March in the XaraXone

[gwpriester]

I'm happy to announce that the XaraXone has been greatly reduced. The former animated XaraXone title (96K) has been replaced with a slimmed down Flash version (17K). The Flash version of the animated title is based upon this month's Xara X - Flash Tutorial.

This month's Featured Artist is Risto Klint (I bet you didn't know his last name either!) Risto's images are delightfully whimsical and original as those of you who have seen his work in the XaraXone Gallery will know. His design sense is excellent to boot. Stop in the gallery and have a look.

A new section has been added Guest Tutorial, which starting next month (April) will be featuring tutorials created by you folks. This will not replace my current tutorials but will augment them by providing in-depth, step-by-step mini-tutorials for creating some of the really cool techniques seen in this conference since the release of Xara X.

As always, comments are welcome.

Gary

Gary Priester

Moderator Person

Be It Every So Humble...

[gwpriester]

I'm happy to announce that the XaraXone has been greatly reduced. The former animated XaraXone title (96K) has been replaced with a slimmed down Flash version (17K). The Flash version of the animated title is based upon this month's Xara X - Flash Tutorial.

This month's Featured Artist is Risto Klint (I bet you didn't know his last name either!) Risto's images are delightfully whimsical and original as those of you who have seen his work in the XaraXone Gallery will know. His design sense is excellent to boot. Stop in the gallery and have a look.

A new section has been added Guest Tutorial, which starting next month (April) will be featuring tutorials created by you folks. This will not replace my current tutorials but will augment them by providing in-depth, step-by-step mini-tutorials for creating some of the really cool techniques seen in this conference since the release of Xara X.

As always, comments are welcome.

Gary

Gary Priester

Moderator Person

Be It Every So Humble...

[gwpriester]

Oops sorry. I forgot to change the link for Risto's featured artist page.

It's been changed now.

Gary

Gary Priester

Moderator Person

Be It Every So Humble...

[mckinney]

Gary -

I really like the new radar screen on the XaraXone main page and applaud your highly creative work. The much smaller size is very nice, but there is a downside for me. On my system, the Flash version seems to really chew up CPU time, making the computer *very* sluggish when viewing that page. Does anybody else find the same thing? Is it an inherent Flash feature/problem or could it be my system? The machine I'm viewing this from at the moment is a a 300 MHz dual-cpu system (I think they're pentium pro chips) running Windows NT4. I'm using Internet Explorer 5 to view the web page and a fairly recent version of Flash is installed. The Task Manager's performance monitor shows that about 50% of the CPU time is being used when the XaraXone main page is showing. When I move to the Xara Conference page the CPU usage drops to 3%. I can't compare those numbers to the old version of the animated radar, as I don't have a copy of it.

- Pete

[glenngosack]

Yes.. it occurs on my system too. PIII 733 Mhz with W2K and IE5.5. As I write this, cpu is 0~1% but on that page, 90%.

[JZiehlke]

Gary,

This was a great tutorial. I enjoyed seeing the interactivity that can be achieved with XaraX and Flash. I use both programs daily to build Flash animations. [img]/infopop/emoticons/icon_wink.gif[/img]

Joan

[jwt]

My CPU usage in the other parts of the Xone and forums is usually 2% to 5%. On loading the XaraXone home page with the Flash radar image, my CPU goes up to a max of 98% then drops back to around 85% while on that page.

Intel Pentium Celeron 300A, 256MB RAM, IE 5.5 at 800 x 600 resolution.

JWT

[ivan louette]

I remember I had the same problem when I opened Xara2 and Flash2 simultaneously (then I had very big problems of screen refreshing).

I use Netscape 4.75 on a Pentium II 400 Mhz with 128 Mo ram and Windows NT4 SP6a

BUT THE ANIMATION IS VERY NICE, GARY ! (!!!)

Kind regards,

ivan

[gwpriester]

What is so odd is the file size for the Flash is only 17K while the GIF animation is 98K.

Back to the drawing board I guess [img]/infopop/emoticons/icon_eek.gif[/img]

Gary

Gary Priester

Moderator Person

Be It Every So Humble...

[billa]

Gary,

I think the culprit is the flash plug-in, a small flash file activating a big plug-in engine.

Regards,
Bill Antonacchio

Regards,
Bill A