Bouton's Wish List for Group Participation on v 11

[Gare]

I did as Mike W wisely suggested and, closed both versions 9 and 10 requests I'd started a new thread on "Dear Xara."

I believe that if we keep things reasonable—IOW without requesting that all the engineers tear up the core engine so one person can import PSG layer with Adobe's Layer Styles in place and editable—we might actually get as widely requested feature or two in the nest version.

I suggest if we keep this thread terse and focused without a bitchy tone, the Xara folks who read this might be more inclined to seriously ponder a "good request." And to do them one suggestion/plea per post and possibly put your request in the subject line, which requires toy go to Advanced mode.

Do anything you ca to make your request polite in tone and reasonable and popular as a request. Don't suggest something( ie. "when is a Mac version coming out?") when you post something you know benefits only one or two people.

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Me first: CorelDRAW has featured a dynamic Polygon tool since the mid-190s and I'd like to see this in Xara.

• You can set the number of sides even after you've significantly altered the polygon, the alterations including adding control points, deleting them, and turning smooth lines to curves, vice-versa, as well as changing the type of control point, which all told, lets you do stuff like this:



• I'd like to see a utility box where you can create your own strokes and pressure profiles. Xara is doing great sat providing is with presets, but what if we need a custom profile?



I think this would be do-able. I'd imagine do to this with existing code's not as hard as inventing a brush tool for the program.

By Best,

Gary

[gwpriester]

OG - I would like to make a suggestion:

Have the wish list open for 30 days.

At the end of this period, compile four lists, Vector Drawing Features, Website Design Features, Photo Editing Features, and Text and Layout Design Features.

Then let everybody review the lists and vote for their top 3 or top 5 features in each category.

This way there will be actual numbers to prioritize the features.

[handrawn]

no thank you

I can tell from line number two of your post that I would be wasting my time

I have already ported over 50% of my workflow elsewhere, and in a year's time it will, I am fairly sure, be just too late

I believe in asking for what I want - I respect being told that it is not possible - I am extremely disappointed, but I understand the position Xara is in; hopefully they understand mine

[gwpriester]

Text & Layout Design Features:

Master Pages. Master Pages. Master Pages. Did I say Master Pages? Master Pages.

Support for Glyphs and Extended Characters

Discretionary Page Numbering (so page 1 does not automatically appear on page 1 only)

Support for Spot Color in bitmaps and in PDFs

True Grayscale Support

Hyphenation Dictionery

More control for paragraph text, e.g. widow and orphan control.

Master Pages

Website Design Features:

Parallax Scrolling

More control over how sub menus are displayed, for example, centered text.

Photo Editing

Grayscale support and creation (Import and Export a bitmap that is recognized as Grayscale and not RGB)

Update the bitmap tracer or lose it.

General Features

Ctrl R (repeat last step - ala CorelDRAW)

Arrays (repeat a series of steps)

[gwpriester]

Steve - Don't participate if you don't want to. But consider that as we speak, plans are probably being made for version 11. The sooner we come up with a representative list the better our chances of getting these suggestions in early enough that they can be explored and added to the next versions.

[Gare]

There's no rule that says any everyone is not welcome to make their own post in "Dear Xara". I didn't even realize until my posts grew into a thread with version 9 that several people were tacking on their own requests to my personal ones. I don't mind discussions as long as they are civil ad constructive, right here.

Amoore is the Moderator for this area; perhaps someone should ask here about the structure of future requests before it becomes unwieldy and chaotic?

Well-presented requests invite Programmers and other PTB to read and consider the requests. Bitching and in-fighting would msake a reasonasble person blow this thread off.

And I agree with Og, that the sooner we start mutually cobbling a do-able list, the sooner TPTB might consider the merits, especialy in the light of the "what did we do wrong?" pall cast over this version.

My Best,

Gary

[handrawn]

please define 'doable' I have no idea what is and isn't - do you? - can you tell us? - or we just going to have to guess, those of us [most of us] who know nothing about the coding and the modularity of the program...

xara is supposed to be a program for designing things - I design things top down, line art and then as many layers below as are necessary, I am sick and fed up with new layers being at the top of the stack and having to drag them down time after time after time after time after time - so an option to put new layers above/below the current, to me that's doable, easy, a programmer should be able to do it with eyes closed and one arm behind their back - but I bet it's not, or it would have been done by now

and nested layers - there is a reason most every other program has them, for example when you design alternatives that need to be switched in and out with one click - xara groups are no good, cannot edit within a group and see the rest of the drawing in situ at the same time as you edit, dumb, so setting them up is making a rod for the back when trying to match colour changes and anything else that needs to be in sync inside/outside of the group

I am not trying to be negative; I am resisting the cynic in me that hears "Qu'ils mangent de la brioche"; I know Xara cannot please everyone and would be silly to try..

but a definition of 'doable' please - do you have one?

[angelize]

One thing for the web design side that would provide good solid feature would be to bundle XT-CMS with the WDpremium and Designer Pro versions. TG member Xtom created this system to work with Xara software and I've been working with it on a site that hopefully should be nearing completion soon. It's easy to install and set up but if there were some way it could be bundled so that after you set up your page templates in Xara you would have an option to publish to CMS you would do this the first time and the CMS files would be uploaded to your webspace, the template (html page files) would be uploaded to the themes folder using the filename from your .web file and Xara would provide you with a link like it already does but this link would take you to the admin login of your CMS, where you set up your configurations (not difficult to do) Then after that when you publish changes to this site from xara the profile would be set to publish the files into the themes folder, and again xara would present you with the link to log in to the CMS

[handrawn]

Steve - Don't participate if you don't want to. But consider that as we speak, plans are probably being made for version 11. The sooner we come up with a representative list the better our chances of getting these suggestions in early enough that they can be explored and added to the next versions.

Sorry Gary P; for you I have great respect and admiration - what you say is true, especially 'versions', in that it is likely too late already for version 11

........................

IOW without requesting that all the engineers tear up the core engine so one person can import PSG layer with Adobe's Layer Styles in place and editable—we might actually get as widely requested feature or two in the nest version.

This just really annoyed me, and I was pretty upset to begin with
Kate said that Camelot was being overhauled [in so many words]

It's possible Gare means PSG, but I'm thinking he meant PSD which means the likes of me were wise to start going elsewhere; we no longer count, if indeed we ever did.. just unhired, unpaid help

I have possibly derailed this thread, for which I am sorry also...

[theinonen]

I had a play with the trial version and there are actually many ways the vector drawing tools could be improved by adding some CAD like features. Those would also go well with the designer part of the name.