Bugs & Suggestions

[diniel]

I thought it might be a good idea to start a new thread for people to post any bugs or suggestions for this Public Beta release of Xara X.

xara.com requests that we email them of any bugs that we find, but I thought rather than 100 people send in the same thing, if we channel our efforts into this thread, it will be much more effective.

I'd like to start the ball rolling by mentionning the use of the "wheel" on my mouse. I have a cordless Logitech mouse and use Win98SE, but the same holds true for the Wacom Graphire mouse too, so imagine it is the same for MS rodents too.

I am delighted to see that I can now press "G" to jump to "Gill Sans" in the font list with the text tool, and even more delighted to see that I can use my beloved wheel to scroll though font entries. I see this as more useful than the shadow or bevel tools (brilliant though they are).

I can't, though, scroll through the Font Gallery, or any of the other Galleries (Colour etc) come to that, with my wheel. I'd quite like to see this introduced - I thought it was one of the first entries in the old forum's Feature Request mammoth threads.

[diniel]

I thought it might be a good idea to start a new thread for people to post any bugs or suggestions for this Public Beta release of Xara X.

xara.com requests that we email them of any bugs that we find, but I thought rather than 100 people send in the same thing, if we channel our efforts into this thread, it will be much more effective.

I'd like to start the ball rolling by mentionning the use of the "wheel" on my mouse. I have a cordless Logitech mouse and use Win98SE, but the same holds true for the Wacom Graphire mouse too, so imagine it is the same for MS rodents too.

I am delighted to see that I can now press "G" to jump to "Gill Sans" in the font list with the text tool, and even more delighted to see that I can use my beloved wheel to scroll though font entries. I see this as more useful than the shadow or bevel tools (brilliant though they are).

I can't, though, scroll through the Font Gallery, or any of the other Galleries (Colour etc) come to that, with my wheel. I'd quite like to see this introduced - I thought it was one of the first entries in the old forum's Feature Request mammoth threads.

[standay]

Here's what I've found so far (sent this to xara as well):

When trying to export a transparent gif, the only transparency available is based on the background color instead of the shape of the overall object like previous versions. Specific color transparency is not as useful as the original method.

When trying to export a transparent gif, when you set an option it tries to update the preview right away. This is OK for some of it, but it works against you in the size selection fields, it tries to update before I've finished typing in the size I want. Personally, I'd prefer the old "preview" button to any automated preview.

When trying to export a transparent gif, I went too fast for it and xarax froze up while writing it's temp gif preview image file. I don't remember exactly what I was doing, I was in the gif export options dialog and clicking pretty fast.

The *.XAR file extension association command (i.e., c:
rax
rax.exe /dde) does not like spaces in long filenames and won't open them up in xarax. I changed it to something like c:
rax
rax.exe "%1" and this worked until the program changed it back to the /dde style. The dde command looked right, but something's wrong there.

Good things: eps and AI import and exports are finally working a lot better, these were real problems for me before, it's good to see them fixed up! [img]/infopop/emoticons/icon_wink.gif[/img]

[lucx]

Here's a copy of the message I sent to Xara:

My computer is far from the latest (Pentium 100) but there are areas that are causing an abnormally large slowdown. I have the latest drivers for my video card. One is in the Font list in Text Tool autoscroll. The scrolling goes through every entry in the list and scrolling from A to Z takes several seconds. Another is On Screen Bitmap Antialiasing which slow down the display dramatically when zoomed in greater than 100%. This is also true for shadow/feather/bevel display, since I'm assuming they are treated as bitmaps and antialiased as well. May I suggest a way to turn off On Screen Bitmap Antialiasing (setting view quality to normal does so but also sacrifices vector antialiasing). Also, may I suggest a feature to alow the user to customize Keyboard shortcuts for menu command and tools.

Thanks.

[NinaV]

I was so excited to download the beta. It was a good 20 minutes into the program before I crashed it. Love that bevel tool - hope they work the kinks out. Below is the error report I sent to Xara. Is anyone else having this sort of problem??


*************************
I was trying to create an ice cream cone using the new bevel tool. I can no longer open the files I created with Xara X even after
re-boot.

Here's what I've been doing.

Make a triangle. Slice the image up into diamonds using angled lines. Break
that apart... then select each diamond area to apply the bevel effect. After
about ten bevels the program says either:

"Serious Error"
"A read error occurred (buffer error) with file unknown"
or it just simply shuts down with out throwing an error at all.

