Thank you and good bye! I'm no longer Xara's target audience.

[MerryOtter]

It's obvious, that you don't work with CMYK very much. For such purposes, Xara lacks a real CMYK mode - since years without change. Instead, they are coding a new "red eye removal tool" with each and every new version.

You're right, I don't. Most of my stuff these days is for on-screen presentation. My point is that while some people may not be happy with the advances in certain areas, this release is making others quite delighted.

I learned long ago, both in my personal life and in business, that it's better to focus on what you're good at instead of trying to be all things to all people. The best competition to have is no competition at all. In my opinion, there's no replacement for Xara Xtreme, it solves key problems for me that aren't addressed by other software.

Do I personally think I'll use the red-eye removal tool? No. But there certainly must have been some users somewhere who have requested it. I also think it's a common mistake of people to say, "Oh, they have feature X but not feature Y" as if all functions were of equal difficulty to implement. It's a little like saying, "Oh, you added the ability to group Web-safe fonts at the top of the menu, but you didn't port to Mac, how dare you!" A Mac port is obviously a lot more work, and if you can add little check-box features like this to increase the appeal of a product, you probably should. I'm sure it was a heckuva lot easier to do a red eye gadget versus proper CMYK support.

One thing I do like about Xara is how it bridges the gap between vector and bitmap editing. It's so much easier to incorporate bitmaps into documents than with Illustrator, so I don't begrudge them adding enhancements like this. Content-aware resizing is an example of this. It's not something I would ever expect to see in Illustrator, ever. And I'm a little surprised to find it in Xara Xtreme. But then I can think back to some occassions where I had stock photos that didn't quite fit the space I needed, and how this would have let me incorporate those images, saving hours of work or redesigning my layout.

Another aspect to consider is that Illustrator has become corporate-ware. There is a real possibility that Xara could spend all their time and effort adding these high-end functions only to discover it was for naught -- generating not a single extra sale -- because companies have "standardized" on Illustrator and will not budge at this point. I certainly have had trouble getting some designers to be open to the idea of using Xara Xtreme, to even have a look at it... firstly because they haven't heard of it before (and often because they are Mac users) but mostly because they have spent the thousands of dollars on the software, education/training, supporting utilities, etc. and then are convinced they are much more employable with "Adobe" on their resume than with "Xara."

I'm sure some people will look down on the kind of graphics design work I do, just as they look down on Xara. But I think it's a real gem, and I applaud what they've done with this version and look forward to what's coming next. If you think it's a great product, want to continue using it, and want more updates the best thing to do is to support the company with your upgrades and feedback.