Xtreme Pro 4 way too big!

[jens g.r. benthien]

Dear Charles and Xara Team,

you've asked for some comments...

Believe it or not, I still have Xara X1 installed on my machine, next to Xtreme Pro 3.02. Now there is Xtreme Pro 4.0.

X1 comes with a footprint of around 10 MB on my hard drive, X4 with 116 - that's a whopping 12 times as large! That much more for just multiple pages and text columns?

And all the stuff that's installed which I don't need or want at all - not really:

Photo Editor - now there are **2** different editors. I don't need a photo editor, because I already have three great professional photo editors (PhotoPaint, LightRoom and LightZone).

3D? I already have two 3D CAD systems (Cinema 4D and Rhino). A simple 3D function isn't good for a software with the term 'pro' in it!

And now I have yet another movie player I don't need or want.

Question: even though I understand that some people **might** like those features and the Xara team obviously doesn't want to offer a modular based kit (basic version, add / pay the modules you really need!), this is my biggest wish:

Please give us an installer which let's us choose which parts we want to install! Please, please, please!

I would be very happy again if I could deselect the installation of the movie player, the 3D option, the web function, the two photo editors!

I've just produced two large 80 page photographic books about Andalucía with Xtreme Pro 3.02 and it's multi page function - they are both perfect, really. And for those projects I really don't need the photo editors - they are just bugging me, because when I drop an image to the workspace and - working very fast - double click the image, the photo editor will start, forcing me to wait for ages because my images are around 13.200 x 8.800 pixels large (that's a whopping 130 megapixels from large format scans!). Please give us an option to disable the automatic pop-up of this pesky amateurish photo editor!

Please Xara , do something with these issues. It really shouldn't be such a big issue to modify the installer to give us a choice!

Other than that, try to optimize the code as you've done in X1 - small, fast code and not bloatware: not everyone of use wants to invest into new hardware...(I'm switching to Mac now because I can't stand Windoze anymore and definitely Vista is the wrong way to go).

Thanks a lot for listening and hopefully a better installer very soon - you'll win another happy pro user to upgrade to version 4.0 or 4.1 if you'll include these options.

[handrawn]

the xpe is a darn irritation

if you use notepad to create a dummy file [eg: oops.exe] and in options tell xtreme to open with this instead of xpe, then you will get an error message straight away [slower the first time maybe] click ok and on you go.

this is a lot quicker than waiting for xpe to open [forever]

there is away to avoid even the error message - but I forget

[gwpriester]

Hey Jens - It's been a long time. Welcome back.

But maybe you are not the typical user?

I agree that there are other products that do things better, such as Photoshop and AutoCad 3D Max (at $4000).

I have Photoshop CS3 installed on my computer and yet I use X4 for about 90% of my photo edits. It is very convenient. And having the ability to do some 3D extrusions is handy too. As imaginative people like Mike Sims have shown with Xara 3D, you can do some really incredible things.

The new text wrap feature (repel text) is quite excellent and there are some other nice upgrades in the Text Tool such as the ability to preview different fonts, styles, and sizes for an entire page of linked text areas instantly. And very useful features like HTML Export. This feature is not a reason for Adobe Dreamweaver to worry, but if one is creative and inventive, one can do some really neat websites with out ever leaving Xara.

I agree the file size has grown. A lot.

But when you and I first started working with Xara, a 100 MB hard drive was a luxury. Now you can get 4GB flash memory on a removable USB stick for $25 US. Storage is cheap. Why not use it?

It was not long ago that I wrote an article on the 216 web-safe colors. But with today's monitors, who cares?

As my idol Bob Dylan once sang when you and I had dark hair, The times they are a changing.

Good to see you my friend.

For those of you who don't know Jens, check out his 2003 Featured Artist Gallery.

Gary

[willdean]

A standard XXP4 installation, before you download all the videos is about 100MB. (~ 1/10th of a gigabyte)

This amount of diskspace costs around 2 - 3 US cents to provide on hard disk.

It is hopelessly misguided to suggest that Xara should spend time writing and supporting a significantly more complex installation so that customers who are prepared to pay a few hundred dollars for the software should then be spared on the order of *one cent* in storage costs.

I seriously doubt that you guys who still shovel coal into your computers are going to be able to persude sane software developers of the strength of your cause or the value of your market segment.

Allowing the developers of your applications to stop fretting about disk space is one of the ways you can free them up to make better software.

[handrawn]

thanks Gary for the link - some top class illustrations there Jens - 5 star work and no mistake

[Dón|Olivierè]

But when you and I first started working with Xara, a 100 MB hard drive was a luxury. Now you can get 4GB flash memory on a removable USB stick for $25 US. Storage is cheap. Why not use it?