My system config as follows:

Win 98 SE
PIII 800
256 MB RAM
30 Gigs of drive space (lots of free room)
ATI All In Wonder Pro 128 AGP


Nina Vecchi
Pixel Point Productions

[diniel]

In addition to Standay's bit on this, which exporting gifs (for a website) I often do more than one revision of each gif. For example, I might do a "home" button, see it in a browser within the whole page, and decide it would be better with a yellow border.

I used to be able to go CTRL+SHIFT+E, type in the filename (say, home.gif), hit return, press R (for Replace) and then hit return again.

I've been doing this daily for about 2 years, but XX stops me dead in my tracks at the last return, I have to press Export with the mouse, or press ALT+E.

Can I have my last Return back? Export is already selected as the default button (shown in bold)? [img]/infopop/emoticons/icon_smile.gif[/img]

Also, if I press the "Make background transparent" button in the GIF export (to put things back to how they always were in CorelXara)l the redraw of the preview takes 7 seconds even on a simple 100x100 pixel gif.

Once I've done this, each preview on subsequent exports takes 7 seconds before it even appears on the screen - I get a solid grey box until then.

I have a 32MB Matrox Millennium G400 graphics card, Athlon 850MHz cpu and 256 MB of RAM, so I don't think it should take that long.

[This message was edited by Daniel on September 30, 2000 at 12:46 AM.]

[Wolfgang]

Nina,

I found that an interesting idea and tried it right away.
But as much as I tried, I could not get XX to crash.
It's getting kinda slow on my old PII/266, but apart from that it works just fine.

Wolfgang

http://www.carpediem.at/images/icecream.gif

[Wolfgang]

I second everything Daniel said. Redraw in the export-dialogue takes FOREVER.
I seem to work just like Daniel with all that CTRL-SHIFT-E, RETURN and so. This was one of the big advantages for me.
Please give the speed and simplicity back to us.

And like standay said, the PREVIEW-button was much better than the lazy auto-redraw.

One more thing: When I made the icecream-cone above, I grouped the "cone" and the "icecream" to apply a joint shadow.
Later I wanted to ungroup the two, but XX would not let me.
It showed "one group selected", but when I hit CTRL-U it said: "no groups selected".
It took some time to find out, that you can't ungroup objects that are shadowed.
I had to remove the shadow, then ungroup, edit the picture, group again, shadow again.
Strange behaviour, huh ??

Wolfgang

[NinaV]

Wolfgang;
That's exactly the effect I was looking for. Thanks for confirming that it could be done on another machine. The machine I have is only a few months old. I just can't figure out what the trouble is with this bevel activity.

Hopefully Xara support will come to my rescue.

BTW could you make that double chocolate with sprinkles pleeeeeze [img]/infopop/emoticons/icon_smile.gif[/img]

Nina

[rheaton]

Daniel,

I did a timing experiment on loading the Export Dialog and the change from x'parent to non-x'parent .gif export. I'm running a 1 yr. old 500 MHz PIII from Micron on NT 4.0 SP5 with a Matrox 32 MB G-400 Max, 256 MB RAM, Adaptec SCSI UW2. For the experiment, I took a 2.0 file w/ .tiff and vector info in it, loaded it, and applied some bevel to the text and shape and exported it. (Inspired by Garry's leaded glass tutorial, just been waiting on X to finish it.)

Test 1:
With preview in export already set for x'parent the Save As to Export Preview Dialog load time takes ~5 sec. and the change from x'parent to non-x'parent takes ~3 sec

Test 2:
With preview in export already set for non-x'parent the Save As to Export Preview Dialog load time takes ~3 sec. and the change from x'parent to non-x'parent takes ~5 sec.

Hate to say it, but maybe the difference is the Athlon chip. Take somebody smarter than me to tell you that. Anyway, if you wanna take a look at the results go here:
http://www.ipass.net/~rheaton/Xtest.htm
The page may take a second to load as the files are pretty porky. The two .gifs are 35 kb each. I also did a .jpg @ 75% quality which came in at 15 kb.

I do know that the new features are just too cool. Loaded it last night and spent the next hour just playing like a kid. Pretty work Xara!!! Looking forward to the brushes. So far no three finger salutes. Good Luck!