Bones and Egg:
I've been using Draw for roughly 20 years and Illy for nearly 13. Let it suffice to say that I fly in these programs. Knowing them as well as I do I am familiar with their respective strengths and weaknesses with regard to the work I do, and I will use one or the other (or sometimes both) depending on the task at hand.
I fully realize that XX has no aspirations to be either of these two applications and it clearly has a lot to offer on its own terms. I'd dabbled with it in the past but this was my first time actually trying to use it for serious vector work. I decided to give it a shot so I put a solid seven or eight hours (cumulative, over the course of a day and a half) into a few design sketches, including many trips to the help file and online video tutorial page.
The interface is pretty standard so the learning curve was quite gentle; I got the gist of it pretty quickly. What's more, I also — as I'm sure most of us 'power users' do — learned a good number of basic keyboard shortcuts and tool modifier keys.
Basically I'm trying to say that before I wrote in to vent I had a pretty good handle on what the program does well and where it falls short.
I have observed that in the areas of object interaction and manipulation, and in node editing, Xara Xtreme lags CorelDRAW and Adobe Illustrator— neither of which handles these tasks in the same manner, but either of which easily outpaces XX.
Here are a few more things I've found using XX:
• Nothing snaps to path intersections.
• No inferred tangents.
• Using the mouse, an object can be rotated only from its rotation handles, not from an arbitrary point along its curve.
• Snap points are not clearly identified (am I snapping to a curve? a node? a guideline?)
• Guidelines can't be angled.
These are things I take for granted, and I expect them to be there as much as I expect power windows in a well-appointed car. I don't care that one manufacturer puts the controls on the door and another puts them in the center console; as long as the feature is *there* I'll learn how to use it.
Anyway, before this gets out of hand I want to stress that I think XX is *excellent* software and that I've *really enjoyed* using it! There's no question that what it does well it does FAR better than Illy or Draw. I'm only picking on its flaws because I expect more from software that holds itself to such a high standard. If it wasn't any good I certainly would not have used it for long enough to nit-pick its shortcomings.
Whether or not I buy it when the trial ends remains to be seen but it certainly is worth the price of admission.
Piyono
Bookmarks