Xara Designer Next

[hseiken]

I'm going to chime in this 'evolve' business and use the other profession, of sorts, I'm involved in and that's music.

One thing I get extremely annoyed with in the graphics community is that there's no MIDI for graphics despite the fact SVG exists and could be that. Vector is vector is vector. Except when it's Illustrator or Xara. This is annoying. There's PDF, but then it's proprietary and thus not really SVG, it's not MIDI. MIDI was developed between competitors! It was a way so that each company could actually make money working their niche while supporting other companies making music gear. No one in any medium wants to compete when they're on the 'working side' of things. Even with audio, which would be the 'rasterization side' of the things, like PNG/Gif/JPG, there has been some semblance of normalcy but this goes out the window when using layers. I don't blame Xara for this one, but Adobe. They continue to manipulate PSD format so that no one else ever can keep up and they lock their userbase on an every shrinking, ever price increasing, base.

As for 'features'...I find this be absolutely asinine in terms of complaint. With export, we're not making music, we're stuck in the backwards graphics world, where there's no MIDI, there's only every company trying to control the market rather than create a uniform format and then compete on workflow and cater to different styles of people's methods of creating graphics. In that world, you'd probably have a really awesome page layout software that could load up vector graphics from *any* other software, i.e. a universal midi. But no...that said, in the music world, also, the guitar never ages. People get better at playing it, find new techniques, discover their favorite tone, and claim it as their own. Even with samplers and synths, people will return to an old synth and find it had locked away in it sounds they never thought of because they simple never used it the way they tried years later. Art software is very much this. All of that. And so I say, it's not the art software that sucks, it's the industry's inability to lay down their swords on format and concentrate on make the artist COMFORTABLE. For me I put up with the format problems because the comfort is unmatched for me. I don't need things to MOVE FORWARD, because that's so arbitrary these days with everything that involves workflow. Again, in the music analogy, you've all listened to legendary tracks that were made with a simple 4 track system. You have, trust me. It wasn't 'tech' that made that album work, it was working the artform. The more people pay attention to that, and work with what feels good, the more you can both evolve as an artist and also buck the 'you must use this tool' attack against US, the USERS of software by locking us down to formats. I put out all my stuff in png format and if I absolutely have to work with others, I go that extra mile to make a PDF work with any version of whatever people I'm working with use to open and edit a PDF. If they're using photoshop, i export all my layers in Xara into pngs numbered with their correct layer order and instruct my partner in crime to put them with transparencies in that order.

But I've tried multiple tools even after buying xara, and I won't switch, even though I hate how it keeps bugging me to upgrade, I hate the cloud, etc. I have what I have and it works great. I don't think others using 'new tools' is anything other than 'grass is greener' syndrome in most respects, and the biggest problem that faces any xara user and in fact ANY graphics tool user is the stupid, absolutely abysmal state of format interchange.

You don't hate Xara, you hate formats. Because in the better world, you could load up the same file xara made in the 'newer cooler' tool, edit it, then bring it right back in to xara and keep working, just like I do with my music files. But that's not our world, and that's the problem that NEEDS to be solved. And it wont because Adobe is too fat to fail and too pig headed to cooperate.

EDIT: I'll also add that the video format BS is also problematic in the same way. This prick waving to control markets garbage hurts us as artists.

[Acorn]

I'm going to chime in this 'evolve' business and use the other profession, of sorts, I'm involved in and that's music.

One thing I get extremely annoyed with in the graphics community is that there's no MIDI for graphics despite the fact SVG exists and could be that. Vector is vector is vector. Except when it's Illustrator or Xara. This is annoying. There's PDF, but then it's proprietary and thus not really SVG, it's not MIDI. MIDI was developed between competitors! It was a way so that each company could actually make money working their niche while supporting other companies making music gear. No one in any medium wants to compete when they're on the 'working side' of things. Even with audio, which would be the 'rasterization side' of the things, like PNG/Gif/JPG, there has been some semblance of normalcy but this goes out the window when using layers. I don't blame Xara for this one, but Adobe. They continue to manipulate PSD format so that no one else ever can keep up and they lock their userbase on an every shrinking, ever price increasing, base.

