Sad update for users of the perpetual licence of Designer Pro X19

[handrawn]

I've had affinity programs since they first came out on windows; yes the Ui takes some getting used to but they all do, xara did when I first started using it 20 years ago it was nothing like photoshop, but then it wouldn't be would it

affinity designer has now added vector mesh warp and a flood fill tool, things that xara was asked for 10 years ago but [apparently] are not interested in; affinity are geared for the kind of vector work I usually do

on the subject of PDF, again 10 years or more ago, PDF became a preferred transfer format for vector objects; xara seems to have forgotten this and is now only dealing with PDF's as paginated documents, the ability to drag/drop mutliple PDFs all onto the same page ended at version 15.1 or thereabouts

why does xara not have a workspace view ['canvas'] rotate? - this is surely a no brainer to anyone who actually draws.... in xara this is really more trouble than it is worth:

https://www.talkgraphics.com/showthr...-xara-designer

you need to think about preserving layers and stack position and... well... hello affinity

[Daniel]

what would happen if it went bust is a question I can only ask...

Well, you can ask it... I did.

I asked Xara Support via my Xara Cloud Team+ subscription (ie Designer Pro+ for three users) "are there any contingency plans in case whichever Xara entitiy that runs the licencing servers were to go pop? If the desktop software phones home and everyone's gone, it'd get no answer and go read-only?"

Xara's reply is:

Once activated Designer+ can run happily offline for 30 days before it will stop working and require a connection.

I take that as a "no". If Xara goes pop, there's a maximum of a month before the software chokes itself. Even as a die-hard decades-long user, I'm not enamoured.

[handrawn]

yes but my question was for the previous versions not pro+ [susbscription], should the company go belly-up

I have no answer for those versions, do you ?

xara does not seem to want to comment pre-pro+

[MarcT]

Behind my glasses, it seems chasing the ever-changing latest trend in web design, is much more effortful than building productive creative tools.

Creation tools remain more or less the same in time.
Xara has already made many innovations in his field.

[Acorn]

yes but my question was for the previous versions not pro+ [susbscription], should the company go belly-up
I have no answer for those versions, do you ?
xara does not seem to want to comment pre-pro+

handrawn, this Thread is seemingly descending into hypotheticals.

"What if Magix fails to renew its SSL certificate?" On-line content stops. Not hypothetical as it happened.
"What happens when Xara overwrites your catindex.txt files incorrectly?" You lose your cache entirely. It happened.
"What happens when the BBC uses an UPS that needs mains to keep it working?" Well, when the power went off so did the UPS and transmission services stopped.
Ditto Y2K and micro Leap seconds & DNS attacks, ...

Companies have Contingency Plans and Disaster Recovery processes in place. They are rarely tested and usually don't cover the unexpected or the impossible. Sadly, the impossible happens.

In the case of Magix (& Xara) selling licences to use "forever", you could start a class action, group litigation or collective redress to be compensated for that loss.
Though any court would consider "forever" to be hype as no operating system may exist to support the product.

Licence servers are usually only needed at time of activation.

I expect your VM can reset its clock and give you years of enjoyment to come.
I can revert all the way back to Xara Xtreme 5 if needs must. I use it occasionally to establish how far the product has eveloved.

If Plus dies, we've got 30 days to kick and shout.

Acorn

[handrawn]

yes and I have a spare computer that I can reset every 30 days and carry on using the trial 'forever' - with at least some magix versions that would work, with pro+ it would not

it was rhetorical which is why I phrased it the way I did, and based on an understanding that the activated magix programs need to check with the company servers every [month?] to make sure that the device in use is activated for that program - so what happens if that fails? - without hypotheticals there would be no insurance industry... [that's possibly hyperbolic rather than rhetoric, but you get the point?]

it all stemmed from my [also rhetoric] question about xara going out of business - it was just something to think about, not obsess over

unlike some other programs I use, there is nothing xara can do [for me] that cannot be done in another program, leaving aside UI preferrences...

I may be wrong but it seems to me that xara is not really interested in preserving magix versions, only in pushing pro+; I can understand that should it be the case