Hi Cliff

I'll take the last point first:

One last thing...handrawn; when you were "building audio circuits from scratch", weren't those op amps, transistors, valves, tubes, boards, and whatever you used to "build from scratch" the templates and smart shapes and widgets you needed to "build form scratch"? You didn't build THEM, did you?
no indeed - but you can take that argument right down to the atomic [or subatomic level] - everything is made of something else; the point was about design in the creative sense - you can only be creative in a limited sense with a building block that has a specific purpose, the more specific the purpose the more limited you are; for example when assembling a computer the graphics card will only do what it was designed by someone else to do, wheras if you built your own from components it would have whatever capability you designed into it

I could use clip art a lot - I don't partly because someone would notice, but more to the point, I would think it at best lazy, at worst cheating, I prefer to make my own asset; that is not to say it is all 100% original and most things that look realistic have to have a reference, but it has to have a unique style; style is crucial; if you are an artist in the sense that I am, and someone else cannot tell your work apart from another's just by looking at it, you have no style, and quite possibly no work

I don't see this in websites... sure they can [should] have style, but can you point to a website and say - that was made by XYZ just by looking at it? I don't think so, because that is not what they are about, but I may be wrong...

moving on...

the other point I was trying to make is that Xara has gone down the route it has for solid commercial reasons - there is little point, at this stage anyway, in 'adding new vector tools' because it won't make them the money they need - there is too much competition out there now, the world has changed, the options widened considerably... and so like all good companies [and artists ] they are concentrating on what they see as their future in a way that will give them an edge - find a niche, exploit it... hence xara cloud...

I chucked all notions of 'one program does it all' just about the time the back of my ears dried out graphically speaking - but that is not to say that programs such as XDA are not useful, it is, but it is just one tool in the box for me