Quote Originally Posted by pauland View Post
Charles, I'm frankly shocked that you don't see what's missing or why Xara software isn't great for producing books.
Where did that come from? I never said, and none of our marketing material ever claimed Designer is suitable for creating books (although people have created books in our software). I mean we don't even have e-book export, so this not something we aim for. In fact I specifically said 600 page documents were beyond what Designer is aimed at.

Regarding the point about whether it's better to have separate programs for creative document production, or one like Designer Pro, I think some people are brainwashed by the Adobe approach which is simply an accident of history. When you know how it came about it has little merit. On the contrary, a suite of separate, large, complex, memory hogging programs has a world of pain associated with it.

Do people imagine the Adobe Creative Suite was deliberately designed and planned this way? It was not. It's a suite of totally different products, most of which started life in separate companies, acquired by Adobe. They are totally different code bases, and even Adobe would not consider attempting to merge them into one. So they did the only sensible things they could. They tried to make their UI consistent as they could, and bundled them as a suite of applications. It's an accident of history - they had little choice.

Each application is more powerful Designer Pro for sure. But the price you pay is considerable. Say your creative job (like most) combines vector, photos, text layout, probably output to PDF and probably deployed, in one way or another on the Web. In the modern world PDF and Web are the mainstay methods of distributing creative artwork and documents of all types.

- So that's four or more separate apps you have to use to produce the one creative document.
- There is some consistency between these apps, but fundamentally they are different apps, with separate leaning curves.
- The compute resources are considerable - like 4 times greater and Xara's single app. It's not just memory, but CPU and now GPU requirements. If you update your computer every year - you're in luck you've probably got the horsepower.
- Consider the workflow. Remember I'm producing one creative document that happens to combine vector, photos, text layout. Do I really have to switch apps to do tweak my vector artwork, or my photos?
- And the final cost, don't forget, is the actual monetary cost of this.

And Adobe are aware of the fundamental inefficiencies of this work-flow. They keep adding more overlap in functionality to the suite. So InDeisgn can now do basic vector editing (as can Photoshop). Why did they add this - when Illustrator is their prime vector tool? Because of the absurdity of having to switch apps to do basic vector work.

Take something as simple and common as soft shadows - every Adobe product has re-implemented a way of adding soft shadows. But they are all slightly different, most (actually I think all of them) raster based not vector, with slightly different UIs and radically different engines to produce the same effect. And for all of them the UI sucks (IMO).

We just thought, from the very beginning, that it was absurd to insist, to force users to buy separate apps for what is one creative process, with the aim of producing one final document. And when you look at the spectrum of graphic design work, everything from posters to web design, to brochures, flyers, magazines (online or offline), blogs, or artwork on the sides of lorries and buses, it all, almost always, combines photography, vector and page / text layout.

So why, when I'm producing my artwork for the side of the bus, or for my website come to think of it, do I have to use separate programs? It's not right. Adobe just happened to evolve that way. If you'd planned it from the beginning you'd never have done it this way.

So Designer (Camelot) is not and never was intended to be the supreme vector design tool (or photo tool, or DTP tool, or web tool). It was and is meant to be the supreme tool for producing ALL these document types in one place, covering the creative document universe (at least 90% of the time) with a fraction of the learning curve, computer resources, time and budget.

So if you're a hard core, professional photo manipulator, use Photoshop. But for most people, most of the time, Xara's photo editing is more than fine - in fact it's great in most ways. And if I want to go remove a blemish in a photo I'm placing on the page (web page, print page, poster, whatever) I do not have to go start an (expensive) monster of a separate app, switch to it, do my one-click blemish removal, save, switch back load again blar, blar. So I still maintain our approach IS far, far more productive and cost effective than anything else, for almost all creative work.

Similarly if you want to do bleeding edge web design go use Dreamweaver (but be prepared to become a programmer, not just a designer). But for most people web design is a design process not a programming one, that involves pretty simple layout of photos, text and vector artwork. And I'd rather like the ability to edit that vector artwork in-situ, in my web designer, than do it in some external dedicated app.

Sorry, got a bit off topic there.