Xtreme Pro 4 way too big!

[Ross Macintosh]

Thanks Charles for sharing your thoughts with us.

I for one really do appreciate the time you have been putting into these forums lately. I hope you'll stick around after talk of the new version thins out a bit.

Regards, Ross

[amoore]

Thumbs up, Charles!

[joroho]

All the respect in the world to you, Charles. Thanks for speaking up!

.joroho.

[BONES]

However, the 'pro' version should be a real pro version without gimmicks the pros don't need.

I'm a full-time, professional graphic designer and I think that every part of Xara has applications to some professions. There is not one part of it I wouldn't install. Sure, I'm not likely to use any clip-art or stock images or templates myself, but those things can be great for a client to get some inspiration from instead of me having to come up with several options and have them tell me they don't like any of them. For that purpose alone they are excellent, truly professional parts of the install that will save any professional designer time and money.

What counts are the core competences of a company in the professional area, not gimmicks or kinky 'me-too' features other vendors can do a lot better.

I'm thinking very, very hard about this but I'm not coming up with any other application that does the mixed vector/bitmap thing anywhere near as well as Xara. From Version 2.0, Xara's bitmap handling as been one of its major strengths for me and with every new version it has been getting better and better at it. The other, of course, was speed and they went to the considerable effort of rewriting the whole engine to keep the advantage they enjoy there. So for me, it seems that Xara development is very much focused on it's strengths. I suppose the fact that we can get so worked up over something as unimportant as the installer is proof that there is not much wrong with the product.

does Adobe integrate Fireworks into the core of Illustrator?
Does Adobe integrate Photoshop Elements plus Photoshop CS3 plus Fireworks into the core of Illustrator?

No, because they can make you buy them all separately and make a lot more money from you. It gives smart companies like Xara the opportunity to venture into territory where Adobe cannot follow without shooting themselves in the foot.

Look at Cinema 4D - it's a modular software which allows numerous plug-ins - even 3rd party stuff - **if** you need them.

And its market-share is probably about the same as Xara's in its field, despite it being about 10 times more expensive than Xara. Xara is also extensible through plugins and even supports Photoshop plugins [one of the best improvements ever] for even greater flexibility. For a professional, you don't seem to understand the tool you use very thoroughly.

[mikalele]

Charles' post just made me much more happy with v4

Thanks!

[handrawn]

Thanks for the feedback Charles

[ss-kalm]

Again thank you Charles. I second Ross' comment and hope you stick around the forums after all the excitement about V4 has died down.

[jens g.r. benthien]

Hi Charles,

I really appreciate that you've jumped in.

Please compare our download / install size to the competitors. Someone mentioned 2Gbytes + for Photoshop Elements 4+ GBytes of hard disc. So relatively speaking there is little bloat here.

Fact is: PS Elements has a download size of some 380 MB and installs with some 600 MB max. It **is** bloatware, as well as PaintShop Pro.

The 'disc are larger' argument is of course valid as well.

IMHO it is not an argument. Just because disk space is cheaper today it doesn't mean that it's legitimate for coders for fill it up to the rim.

Yes there are two picture editors that you say you do not require, and our goal, and a major part of the work in V4 is to work toward their removal completely. The Photo tool does almost everything XPE does, better, with no overhead.

Thanks for the info, I'm looking forward to the version without any photoeditor or the option to **not** install it.

And BTW you do not understand the benefits of our photo tool if you suggest your other (bloatware) photo editors are good enough. They may be more powerful pixel editing, but in terms of performance, space, file size and speed, they are not going to get close to capabilities of the Photo tool (i.e. in terms of bloat, the topic you seem so concerned about - we absolutely and totally crush these alternative products. e.g. file size tests doing the same operations in Photoshop can produce files that are more than 100 times larger. That is a truly vast performance and space benefit)

Charles, whatever I do, I am a professional and strive for perfection. So I don't need 'fast, performance, space, file size, speed' but PRECISION in color nuances. And I miss the ability to integrate 3rd party plug ins like Viveza, or the ability to retouch minor dust grains. That's my point. My customers request perfect results, not fast ones. If they ask for fast results, I send them to somebody else on the fast lane.

