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

[Daniel]

I have every confidence in Charles & Kate Moir not leaving their last 20 years' worth of work high and dry should anything happen to them and/or their company.

I disagree with Bones that it's dead money that I pay year after year. Arguably that's what the money I paid to Affinity was for their PC and Mac programs, and their new v2 suite of all their programs - I never spent enough time learning them and only use them as a glorified batch converter to export HEIC photos to JPEG.

Xara Designer only has to save me four hours a year to pay for itself, and it comfortably does that. The subscription covers support too, something we didn't really have properly before. I'd love new non-web features and also stopped buying regular updates when it was money to Magix, but like Bones said, I like the idea of supporting Xara directly. I value time and work that people put into things - after all, I only have time and work to sell and people pay me!

For the longest time I bought every paid upgrade, even though 90% of it didn't interest me at all, out of loyalty to Xara and a desire to see it improve. That all ended when they handed it over to Magix and now it wouldn't bother me in the slightest if Xara went under tomorrow

I don't follow why it'd not bother you if post-Magix Xara went under tomorrow when you supported pre-Magix Xara. Before Magix the updates around that time seemed to be all about brushes and Photoshop plugins - I never used those. Magix-era updates seem to be all about webpage export - I don't use those either.

[Daniel]

Should XC ever approach Plus functionality

That seems... unlikely!

[Acorn]

@Daniel, nicely put.

Acorn

[handrawn]

have every confidence in Charles & Kate Moir not leaving their last 20 years' worth of work high and dry should anything happen to them and/or their company.

but Xara Gmbh is not their company; it is a venture capital based entity that followed on from Xara Group Ltd; what would happen if it went bust is a question I can only ask...

[bwood]

@daniel. Well put. I was on the web design upgrade train for the most part. Now every year I do the pro+sub. I receive my updates, and design pretty well everything I could ask for. I have Affinity photo and publisher.
Folks wanted Facebook headers and posts, along with Instagram bells and whistles and they have it. There’s lots going on behind the curtain with pro+. Worth every nickel to me. I can understand the Magix frustration; but one has to understand that companies, like us, evolve. When pro+ came around folks yelled it was Adobe. Well, it’s not. Affinity folks want a web program too.

[handrawn]

I am going to quietly and gently say that what bones [I understand] and me too are saying is that everyone now seems to think xara is a program for web design; once it was not.. those were the days

[BONES]

Yeah, that's a bit of a thing, isn't it? To be fair, i used to use it quite heavily for that purpose but my band abandoned our website a few years ago (in favour of Bandcamp and Facebook) so I no longer need those features. What really irked me, though, was the increasing focus on templates and clip-art galleries and all of that stuff I will never, ever use. These days Adobe seem to offer free access to Adobe Stock for professional subscribers, which makes Xara's efforts look completely amateurish. There were also a few little things that really peeved me, like the changes they made to the text toolbar that hid away features I use all the time (tracking).

Xara will always be my go-to, nothing else comes close for speed and workflow and after 25 years I know it like no other application I use. But I don't have nearly as much need for it these days as I used to. Mostly I use it for mundane things like word processing - keeping lists, writing out song lyrics, etc. The only creative use I put it to is making album artwork for my band and a couple of others on the same label as us.

Once upon a time, everyone I showed it to at work was amazed at what it could do - think about features we had 15-20 years ago that no other structured art package could match - but these days those things are commonplace so now people see it as some quaint little thing the old bloke in the corner uses. (That's me, I am more than twice the age of everyone else in my department, older than most of their parents.) Xara lost their technological edge years ago and I'm not sure what they can do to get it back. Without it, upgrading doesn't seem like a good way to spend my money and for the few hundred bucks I might make from it in a year, a subscription would be downright fiscally irresponsible. That's just the way it is, for better or worse.

[jaydear]

I have to say Xara+ now seems to be very focused on Real Estate website features. The ongoing premium to keep it alive is definitely not for me. XDP18/19 is good if you already have it and just want to do something quick, but I find trying to do fancy effects frustrating and I seldom need XDP's website features now, as BONES says, social media is easier.

Affinity Designer and Photo work excellently together and suit my personal way of working learnt from years using CorelDRAW. The Affinity apps start up promptly and don't have the constant threat of huge delays or failing to proceed like anything linked back to Magix. XDP18 and 19 do handle PDFs extremely well, but so do Affinity Designer and a slew of PDF editors.

[BONES]

I have both Designer and Photo and I really hate them. Photo is even clunkier than Photoshop, which I wouldn't have thought possible. I also have issues with it when exporting images - I often get white rectangles of varying sizes randomly placed in the image, kind of like it was doing bucket processing - where the image is split into smaller areas which are processed separately, usually sent to different CPU cores/threads - and some of the buckets didn't give a result.

[jaydear]

I've certainly had annoying thin white borders appear on edited pics in XDP, but no 'unwanteds' in Affinity. They'd likely jump on that and find the cause if you send them samples. Might be a RAM or graphics driver issue. Mostly I keep my edits simple, but when I do use clever effects in Affinity they work well. Bringing in photos, adding graphics and text into the Affinity apps, resizing them, changing transparency, selecting borders, etc. all work so much better than XDP because the handles and borders and control points all stay visible and the effects just work without crashing. I love that. XDP was very nice for me back in v11, but they kept messing about with the UI and Magix became intrusive.

I know what you mean about buckets - I recently sampled a picture resolution enhancer from Nero. The online version works fairly well, but results from the installed app are nowhere near as visually impressive and as you describe, it writes new files out from a matrix of little blocks... really s.l.o.w.l.y!