Bouton's Wish List for Group Participation on v 11

[Gare]

Mike,

I think Designer Pro already has the basic photo manipulation tools. The program is not a bitmap editor on a pixel level because it has no true brushes. Which is odd because I read an article back in the Win 95 daze that explained how a "Get Brush" call from Windows' DLL library wasn't hard to code. And I probably just said something that is stellar-class stupid so the engineers lurking here...feel free to chortle.

You can resize, change hue, adjust levels, blur and sharpen, use masking tools to specify and area to be changed, but you're limited to the Photo Enhance tools and cannot use 3rd party filters on your selected ("region") area, not even using MAGIX's filters which I'd think MAGIX might toss a couple of programmers in Xara's direction because they sort of have a stake in the evolution of a money-maker, to be totally pedestrian.

A Suite, in my mind, would be:

• Designer Pro, as is for the moment, with development continuing on drawing tools and neat stuff like the advanced calligraphy features Illustrator has, mesh gradients, editable polygons, choice of color spaces in Xara and for export (everything is sRGB and you can't change this right now for RGB mode), and full control over pressure profiles (make your own, IOW), and make something that works a little more like Expression when you paint a shape of a shape, so to speak. I feel as though I'm using a clone tool when I pepper the page with novelty strokes—it's a workaround to begin with. You need dynamic strokes, editable ones after you've created them, completely unlike the Paint tool.

• Xara Print: A desktop publishing program, no more graphics tools development, but you already have a good DTP program, leave it as that.

• Xara Pixel-Pusher: An honest-to-gosh pixel editing program, a paint program.

No extra weight on load-bearing members, no more retro-fitting, seems t be the way other graphics Goliaths are going.

I really, really want to see Xara/MAGIX kick Adobe's butt in the forthcoming months or even years. Smarmy bastards with the Creativer Clod which is mostly smoke.

-g