You have a movie player that plays the training videos reliably. The player takes exactly 350Kbytes. a trivial amount. And yes you do need this because there is no other way of reliably playing the videos, often cited as one of the best features of the product. I can't believe you're suggesting a 350K overhead for reliable movie player is significant. Do we really want to try and launch what is surely the very definition of bloat - Windows Media Player. Instead we have a incredibly small, tight, optimized movie player that just works. So it's an absolute no-brainer that we include it, and no we're never even consider making it a user-option, since the costs to do so would be huge.

Well, it sounds fantastic, but the fact remains that it is yet another movie player. Why don't you use the flash movie format like YouTube? Everybody could view these movies with his/her browser. It's a fantastic technology. No need to invent the wheel a fifth time.

Extrude - well you might not want it, but again it moves the state of the art on, and those alternative (huge, bloated) 3D applications you mention can not do what we can, as easily as we can.

You should try Cinema 4D. Or Rhino. Or any of the numerous new professional 3D applications. They are fast. Screamingly fast. And not bloated at all.

Just a comparison: we've logged the installation of Xtreme Pro 4.0 and discovered that it adds or modifies more than 1.700 registry keys (after cleaning up the list manually).

In contrast Cinema 4D which has more features than Xara just adds **TWO** single keys in the registry. And if you uninstall Cinema, there is nothing left in the registry as opposed to Xara. We've tested it.

Yes this feature may be aimed more at general user, non-pro market (but of course it can achieve many useful pro results) but are you suggesting that because it's not a Pro feature we should not include it in Pro. I suspect all Pro users would then feel cheated that they had a feature missing.

Usually the term 'pro' means more precision, not more features.

And the code required to implement the extrude is probably a tiny fraction of (hundreds of Kbytes only) the equivalent of other applications (and CorelDRAW and AI have both had crude 3D extrude tools for many years)

The extrude or 3D is no real 3D - it delivers only bitmaps as a final result, meaning you can't even use it for SVG export. Just because AI and Corel do have this function doesn't mean it is professional. 3D effects used to be an eyecatcher several years ago, but those times are gone. A 3D letter in a web site doesn't mean it'll look professional or be a professional design.

The HTML export feature takes just 228Kbytes. Again this is so trivial to be completely irrelevant, and adding options to allow users to chose whether or not to have the feature (or any of the features described here) in the installer would be an absurd waste of technical development resources and money - for a saving of a measly 228Kbytes. (And if you really do not want the feature, just remove the dll from the Filter folder, yes we do have a modular plug-in system in parts of the program). This feature has been described as revolution, by more than one professional graphics designer. So should we give user the choice not to see this feature - no way.

OK, accepted, but you are riding too much on the size of components.

And more than a few people have said things like "I didn't really think I needed another HTML authoring feature, but wow this is really amazing and I'll use it a lot". So had we given the user the choice, they might never have seen the benefits. In fact the HTML export, even it's just for prototyping, is a really fantastic feature. Why would we ever give the user the option to not have it, to save a few bytes of disc space. That really is not logical, at all.

Makes sense, I didn't know so many users just want some spaghetti code in their web pages.

As to 'optimizing the code' unless you hadn't spotted Xara Xtreme is the most highly optimized application of its type, not by a small degree, but by huge margins. V4 is more optimised than any previous release in fact.

I really believe it, however, comparing the executable of X1 and X4 is a huge difference in size, and I just wonder how this can be.

We have, for the entire lifetime of the Xara X product line, had users who believe they do not want this feature or that feature either because they do not understand it, or its benefits. And so we make decisions all the time on behalf of the users, on what we believe is right for the product.

But be honest - you could easily give the users the chance to decide which components they really need or not.

