Xara Designer Pro X and Photo & Graphic Designer Updates

[browj2]

I often see complaints here that Xara does not reply enough to the threads and that feature requests are ignored. However, I do see many times where Xara employees do intervene, comment and help out, but it is, obviously, not enough. Compare this to Corel (Paintshop Pro) where intervention from Corel employees is almost non-existant, and support is limited to 1 month after purchase - pitiful.

On the other hand, below is an example of what I think is excellent intervention by a software company on its forum - BluffTitler. The BluffTitler guy is Michiel and he replies to most threads and takes suggestions for improvements and new features to heart. Magix/Xara should take heed. I know that Magix/Xara do not like to announce what they are working on, or even comment on suggestions in Dear Xara, but they should. Here is one of Michiel's latest threads; judge for yourselves:

"Today we jump to version 14.1.

Not because it's a major new version, but because we need a nice number for the Sea Monsters pack, planned for release later this week:
www.outerspace-software.com...

By request of Jeep35, the show duration is no longer rounded off to whole seconds. You can now, for example, enter 2.5 in the FILE > SET SHOW DURATION... dialog.

By request of Kauzito, a new effect is introduced: Special/NormalMapper. This can be used to normap map a model that has no UV coordinates, similar to what Special/UVMapper does for colourmaps.

By request of lightads, the old ReflectiveWater_CubemapDDS effect has been converted to CFX.

Also inspired by lightads, the SETTINGS > OPTIONS... dialog now has a MAXIMUM TEXTURE RESOLUTION option. This can be used to prevent out of video memory issues when using lots of super high resolution photos. For example, set this value to 1920 and your 8K photos are automatically scaled down to make them fit into the video memory of your graphics card.

Lots of effect thumbnails have been redesigned..."

[BONES]

Like most internet forums, this is full of negativity but I just dropped by to thank the Xara developers for fixing a long-standing gripe I've had (and mentioned here a few times). I bought a new laptop last week and downloaded the latest version of Xara (which I had assumed I was running on my old machine anyway) and discovered, to my delight, that the application now starts far more quickly than it has in years. It is now on -par with all the other software I use so thanks, Xara, it makes a big difference to me.

[gwpriester]

I have removed three posts which do not meet our community standards for civility.