New Smart Tables - v16.0

[Acorn]

Dear Xara...

It might be obvious to your designers and developers but I cannot see what value Tables 11 & 12 have brought to the mix?
Instead the fixed Table 04, with pictures, ought to have been your highlight.

I do like the drag out, release, delete feature for rows and columns but there is still nothing to clear a cell other than go to the Text Tool, select the Cell, highlight the text, delete.

The Open Border Menu hides beneath Embedded Photos.

Acorn

[Rob-Xar]

Sorry I'm a little confused, are you saying we shouldn't introduce new designs if you don't see any value in them or your asking us in what way those designs would be useful?

Designers and Developers are separate departments so one broken design may not be a designers problem but rather a problem in the code in which developers would be looking into this. But come on you know this already.

The issue with border controls being covered by embedded graphics is a known issue that is being worked on, along with other table issues.

[Acorn]

Sorry I'm a little confused, are you saying we shouldn't introduce new designs if you don't see any value in them or your asking us in what way those designs would be useful?
Designers and Developers are separate departments so one broken design may not be a designers problem but rather a problem in the code in which developers would be looking into this. But come on you know this already.
The issue with border controls being covered by embedded graphics is a known issue that is being worked on, along with other table issues.

Rob, I am suggesting that most of the Table template are derivative. The following is not a rant but an explanation of where I see the difficulties in using Smart Tables.

Pre-populating the template cells with indicative data and not providing a mechanism to delete the contents easily is the first problem. Object handling across Smart Shapes and traditional Xara objects is now broken and so different, it is problematic to work out what you can and cannot do - get a nice blue outlined cell and hit the Delete key and you might intuit the cell content are removed; the table is deleted.

The second problem is all of the templates could be derived from a small 3x3 design that has a header row and a zebra pair of rows like Table 02; a row header like Table 05; proper linked buttons and not text panels like Tables 10 & 12; possibly embedding a graphic, a symbol
In hiding behind "new templates", Xara is not explaining the power and capabilities of the table structure and is magicking away the design element of the product.

Finally, Tables 11 & 12 are Named as templateMinProgramVersion:15.1.0. This means they are functional in v15.1 but they do not appear in the v15.1 Online Content Catalogue. If they were simply presentations of the current application coding, they could have been added to the Catalogue months ago and not fanfared as new. I appreciate that the drag left (the tooltip move left is incorrect) to remove function is new v16.0 code but the tables still work (In v15.1, you drag a row to the bottom and then move the Remove Row control upwards).

Two pages 163/164 in the PDF Manual or a page in the Help file is not enough to describe how to make tables zing. There needs to be a better explanation of Smart Shape object handling.
If Xara is intent on incremental delivery of capability, that capability has to work when presented and not left to the Customer to discover the "known" bugs. Thank you for advising you know about the embedded graphics hiding the new control. The statement "You can also paste CSV data from other sources like Excel and Google spreadsheets to quickly populate a table." is wrong.
The HTML output fails accessibility as nothing generated is an HTML table.

Acorn