I kid you not but in the early days we had regular comments from users saying 'why did we need anti-aliasing, because it just makes things look blurry". So just as you might think you do not want the Photo tool, one day you'll realise just how much a revolution that Photo tool is, and probably come to rely on it.

Definitely not. It's to slow and I can't do pixel editing/retouching and not use any plug ins as already mentioned earlier.

(OK I realise that your complaint is not the Photo tool as such, but the other separate photo apps - but they are on the way out, so in that sense I agree with you).

Very good news for me!

Finally the dozens of small improvements, from the fact that zoom now works centered, to the improved path clipping (combine shapes) accuracy, to the much better text tool, to the higher quality anti-aliasing, any one of which might be the key feature you've been waiting for (all of these have been cited as the one reason certain customers have upgraded).

Charles, I didn't want to talk Xtreme bad, I just wanted to point to some features that might be modified. Xara is the application I still love to use, and this after many years, believe me. And I even use X1 from time to time if I can't afford a crash in the middle of nowhere. X1 is rock stable.

Two questions left: Xtreme Pro 4 installs 3 suspicious *.dlls with the name 'muma' in it. Many years ago I've had MusicMaker from Magix which installed similar *.dlls. On right click -> properties there is no additional information about the creator of those dlls... very strange. In addition we couldn't figure out (until today, very short time) that they are used by any function. What are they for?

Last one: if you open a Xara document with a bitmap, the photo editor stuff including the gui is loaded into RAM, even if you don't want to edit the bitmap.

And finally a minor bug: if you install the German version, it creates a directory called 'Program Files', though the German OS sports 'Programme'. A minor glitch I guess.

[Odat]

Just a note (to forestall any future fighting), I said Premiere Elements, not Photoshop Elements (although I did download both). Premiere is in fact ridiculously huge at a 2 Gig download. However it only installs to 3.5 gig, not 4.5 gig. I forgot to take into account that I have some DV footage stored as well.

[covoxer]

Fact is: PS Elements has a download size of some 380 MB and installs with some 600 MB max. It **is** bloatware, as well as PaintShop Pro.

So, isn't X4 smaller?

IMHO it is not an argument. Just because disk space is cheaper today it doesn't mean that it's legitimate for coders for fill it up to the rim.

We don't fill it, we use it for something.

I am a professional and strive for perfection. So I don't need 'fast, performance,

Other professionals may strive for performance as well.

Why don't you use the flash movie format like YouTube?

To force users to download and install Flash player? You think everyone has it installed? Me too, but then again, another professional may decide that this plug-in wastes precious space on his hard drive. This player is much smaller than Flash.

No need to invent the wheel a fifth time.

There was no FLV not even Flash, when Xara already had tutorial movies. So which wheel is invented here?

In contrast Cinema 4D which has more features than Xara just adds **TWO** single keys in the registry.

Registry is there to store application settings. If Cinema 4D doesn't use it, it stores them somewhere else. This doesn't make it less system demanding.

Usually the term 'pro' means more precision, not more features.

Usually the term 'pro' means much, much more than just a precision.

Just because AI and Corel do have this function doesn't mean it is professional.

So, we have no professional vector drawing software on the market then?

A 3D letter in a web site doesn't mean it'll look professional or be a professional design.

Just as it's absence doesn't. Professional look does not come from the tool used, but from the author who was using it. 3D extrude is just another tool which gives you ability to create certain kind of images, which would take you much more time to create without it. Whether you can use it professionally or not, depends only on your skills.

I didn't know so many users just want some spaghetti code in their web pages.

You would be surprised, but most users does not want any code at all - they want pages.

however, comparing the executable of X1 and X4 is a huge difference in size, and I just wonder how this can be.

So is the difference in features.

But be honest - you could easily give the users the chance to decide which components they really need or not.

Honestly? For rookies, it's better not to give them a chance to screw anything. For advanced users (like you) it is also redundant, since they can easily locate movies, fonts and even filters folder, and remove all they don't want in a minute or two. Or don't you?