How do you feel about the 365 Program?

[Acorn]

If you bought 12.5.0 PGD today, for example, then that is the version you have a perpetual license to. If after 1 year your Update Service expires and then you have to reinstall on a new computer, the version you will be able to install is 12.5.0. What you won't have access to on that new install is any updates that you have downloaded during that year (12.6, 12.7 etc). So my point was that if you buy today, reject the updates and upgrade again in a year's time, you are pretty much in the same position you always were. The main difference being the loss of the Online Content Catalog after expiry.

I'm only aware of one serious problem with connectivity with the Online Content Catalog, which we posted about here on TG. ... But I agree it's slower than it should be. You know, the Find function in the Designs Gallery hadn't worked properly for quite some time. We couldn't easily fix that but kept it there as better than nothing. Now we have a proper search function in the Online Content Catalog so we've removed the Find function from the DG.

Kate, I have been on about the loss of the native Find for some time. If you expire your update service then no OCC and therefore no Find. Reverting to the version you bought does not allow you to maintain the websites built with the version you bought as the poorly documented upgrades that might have been your lynchpin part of your design are not flagged as such. Gone, without a trace. The Update Service is a pernicious form of crippleware: Wikipedia - "The term "crippleware" is sometimes used to describe software products whose functions have been limited (or "crippled") with the sole purpose of encouraging or requiring the user to pay for those functions (either by paying a one-time fee or an ongoing subscription fee)." After the one year's subscription, i would expect not to revert to 12.5.0 but 12.5.n where n is the summation of all bug fixes. Bug fixes, gone, without a trace. Your mantra of being able to continue using the upgrades (and bug fixes) until you re-install is hollow.

Specifically on the slow access to the OCC:

1. My initial access time: 4 seconds
2. Search All on %: 3 seconds for each of 93 pages of content.
3. Search Tree section with %: 3 seconds for any of the tree nodes.

I am sure the handshake with another external website, Pixabay, doesn't help. Both Stock Photograph and stock Illustrations should have a toggle.
Forcing the OCC to be driven by Internet Explorer is not great either.

You cannot even collapse a node up to its parent without scrolling to the parent down arrow.
Selecting an open parent closes it so you have to click it again to recover the tree you actually want.
Native Xara Find provided a Description to search on, the OCC doesn't.
To provide an OCC that, on hover, just allows a click button to (Open, Import, Buy) is nugatory and different to the friendlier Symbol method.
The OCC thumbs, which are already present in the Local Design gallery, offers me the opportunity to re-download them all over again (and again? No caching?).

Flip the Update Sevice to we can keep all updates in the year, forever.
Give us a native Local designs gallery Search.
Provide four clear updates in the year: typographic, vector, images, web.

Clean, understandable, a winner.

Acorn

[Acorn]

Just a final hint to those of you saying you are disappointed in the most recent feature additions: We have a survey for Designer Pro and PGD 365 owners @ http://www.xara.com/products/designer/survey/. You may have missed it, or not noticed the 'suggest a feature' question because it was optional, but of the 460 separate feature suggestions so far, not very many are vector ones. Surveys like this are just one source of information so I don't want to overstate the weight we'll put on it, but nevertheless if you have a favorite vector suggestion it can only help if you do the survey and add your voice (please don't post your suggestions in this thread though!).
Also the Xara designer behind the photo filter pre-sets & overlays has recently started a thread @ https://www.talkgraphics.com/showthr...-Xara-Designer, he'd be happy to talk with anyone about content.

... And the Winner of this Year's Xara Survey is (Drumroll ... ... ...) ... Xara!
No published winner, no list of asks, no stated prize, just give us your email, just trust us.

Acorn

[katemoir]

Acorn, mwenz, handrawn, I suspect there's not much I can say that will persuade you and I fear we are trying other members patience by revisiting the same questions & answers, so I think I'll just say that the pros and cons have been pretty well run thru and we must leave people to make their own judgement on whether to upgrade now, wait till they see something they want to upgrade for, opt for Updates or ignore them, or none of the above. Time will tell us whether this is an idea that the majority of users like or not, and we will respond accordingly.

Acorn, thanks for your constructive feedback on the OCC, I will pass that along. And I agree it's too slow. I noted your comment about missing the Find function in the DG earlier but hesitated to point out that it didn't actually work!

hoja - I'm afraid I didn't actually understand you comment.