It is not a question of cheap storage space! Your answer, gwpriester, comply the level of this board and its software, sorry pal. Because harddrives getting cheaper, there is not necessity to fill them with poor written software.

I cannot understand why it is not possible to write good working software finaly? We use computers for nearly 30 years on this planet, we fly to the moon and build up an international space-station out there, but working with computers is always a pain in the ass! Why we cannot get well written software, bugfree with high usability? I really hate to handle lots of bugs with every upgrade. Xtreme like other software on this planet getting worse with every new release.

Tell me guys why does Xtreme needs many thousands of registry entries, while Maxons Cinema 4D for example needs one or two and that software is by far more efficient than Xtreme? After installation of Xtreme your computer is not the same anymore. I better do not want to see Xtreme's source-code - it is surely a nightmare!

I wish I could articulate all the anger I feel inside, but english is not my native language.

It is really, really sad, that there is no good working vector-graphics-software out there! As I came to Xtreme a couple of years ago, I liked it small size and its speed. But now it is bigger than Adobe's Illustrator 10, which I use on my machine, and its speed is gone long ago.

As soon I find an alternative software I will switch and never come back to Xtreme.

I give the Xtreme developers some advices: Do NOT put more and more so called features in your software, because some amateurs demand them! Instead get rid of all the bugs, make your code better and develop a userfriendly Interface.

[Dón|Olivierè]

It is hopelessly misguided to suggest that Xara should spend time writing and supporting a significantly more complex installation so that customers who are prepared to pay a few hundred dollars for the software should then be spared on the order of *one cent* in storage costs.

To get the money to buy Xtreme I have to work for my customers and I have to do it clean and accurate to satisfy them. I think it is understandable, that I expect the same behaviour in the opposite direction. I expect to get well written, functionally and clean software with my money, but Xtreme is far away from that.

It is not a question of storage costs, but a question of funcionality and efficiency!

[willdean]

But I'm not sure why you think that disk-space, which is essentially free at this sort of scale, is a useful guide to quality.

The real negative consequence of a feature being added which you don't want is *not* the disk-space which it uses, it's that the developer who added that feature wasn't doing something which you'd have preferred. That unwanted '3d extrude' icon / lame picture editor / whatever has cost you basically nothing for the diskspace, and basically nothing in performance if you don't use it.

What is has cost you is that the guy who was doing the 3d extrude wasn't doing something you'd have preferred - whatever that is - everyone on here has a different list of things they'd like.

Writing a multi-option installer, and forever supporting the 2^n different installations it results in, has just the same opportunity cost - the guy that's writing the installer is not doing anything more useful to you.

Your best hope is to ask for the features you do want, not fixate on complete irrelevances in a way that might risk people wondering if you use a lot of green ink. Personally, nothing I've ever asked for in here has ever appeared in the product, but let's at least try to be constructive...

[jens g.r. benthien]

Hi Gary,

thanks for the 'welcome back' !!

And geez - when I read the year 2003 I almost fell from my chair. So much time passed by, it seems as if it was a month or two...<sigh>

Of course you are right (as always) but my point is Xara could give us a choice at least during installation. So anybody who 'wants it all' just clicks 'typical', all others click 'custom' and can deselect the movie player, the photo editors, the movies, the help files, the 3D, the html export...

It wouldn't be a burden for the coders, just a modification of the installer. A very simple task IMHO.

Maybe Charles will show a heart for those die hard 'untypical users' who don't need software features to make a 'living by design'

[Dón|Olivierè]

I am not against new features. The problem with Xtreme is the same like Nero Burning Rom: The developers added more and more features which have nothing to do with the core funcionality. At the beginning Nero was a software for burning CDs, now it has features to rip and edit Audio, encode and cut movies etc., etc. But all these features do not do their job very well and the software wastes more than 100 MB harddisc-space and thousands of registry entries so you need special knowledges to get rid of it, if you decide to uninstall it.

The same with Xtreme: with every upgrade there are more and more new features which do a poor job, while all the bugs and usability flaws still remained. For example the HTML-page-feature! Isn't Xtreme a vector-graphics-software? If I'd like to build HTML-pages I get a software, that do this effectively. The websites, generated by Xtreme are worst - the code is worst - unusable, if you want quality.

Look into the forum! There are bug reports over bug reports. A software, that produces so many bugs after a new upgrade cannot be named well written. But there is no need to read bug-reports, a single look on the wasted amount of harddrive-space after installation tells you the quality of the software. I know what I am talking about, because I am part of the IT-business and I have learned to program.

In germany we say: "Schuster bleib bei Deinen Leisten!", which means you should do, what you can do best.