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  1. #31
    Join Date
    Apr 2012
    Location
    SW England
    Posts
    17,744

    Default Re: Xara Designer Pro X and Photo & Graphic Designer Updates

    Quote Originally Posted by jmanganelli View Post
    Just figured I'd add my voice to the chorus. I use xara everyday at this point. it is a great application. it is quick and convenient and stable, for the most part. however, there has been little quality improvement or feature expansion in the last few years. i know a lot of pre-made content has been added, but that is not useful to me. Support for layered tif, exr, and psd files would be useful. ability to handle larger dtp documents would be useful. improvements to brushes would be useful. performance improvements for filters would be useful. being able to reference other image/graphic files without importing them would be useful. a general sense that the desktop programs are being actively and aggressively developed would be reassuring.

    in the last few years, it seems most effort has gone into the online tools, and the desktop tools have gotten just barely enough development to avoid mutiny among maintenance subscribers but not really the kind of attention that a company puts into its feature products. I'm not judging. I'm sure that xara had to make tough decisions to get its online offerings off the ground. but now that the online offerings are off the ground and now that xara recently sent a survey to subscribers indicating that it intends to continue developing the desktop applications and asking us for input on development priorities, it is time to follow through on this promise to develop the desktop applications.

    at this point, i'm not abandoning xara. it is useful and i enjoy using it and i use it daily. but i don't believe that i've seen enough development in the last three years to warrant paying the subscription fee each year. i'll take a wait an see approach over the next ten months, til my subscription is up for renewal. but if the only updates to designer pro in the next 10 months are more free content in the online catalog and a smattering of bug fixes with one or two minor, incremental feature improvements, it will not be enough to justify the $120 annual maintenance fee. $120 is also the annual maintenance fee for photoshop and in comparison to xara's desktop products, photoshop appears to have received far more development in the last few years. though i mostly left adobe over their new pricing structure and increased cost, i have had to maintain some access to and use of their tools on occasion and have been pleasantly surprised at how aggressively they are developing them. similarly, affinity's development in the past few years is astounding, and there is no annual cost for access to those improvements. in comparison, xara's desktop app development efforts appear disconcertingly pedestrian these past few years.

    In summary, xara is a great program and was a good investment as i transitioned from adobe cc. importantly, xara is just a fun and easy but also powerful program to use, which makes it enjoyable in a way that some of its competitors' products are not, in my opinion. But the maintenance fee that i've paid the last few years has not been worth the paltry improvements the desktop programs have seen in that time. if xara does not develop designer pro more aggressively, it will not make me question my investment in the software nor will it make me cease using designer pro in the short-term, but it will make me stop paying a subscription fee when it is not at all clear that there are sufficient benefits for the cost of the subscription.
    Thank you for your balanced assessment. It is nice to recall that the Xara Desktop applications are "fun and easy", but appear to be in a backwater.

    I should advise that you need to read Xara's https://www.talkgraphics.com/showthr...ting-Explained where Xara refutes its Upgrade Service is a subscription model:
    Note: The Update Service isn’t a subscription, and there won’t be an automatic recharge. You will make a choice as usual about whether to upgrade your copy and extend the Update Service for another 365 days.
    While one can continue using the Xara Desktop application in perpetuity (almost), I still strongly disagree with Xara that it is a subscription, as without it, bug fixes, features and on-line content can can be removed from one's repertoire.
    Acorn - installed Xara software: Cloud+/Pro+ and most others back through time (to CC's Artworks). Contact for technical remediation/consultancy for your web designs.
    When we provide assistance, your responses are valuable as they benefit the community. TG Nuggets you might like. Report faults: Xara Cloud+/Pro+/Magix Legacy; Xara KB & Chat

  2. #32
    Join Date
    Apr 2010
    Location
    Kildare, Ireland
    Posts
    906

    Default Re: Xara Designer Pro X and Photo & Graphic Designer Updates

    (I agree the Xara desktop apps are great and I use Pro fairly regularly. I upgraded every version of Pro from v6 (when I discovered it) to v12 because each annual release brought significant new features. Upgrading was actually something to look forward to and exciting when details on the new version popped up. Now smaller updates are drip fed out over the year and nothing really stands out, it seems to be mostly forgettable content updates and on top of that the price went up, nagging popups were apparently introduced and marketing wise the desktop programs that we are so fond of were moved aside in favour of the cloud version on the main xara site and on their social media channels. It's just been dissapointing for the last year or so. Maybe it's now a matter of waiting a longer time for a worthwhile upgrade but with all the attention and promotion the cloud gets and the progress(?) of the desktop app it leaves me doubtful. I mean you just have to visit the xara.com website and ask yourself what to expect? Just more cloud by the looks of it. And the content updates aren't really desktop app updates, they're probably initially intended for cloud and are just convenient to release for desktop users.