[katemoir]

... And the Winner of this Year's Xara Survey is (Drumroll ... ... ...) ... Xara!
No published winner, no list of asks, no stated prize, just give us your email, just trust us.

Acorn

Prize is mentioned on the page http://www.xara.com/products/designer/survey/ and the surveys are still running, so it's not too late for anyone who hasn't done them yet.

[hoja]

hoja - I'm afraid I didn't actually understand you comment.

Just create a slideshow by using the Xara Slideshow widget. It's the only contemporary tool for presenting large images
on arbitrary devices which ships with Xara. If one wants to stick to native solutions, this widget is the way to go.

The Slideshow widget differs from many widgets in Xara. It requires users to be online and uploads all content (images)
somewhere else. Each time one edits the Slideshow, adds or removes images one therefore needs to be online to establish
a connection to that external Server.

Also the final published website loads its Slideshow content from these remote Servers. Some users may be pretty
irritated in terms of the legal foundation of this practice – as this data hijacking takes place without even the slightest
notice. But let's ignore that part for the moment and imagine that a year passes and the user hasn't renewed the
365 contract for whatever reason.

He/she will find Xara still running but in the same way the Content Catalog has stopped working one can neither
edit / delete the existing externally hosted Slideshows nor create new ones. A vital Web-functionality has expired.

[digitalphaser]

Prize is mentioned on the page http://www.xara.com/products/designer/survey/ and the surveys are still running, so it's not too late for anyone who hasn't done them yet.

I am not the PRO X365 owner. I am of course very sorry that I looked this survey. I found it very amusing.
What is it all about?

Who have advised you to buy our car? What do you use most often the brake pedal or accelerator pedal? Do you want a round or square steering wheel? Do you need an ashtray in the car?

Read the developers sometimes "Dear Xara" section? It may be worth looking at what are competitors doing?

I do not think that PRO users desperately need some templates or OCC. PRO users need professional tools and features.

[Jonopen]

I'm only aware of one serious problem with connectivity with the Online Content Catalog, which we posted about here on TG. Are you still experiencing problems??

Hi Kate, probably not the place to say this but I am! (Ticket ID: NFL-655-88957) I was hoping the recent update was going to fix it, but I still can't download anything from Pixabay via the content catalogue, but can directly from their site and anywhere else on the Internet on the same PC. https://www.talkgraphics.com/showthr...uot&highlight=

[hseiken]

Seeing some of the complaints of Xara, I'll play devil's advocate and say your only options are two other vector graphics programs which are SLOOOOOOOOOOOW and FULL OF MENU BLOAT AND GIMMICKS.

The only reasonable request I've seen, imo, has been to group Open Type fonts properly instead of listing them out as all individual fonts of the same family. That said, whatever speed gains you get in the other programs to have those features, you immediately lose through their poor design and slow rendering engines. I know because I know Inkscape and Illusrator inside out and I cannot tell you how frustrating it is to do very simple manipulations of graphics in those programs, down to having to wait 5 seconds for a zoom to happen, which occurs instaneously on this same system in Xara. Those things add up a lot quicker than having an OpenType group appear in the font selection window, for instance.

I don't want to make it sound like i'm minimizing everyone's issues, but again, even with these issues, Xara still gets things done faster and more friendly than literally anything else on the market that's respected, and really makes everything else that not widely accepted look like a toy by a comparison.

Xara isn't perfect, but it's 75% closer to perfection than anything else out there, and adding more features to the vector editing wouldn't increase productivity, it would increase bloat and feature creep, which definitely would kill the product from ever reaching it's true potential. There's power in simplicity and weakness in menu diving. Seeing Xara introduce menu diving as of late has me worried.

[mwenz]

I think that AD is the application with the most promise in the vector realm. InkScrape is painful, a thing built by committee. AI is fine when augmented by plug-ins (especially the Astute ones). Yes, AI is slower than XDP. But it is color managed and to a decent degree is OT aware.

Good luck playing the Devil's advocate with this crowd.

[handrawn]

from my point of view using lazy nezumi makes freehand drawing a lot better in affinity designer - not so with xara, but that's maybe its famed rendering engine... most things in life have minus as well as plus

Yes, AI is slower than XDP. But it is color managed and to a decent degree is OT aware

tortoise and the hare - fast operations do not necessarily mean a project completes quicker - used to have fun debating that with an ex-admin of this site who left shortly before you joined.....