Discussion on the new object handles
Hello everyone,
Some introduction: I am not a designer. I use Xara for "small things" -- namely for technical illustrations. However, I am the user since very old versions, through the Corel-Xara time... until now. At the very begining, I did use CorelDRAW a lot, Adobe Illustrator -- switched to Xara when it appeared, and never regretted. This way, I can say, I feel "the spirit" of the tool, and it fits my needs (and my brain). The tool always "evolved", keeping the things that worked unchanged -- I mean the user interface. In other words, the behaviour was enhanced sometimes, but the good features were never removed.
Even though I do not use Xara (later ... Photo & Graphics Designer) frequently, I did buy new versions occasionally, and now I do buy the license "for the next year". So, I am not new in that either.
In the last versions, I was quite disappointed by the change of the object handles. Frankly, I liked more the old small, squares around plus the second set of handles after the other click. There may be two reasons for not liking the new handles:
- I am kind of conservative, and I do not like changes without the reason, or...
- The new handles are simply worse.
As that view may express only my opinion, and not the opinion of the majority, I have thought more about pros and cons. Please, add your own if you think that something is missing, and somehow important for you.
PROS of the old handles:
- They were intuitive, and were simple simple.
- The handles were small, and they did not disturb you when looking at the picture.
- Still, the handles were easy to spot.
- The handles did not combine too much functions together -- clicking the object selected the second set of handles, that were equally simple to understand.
CONS of the new handles:
- They look clumsy to me.
- The icons are too big, obscuring the image.
- The border around is more visible than necessary, obscuring the drawing.
- The dashed/coloured contours of the bounding rectangle, colors and contours of the handles add no advantage.
- I would summarize it as the "advertisment of the work of the new implementor" (in the sense... Have a look, how nice are the handles!) instead of making it nicer to use.
- Some handles are not intuitive -- think about stretch vs. skew, resize vs rounding.
- The rotation handle is intuitive, but it is clumsy. I understand that may work well for the users of Microsoft Word. I think it is not suitable for tools like Xara where you work with graphical objects much more intensively.
- The coloured handles (that is "not black") disturb the view when you look at your image. (The small black spots are kind of invisible when you want ignore them -- mentally.)
There is related set of questions that came to my mind -- please confirm if it is only my false perception or not. Just yesterday, I tried to add one bitmap image to another bitmap image to simulate how the things will look together. Nothing special -- window at the balcony, adding the image of the outer part of the air conditioner. I have just downloaded the front view image of the outer unit, imported both the photo of balcony, and the image of the unit, and wanted to skew the image of the unit to simulate perspective at the photo (nothing extremely precise, just rough first look). I could not do it, and gave up. I believe, it was easily possible in the older versions of Xara. So, my related question is...
Has new versions of Xara removed some of the behavior that worked in older versions? Not having the older version in hands, I cannot try now. But I am quite confident I did such things in the past very easily (intuitively) -- even with pictures.
Thanks for your time and have a nice day,
Petr
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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.
Originally Posted by gwpriester
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