Quote Originally Posted by Acorn View Post
If I can achieve this with little CSS tweaks then Xara ought to manage with all these developers working on Xara Cloud.
I suspect there aren't that many developers. I remember working on projects with £1 million + ( $1,500,000 ) budgets back in the day and there were five of us at most working on it.

Xara has ruined and squandered its elegant workflow by introducing so many different mechanisms that hamper design: SmartShape controls, Text Inside, Squishy/Squashy, Web Animation, Variants, Navbars, ...

Acorn
Absolutely.

Listening to the various mention of complete rewrite VS add-on, from the perspective of someone who has worked on reasonably large projects over time, the pressure usually comes from extending the capability of software over time ( new features, etc ), so what starts out as an elegant solution gets bits bolted on. Over time staff change too, so Bill who originally wrote feature X and Y leaves, and maybe even the person who came up with the original structure for the software moves to another project, so you can have developers left behind that know some parts are tricky, not entirely sure how everything fits together and very, very reluctant to do anything at all that will break the whole program if their improvement goes wrong. Management start looking for 'quick wins' that don't risk disasters.

I remember working as part of a support team on some software ( which shall be nameless, not Xara, the licence costs for which were typically several thousand pounds a year ), and in the code was a comment 'There be dragons here' and I completely understood why someone had written it. There was one part of that products code that was only understood by one person in our team and frankly I was in awe at his ability to work on that code.

So I have sympathy with Xara's situation, Gary's call for a re-write/re-design and Xara's enthusiasm for the cloud product as a way forward.

I think Xara code is now based on C++ ( correct me if I'm wrong ). I once worked on a team where it took six weeks of hard work to fix a bug introduced in the code, caused by a trivial coding error and compiler interaction. One of those things where the place where the fault is isn't the same place as where the software goes wrong and it doesn't go wrong consistently either.

I'm glad I'm not working on legacy code of the age and complexity of Xara.