real time on screen intuitive editing has always been the great appeal to me.

I have to agree about PSD - xara does not even support clipping layers, let alone effects layers

the transparency tool in xara is very useful; not being able to add a transparency to a colour ramp [gradient tool] is a pita

not having a mesh warp is a killer....