My TalkGraphics (your Xara Online Forum) handle is
Acorn and I believe Robert's is
Rob-Xar.
I have been having a long harangue on TalkGraphics with Matt Bolton, Kate Moir (and Robert) about my concerns in the decision to hide away the Xara Online Content Catalogue material behind a paywall.
Such a decision seems to fall upon Magix as a marketing approach but it is clear over a number of version releases that unsuspecting customers do not realise this material is time-limited and is a case of a poorly advised 'use it or lose it' policy before the Update Service expires. As a long-term use of Xara's excellent products, this is a major disservice where access to content that has application functionality built-in is blocked. If you have the time to examine
http://downloadsv16.xara.com/web/catalog/index.html, those items listed as Buy are no longer accessible unless they have been previously downloaded to the Local Designs gallery.
If you then examine those remaining, under First Look > Free Example Components, and ignore all the Website, Social Media and Presentation templates, then, even if you are not a user of the Xara Desktop application, you will get an understanding of the almost total cull of the functionality of the application.
Robert suggested that Magix handling the "content directly costs money to maintain". In my reply, I posited that the cost was trivial and could be very cheap using Amazon Web Services (e.g., its Simple Storage Service (S3)); I had also suggested my web service provider offered me unlimited storage.
I would be more than happy for the Website, Social Media and Presentation templates to continue to be behind a paywall as I find we have better, richer, persistent and cheaper access elsewhere. Do note that these templates storage is only 3GB.
I propose that the trivial 95MB storage for Components should be fully accessible after the Update Service expires. This can be either through the current Online Content Catalogue or hosted elsewhere. My preference is that the Components are downloaded into the local Cache as a specific function of the Xara Desktop application as this ensures the content reaches those people who purchased its access in the first place.
Respectfully
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