Xara alternatives?

[Simon2099]

Do you know a good Xara (non Adobe) alternative for making professional web and graphic design?
Since I am not searching for pseudo Wed coding, I may appreciate to hear your experiences with:
Photoline
DrawPlus 6
Affinity

I also appreciate more suggestions. I did not include Canvas because it is focused mostly in oilers and I did not find a 64bits version.

X10 has a lot of new features, but may be non of them has been requested in this forum.
The Design & Usability Enhancements do not include the long time wished improvements in the edition of groups and paths.
http://www.talkgraphics.com/showthre...ine-their-path

The Web Authoring & Publishing features do not behave as CSS. I do not see how to get predictable code to make simple things as templates for CMSs.

Xara does not listen to its loyal users. Why keep dealing with it? The best is to get the product with the desired features in it.

Thank you.

[iamtheblues]

"The best is to get the product with the desired features in it" Well, there's the rub, as probably the only program with the desired features in it (for me) is Illustrator and that is very expensive and the pricing structure sucks, too. I have no interest in the web, DrawPlus is exceedingly buggy (the contour tool is worse than useless) and Serif doesn't respond to its users requests very well either.
Inkscape is great, considering it's free, but is clunky to use.
All in all that puts the Xara products pretty much up there as far as value for money and ease of use is concerned. Those who use it for the web will, I'm sure, offer their own opinions here.
Bob.

[handrawn]

Xara does not listen to its loyal users.

it does listen, but it cannot do everything at once; in fact it listens as much as any and a lot more than some..

like Bob I cannot advise about web building

also some things are not straight-forward to change; the fact that other programs have such features is not always all that relevant to how difficult it is

[Simon2099]

I download the starter edition. I did not experience issues with the contour, but it was a simply test, I had never used such feature before
BTW, your "T" dilemma can be made going to "Line" and there picking "Double Line","Sharp Join","Scale" & "Behind". You can adjust the double line type and the width as well.
Then you may agree with me how important is to control the line path. Your solution was possible thanks to the Behind function. It is not as good as Fireworks or Canvas have but it is better than nothing.

[Albacore]

Would it not be easier if you looked at the D/Plus forum to see the reports from the users there? You are going to get divided views as like here some will love the new tools while others will say I am not upgrading because of X or Y but at least you'll know opinions about the product from normal users. I got given DP X6 recently and though I don't like the way the panels are set out I found it no problem drawing with a pen tool and modifying bitmaps. The the painting brushes were a nice touch good with a wacom and it brought in a great 3D grid system which works well with simple shapes. I took it off my hard disc recently so maybe that tells you something but I have been using Xara products since early nineties and Illustrator since 2002 and I still have Freehand so I have enough vector tools.

Now this is just my opinion here! if you want to use CMS then your going to learn how to code and to make up your own templates. WordPress, Joomla are not that hard to learn to use and there is so much support. Yes, and you can still use whatever programme that you want for your bitmaps for your web design. Stop grumping and do that's my motto.

[Fred vanderZee]

I can only agree with Albacore. My old web site was all done in Xara but I need stuff that is not (and problably never will be) available in Xara, like a shop with integrated cart, delivery and payment modules, full social media integration (FB login for instance), template design and management, multi-language support, forms - and that is just the starter requirments
So now my work flow is like this, I use:
- Xara for web and (web) graphic design
- template toaster for setting up templates
- Joomla for cms, and a lot of extensions for adding various functions

Xara is stil an important part in my web design work flow, easy to use and to experiment. See the Stop & post of November for some examples.

And of course I use it extensively for my drawings.

[Simon2099]

Thank you all. Your comments were very helpful.
I also keep thinking freehand was the best, specially when you remember the wonderful things done with a small chunk of the resources found in current PCs.
Great draws Fred, also is welcome your tip about template toaster.
At the moment the best tool for me is Photoline. It does not have the type of interface of DrawPlus and Xara, but it feels faster (by far), more reliable (it is fully 64bits), better bitmap edition and have all the features I use to work with, without the need of plug-ins (BTW I experienced better PS plug-in compatibility than Xara). There are also Windows and Mac versions so my team work can use it no matter what hardware they have, except Linux but apparently is is nice with Wine.

[mwenz]

...best tool for me is Photoline....(it is fully 64bits)...

I use PL as my main photo editor. Have for years. It is not in the same class for doing vector as XDP, AI, CD, etc.

Why not ask Martin Huber if there are any 32-bit processes or code running when one uses 8bf filters in the 64-bit application?

Pretty much everything else about PL I agree with.

[KIR23]

I curious if Photoline has the same bitmap ability as Xara:
1. feather edges quickly
2. Vector masks/crops editable keeping bitmap fill on place or scalable together with the vector outline
3 name or just color tags to keep layers/selections organized. maybe a kind of layer compositions?
4. A brush that could randomly scatter around groups of bitmap objects like Xara brushes, that could be kept as vector objects.
5. A tool to quickly replace similar bitmap fills keeping the scale and position intact . Maybe an outer reference to a file on disk like illustrator does

Ps. maybe illustrator can do so already? I tried it 10 years ago last time.

[pauland]

What really disappoints me about the way that people look at Xara and then look for alternatives - comparing with Xara features and bullet point comparisons. You often see it in all sort of threads .

Xara is a one-size-fits all program whose sweet spot is someone who wants one purchase to do more than one thing - ie illustration and web publishing, illustration and PDF production, illustration and bitmap editing without breaking the bank and requiring too much technical knowledge. Xara sits in that niche.

For me, that niche isn't so much where I want to be, but it is where Xara's core users sit.

So, I wouldn't go looking at other software looking for a capability that is like Xara, I would look for a program that fits what you want to do and isn't Xara plus.

Personally, I picked up a Mac based program that specifically targets the mobile app/web design that I need to do. It doesn't do half of what Xara does, but it does what it does extremely well and has no bloat. For most Xara users it's not an option because you need a Mac.

For the curious, you can check out this software here: http://bohemiancoding.com/sketch/ and there are a lot of videos out there about it. It's not an option for Windows-based xara users.

I would encourage everyone to think again about how you evaluate software. It's too easy to compare feature bullet-points and look for too much functionality that you may never use or can be done better in another program.

I think Xara users are their own worst enemies - expecting everything to be available in one basket, when really separation of function can be good.

A number of Mac Xara users are currently gurgling over Serif Affinity which on paper looks like a much more sophisticated program than Sketch 3. I can see why people are excited by it, but for me Sketch 3 is targeting my kind of design workflow, so I want that targeted simplicity.

Unfortunately for Xara users, the Mac world looks to be leading the design software breakout at the moment, fuelled I think by Adobe's licensing choices and costs and for the first time I can see Adobe's dominance being challenged in the future. A long way to go yet.

My message here is not that everyone should buy a Mac and one of these programs, but to look at what you do. Hard. Then make a choice that isn't based on a bullet point count or similarity to Xara. You may even find that Xara is a better fit for what you do than you realise.

Good luck in your choices.