As for 'features'...I find this be absolutely asinine in terms of complaint. With export, we're not making music, we're stuck in the backwards graphics world, where there's no MIDI, there's only every company trying to control the market rather than create a uniform format and then compete on workflow and cater to different styles of people's methods of creating graphics. In that world, you'd probably have a really awesome page layout software that could load up vector graphics from *any* other software, i.e. a universal midi. But no...that said, in the music world, also, the guitar never ages. People get better at playing it, find new techniques, discover their favorite tone, and claim it as their own. Even with samplers and synths, people will return to an old synth and find it had locked away in it sounds they never thought of because they simple never used it the way they tried years later. Art software is very much this. All of that. And so I say, it's not the art software that sucks, it's the industry's inability to lay down their swords on format and concentrate on make the artist COMFORTABLE. For me I put up with the format problems because the comfort is unmatched for me. I don't need things to MOVE FORWARD, because that's so arbitrary these days with everything that involves workflow. Again, in the music analogy, you've all listened to legendary tracks that were made with a simple 4 track system. You have, trust me. It wasn't 'tech' that made that album work, it was working the artform. The more people pay attention to that, and work with what feels good, the more you can both evolve as an artist and also buck the 'you must use this tool' attack against US, the USERS of software by locking us down to formats. I put out all my stuff in png format and if I absolutely have to work with others, I go that extra mile to make a PDF work with any version of whatever people I'm working with use to open and edit a PDF. If they're using photoshop, i export all my layers in Xara into pngs numbered with their correct layer order and instruct my partner in crime to put them with transparencies in that order.

But I've tried multiple tools even after buying xara, and I won't switch, even though I hate how it keeps bugging me to upgrade, I hate the cloud, etc. I have what I have and it works great. I don't think others using 'new tools' is anything other than 'grass is greener' syndrome in most respects, and the biggest problem that faces any xara user and in fact ANY graphics tool user is the stupid, absolutely abysmal state of format interchange.

You don't hate Xara, you hate formats. Because in the better world, you could load up the same file xara made in the 'newer cooler' tool, edit it, then bring it right back in to xara and keep working, just like I do with my music files. But that's not our world, and that's the problem that NEEDS to be solved. And it wont because Adobe is too fat to fail and too pig headed to cooperate.

EDIT: I'll also add that the video format BS is also problematic in the same way. This prick waving to control markets garbage hurts us as artists.

Quite a good analogy.

SVG should be in place as both and Import and Export options. We have the Export but the (almost) trivial mechanism to Import it back in as SVG baffles why Xara has not done so.

It is almost possible to reverse-engineering a Xara design file from a website's HTML: if every element rendered had a data part of its originating layer.
Better would be the option to include the design file in .WIX format to the HTML Export, password-protected and excluding Bitmap Gallery elements to save space.

Charles Moir developed his universal exchange format way back but sadly it is languishing, unsung.

Acorn

[handrawn]

I have used midi for a very long time - currently I have a roland 4-octave midi keyboard controller - not the same as a traditional piano as far as feel goes, but the keys are well weighted and velocity responsive; I use it to create soundtrack material with magix music maker and sometimes ableton light [which came bundled with it]

musicians had an incentive, because for musicians, collaboratation, sharing and performing together is in the blood...

[hseiken]

I have used midi for a very long time - currently I have a roland 4-octave midi keyboard controller - not the same as a traditional piano as far as feel goes, but the keys are well weighted and velocity responsive; I use it to create soundtrack material with magix music maker and sometimes ableton light [which came bundled with it]

musicians had an incentive, because for musicians, collaboratation, sharing and performing together is in the blood...

Right, so hopefully my analogy works here. And graphics folks have to collaborate too. I can't tell you how many times I'm asked to deliver an adobe format for someone to continue to use the assets for various other things, such as taking a graphic I did and using it in an animation/video.

It's quite frustrating. I hate adobe's workflow for all of their software. It's like being a piano player and everyone I'm forced to be in a band with wants me to be a drummer. I can drum, but I'm a friggin' piano player.

[handrawn]

music - you prepare, you practice, practice, practice, practice, and then you preform... even then you might extemporise if the mood takes you; or the audience reaction or that of accompaning musicians prompts you to do so; or you just damn well forget the passage you are playing

in graphic art I rarely see anyone extemporising; sticking to 'the script' is paramount

apples and oranges...

at heart midi is a digital interface with it's own communications protocol; it has a file storage format that stores only the notes/intervals and this is very important if you want to compare it to graphic art - we already have graphic formats that can store strokes/outlines/flatcolour, I use PDF for this and I have yet to find a program I would want to use that does not accept it - PDF has not been proprietary to adobe since was released and adopted as an ISO standard in 2008

the issues with porting from one graphic program to another are usually due to the way gradients/transparencies/effects etc are defined, and which are handled differently by each program

therefore, in actual fact, this is really no different to the midi standard which defines only notes/intervals as each DAW will have its own way of transposing to sound like a specific instrument

the real joy of midi is I can 'play' a guitar using a keyboard; or drums; or harp; or anything else the DAW has voiced; I don't need all the instruments even if I could play them for real which I cannot

[Boy]

in graphic art I rarely see anyone extemporising; sticking to 'the script' is paramount

Even though this is way off topic, I'd love to see, or hear, you extemporise.

[handrawn]

be careful what you wish for

[Boy]

Yeah, you might be right, perhaps already enough extemporization here on the forums...