    Anyway I know this is yet another negative post but the reason people are posting negative comments in relation to this kind of thing is because they like the program but don't like the direction it's going. I'm sure it's hard/impossible for the team to keep everyone happy and also make the money doing so but it's also important that users give their feedback. It's when users go quiet and stop giving the feedback it's probably too late, they've moved on. Sometimes I wonder if leaving behind old users for new ones that don't know any better is some kind of acceptable losses marketing strategy. Probably is. Anyway I better go make a cup of tea and cheer myself up before I get any more pessimistic.
    XT-CMS - a self-hosted CMS for Xara Designers - Xara + CMS Demo with blog & ecommerce shopping cart system.

  3. #33
    Join Date
    May 2015
    Location
    Greenville, SC, USA
    Posts
    22

    Default Re: Xara Designer Pro X and Photo & Graphic Designer Updates

    Hi All, happy holidays.

    Figured I'd reply to this again. Some thoughts that I hope are useful for xara/magix. I continue to find xara essential, and as noted in original post, as a kind of 'one note on steroids'. But over time, and as I learn xara better and better, I still find myself going to other graphics editing programs frequently because they do things that xara cannot do or does not do as well, so I do not think that xara designer pro 16, as it is now, is a comprehensive, advanced solution --- or at least, it is falling behind. I do not see this as a problem, necessarily. It is a very useful, convenient program. But, I have a suggestion and a comment.

    My suggestion is that if xara designer pro is to serve as a great creativity tool (like one note, brainstorming, sketching, note taking, conceptual layout, etc), and only a great creativity tool, but not its own competitive, comprehensive suite of graphics editing tools, then it would be enhanced by greatly increasing its interoperability with the tools to which the files must be transferred to complete the development of the graphic or document or website.

    My comment is that I have upgraded to release 16, and to each release the past few years, and I really don't see what I get for the money each year. I will take a wait and see approach before upgrading anymore. Assuming 'development' continues as it has these past few years, I don't see enough effort going into designer pro to justice the upgrade price.

  4. #34
    Join Date
    Apr 2008
    Location
    Rostov region
    Posts
    84

    Default Re: Xara Designer Pro X and Photo & Graphic Designer Updates

    Most of all I hate that think I'm an idiot.
    I'll just leave this here:
    Click image for larger version. 

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    "$129 вместо $647" ? Such a huge discount?
    Throw money at the monitor ... of course not)). Dear Magix, you can keep ASEOPS to yourself - for an even more aggressive marketing in the Internet.
    And happy new year to you. I hope that someday you will go broke, and the developers of Xara will appear on the sponsor, not friends-marketers.

  5. #35
    Join Date
    Apr 2012
    Location
    SW England
    Posts
    17,744

    Default Re: Xara Designer Pro X and Photo & Graphic Designer Updates

    Quote Originally Posted by maksimon View Post
    Most of all I hate that think I'm an idiot.
    I'll just leave this here:
    Click image for larger version. 

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Size:	8.3 KB 
ID:	123026
    "$129 вместо $647" ? Such a huge discount?
    Throw money at the monitor ... of course not)). Dear Magix, you can keep ASEOPS to yourself - for an even more aggressive marketing in the Internet.
    And happy new year to you. I hope that someday you will go broke, and the developers of Xara will appear on the sponsor, not friends-marketers.
    This is only marketing.

    The full cost is $299. The upgrade cost is $129. This is a "saving" of $170.
    If this "saving" didn't exist, you would have to buy the full product and no one sensible would even consider this.

    Next, Magix throws in an unnecessary free gift. Here it is ASEOPS, "worth" $384.
    No software product has an intrinsic worth and the cost to Magix to offer it is in the low dollars.
    The web page then conflates an essential discount with an imaginary need to achieve a miracle saving of $647.

    If you can suffer the loss of not upgrading for a time, do so.
    Buy in when the offered software is worth it to you.
    It then becomes a game of chicken; the more Customers who hold back, the less Magix gets and the more aggressive the marketing becomes.

    For those who are interested, we passed the first anniversary of the release of v15.0.
    Those who are in the Update Service have had a buggy v15.1 update and a buggy v16.0 release. Xara promised 3 to 4 regular updates a year. I would like a bug release for v16.0 so I can retire v15. I still have websites edited in v12 as I will not go to v16 until the bugs are reduced.

    Acorn
    Acorn - installed Xara software: Cloud+/Pro+ and most others back through time (to CC's Artworks). Contact for technical remediation/consultancy for your web designs.
    When we provide assistance, your responses are valuable as they benefit the community. TG Nuggets you might like. Report faults: Xara Cloud+/Pro+/Magix Legacy; Xara KB & Chat

 

 

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