Expert Advice Requested --- Corel v10 or XaraX???

[schallow]

Okay, boyz and girlz. I have been a Corelian since v1 back in 1987 and have purchased every upgrade since...do the math...you all know how much we have forked over for!

My question to myself is this --- should I spend another $225 for the upgrade from 9 to 10 or trash the whole works and get Xara-X?

My experience with every Corel version was that even-numbered ones sucked, plain and simple...they were never stable. And as of late, v9 has sucked also with numerous crashes especially in PhotoPaint.

I don't really need the RAVE as I have Macromedia Flash and a whole boatload of other shockwave stuff...so just requesting some input here from fellow Corelians!

Regards,
Mark
aka The Fontman [img]/infopop/emoticons/icon_smile.gif[/img]

[schallow]

Okay, boyz and girlz. I have been a Corelian since v1 back in 1987 and have purchased every upgrade since...do the math...you all know how much we have forked over for!

My question to myself is this --- should I spend another $225 for the upgrade from 9 to 10 or trash the whole works and get Xara-X?

My experience with every Corel version was that even-numbered ones sucked, plain and simple...they were never stable. And as of late, v9 has sucked also with numerous crashes especially in PhotoPaint.

I don't really need the RAVE as I have Macromedia Flash and a whole boatload of other shockwave stuff...so just requesting some input here from fellow Corelians!

Regards,
Mark
aka The Fontman [img]/infopop/emoticons/icon_smile.gif[/img]

[Peter Clifton]

Fontman

There is an almost fully functional demo of Xara X (expires ond of October) available for download from i/us or xara.com

This should be enough time to get to grips with the package and see if you like it.

I have tried the demo, and it is good, but it still does not do what I personally need from a vector illustration package, being more technically orientated.

Working environment is quite similar but I found the node editing tools a bit more limiting than Draw's, not much, but enough to cramp my current working style, maybe with practise this can be overcome.

And I really miss the dockers / roll-ups.

If you do pixel level editing on bitmaps you are still going to need a package like PhotoPaint.

As for file compatibility with Draw, the CDR import filter appears to handle V5 files quite well, With some text import issues. Draw file versions 6 or greater, appear not to work.

There are almost no automation facilities, re scripts / macros etc.

Note I am not knocking Xara, I am only relaying what I personally missed whilst using the package, there is a lot of great stuff in the package, for web graphics design, artistic illustrations, just not the kind of stuff I normally produce or am capable of producing.

Peter

Draw suite user since 1990, skipped a couple of upgrades.

Write something memorable and live forever - anonymous

[Peter Clifton]

Mark

Based on images on your homepage I would say that Xara X should definitely be in your graphics toolbox.

But you also appear to have some images that could only be created in a bitmap editor so perhaps Xara X could be an addition.

Incidentally I've found Draw 9 to be very stable, but PhotoPaint 9 definitely has some issues that I cannot put down to the usual excuse of graphic driver incompatibilites. Certain fonts rendered at large sizes that sometimes exceed the paper space whilst I'm working cause a typical GPF in PhotoPaint but more worryingly and this has also been reported by other users who have Windows98 is the unexpected total system freeze, no error messages, no CTRL+ALT+DEL to task process, only a hard reset is possible.

Peter

Write something memorable and live forever - anonymous

[schallow]

Thanks for the advice, Peter.

I love Corel, but constant crashes have me a little upset as of late. Nothing else on my box crashes. Running Win98SE on a Pentium III with 128Mb of RAM. Main problem comes when trying to run one of my many scripts within PP.

Oh well, guess I will tuck away $225 or whatever the upgrade will be!

Regards,
The Fontman

[Not Ziggy]

I hope this doesn't ruin everyone's day, but neither Draw nor Paint has ever crashed for me since I started using NT two years ago. (It probably also helps that I have 384 Megs of RAM, and sometimes I wonder whether the low clock speed of my old 266 MHz processor actually contributes to this stability since it's probably less frantic than the newer faster ones.)

In other words, the real issue may be more a matter of 98's circa-1972 DOS memory-swapping technology trying vainly to accommodate a program as robust as a 1999 illustration & page layout program.

What would you say if your sister started dating a man 27 years her senior?

[Peter Clifton]

Ziggy

You are of course correct about Windows 9X fundamental instability however...

At work I have Windows 95 OSR2 machine Running Ventura 8, PhotoPaint 8 and Draw 7.

I manage two Novell servers from this computer have a virus scanner and all sorts of other stuff loaded and I almost never have a crash whilst using these Corel Apps. I have all sorts of other errors whilst using fundamental apps such as Explorer and IE, I count a day with only one OS reboot as a good one.

I know going to a Windows NT or 2000 system would be a good move but the PII-266 with 64 Mb of RAM wouldn't hack it, I would need to put in for a new computer (not an option at the moment).

However Photopaint 9, on my PC at home which has a relatively new clean install of just Windows 98SE and the DRAW9 suite, has frozen 3 times in a month of occaisional use and I get GPFs with even more regularity, it might be a driver issue, but DRAW as I said has been most reliable, fingers crossed, no crashes so far.

Still as soon as they produce as home orientated version of Windows 2000, I will almost certainly jump ship.

Peter

Write something memorable and live forever - anonymous

[gwpriester]

As someone who uses both products, and is beta testing DRAW 10, I'd say whether you upgrade or not depends upon the type of work you do.

DRAW is much better suited to printed output. No question about that. Version 10 will address the Web better than previous versions have. And even though you have FLASH, RAVE is pretty awesome. Not that it offers a lot of features, but it lets you work with DRAW's tools with a user interface which you already know how to use to get what needs to be done, done.

Xara X on the other hand, has some really cool new features and with the Profile settings, can do things that DRAW cannot. They have taken the Interactive controls that DRAW has several steps beyond.

And the features that Xara has are very accessable which means you can do more in less time.

For my money, I'd get both. There are times I work in Xara (most of the time) but there are times I also work in DRAW because of the support for CMYK, multi-page documents and printed output.

Gary

Gary Priester

Moderator Person

Be It Every So Humble...

[schallow]

Have you created anything with Corelv10's RAVE function? If so, please send it to me via email at mschallow@ec.rr.com

Am curious to see what everybody is "raving" about. [img]/infopop/emoticons/icon_smile.gif[/img]

Regards,
The Fontman