Xtreme Pro 4 way too big!

[Improv]

I am a pro and I still draw lines with a piece of technology that was invented when Queen Victoria was learning to walk. [as in my avatar]

It takes no disk space and requires no electricity [if you only use it in daylight]

Doesn't come much leaner and fitter than that

I say this just in case the term 'pro' is automatically thought to be 'cutting edge'

I use what works. I don't care if it has other things too, as long as they do not get in the way - life's too short.

I may be new here, but looks like you're talking about the Xara 2B or perhaps Xara HB digital manual input hardware?

[jclements]

I am not qualified on the technicalities of an installer and whether or not having one "pick and choose" what is to be installed complicates the process of assuring various features/components (whatever you want to call them) work together once installed.

And within the last couple of years I more less kind of given up on custom installation of applications as the "quicker processor, cheaper memory, and unlimited harddrive space" approach seems to have taken over.

However, I do miss being able to custom install and pare-down what goes on the harddrive. It is all to easy these days to have your PC "slow down" for no apparent reason or just plain have too much unnecessary things installed on it. I do enjoy having a 'well-oiled', efficient PC. And even if something is running relatively fast, if it can be made to operate even smoother then so much the better.

It seems that Xara still has a good tight code (by evidence of how well its features/tools work relatively well with one another), but if at least the Pro version could have a custom Installer without turning the world upside down, it might be even more attractive to "professionals" and to people like me.

===========================

Oh, if you are knew to the forum within the last few years, Jen's request and subsequent replies posted here have been well constrained.

Jen's, life in Spain must be agreeable.

"I've just produced two large 80 page photographic books about Andalucía ". Is there anyway we can take a sneak peek online at some the pages from your photographic book?

Regards, John

[Bob Hahn]

With a custom install or not, the option to even install Xtreme 4.0 is still up to the user. Not installing all the updates you don't want from X4, and you will pretty much end up with version X1 installed again.

When it comes to file sharing, it's probably best to have the same components installed.

I think with most software - when you can choose what to install, you are actually selecting individual, standalone programs. Not picking apart one program. But I could be wrong.

[handrawn]

I may be new here, but looks like you're talking about the Xara 2B or perhaps Xara HB digital manual input hardware?

close but no cigar - although I do use them too of course
I was referring to the xara 1290 [Gillott Edition]
http://www.scribblers.co.uk/acatalog/Drawing_Nibs.html

[Odat]

And then there was the time I download a trial of Premiere Elements 4, which was a 2 gig download, but a well compressed 2 gig because it takes roughly 4.5 gig once it's actually installed. Somehow, the extra size of some help movies seems to pale into insignificance...

But anyway, to stay on topic, I'm usually all over an installer that allows a customize option so that I don't have to install parts that I don't want or won't use.

It would be exceedingly clever if every tool in Xara was actually a plugin that you could install, or not, so that only the features that you want are installed and everything else isn't. Ditto for import/export filters, so that I could not install the ones I never use and thus have an easier time finding the one that I want in the list.

if such a thing could be done in 0 time with 0 cost, I'd be standing on a soap box pelting someone with muffins to go ahead and get on that, already. But since that's not the case, and having bugs fixed and new features is more important to me than being able to selectively install something that it already does, I'm going to have to take a pass on that one.

Which leaves me with more muffins to eat.

[handrawn]

nicely put - got any to spare ?

my but the size of some animation software.......

[Improv]

close but no cigar - although I do use them too of course
I was referring to the xara 1290 [Gillott Edition]
http://www.scribblers.co.uk/acatalog/Drawing_Nibs.html

Ahhhh! A high tech pencil!

[Odat]

I went shopping at the Costco (warehouse pack type place) this weekend, so I have almost a dozen extra to share around (if you like chocolate chip muffins).

[steve.ledger]

Just look at some the struggle people around here have to open a command prompt and run expandxar on a file - then just try and imagine a telephone call ...........
Don't forget that they won't be using nice clear terminology like button, toolbar, window, cursor, either. They'll also deny having even done the reinstallation or changing any options if they did. They won't tell you that since they 'caught a virus', the neighbours' son who "knows a lot about computers" came around and fixed their computer before they called you.

Amen..
Welcome to my world

[Charles Moir]

Please compare our download / install size to the competitors. Someone mentioned 2Gbytes + for Photoshop Elements 4+ GBytes of hard disc. So relatively speaking there is little bloat here.

The 'disc are larger' argument is of course valid as well.

Yes there are two picture editors that you say you do not require, and our goal, and a major part of the work in V4 is to work toward their removal completely. The Photo tool does almost everything XPE does, better, with no overhead.

And BTW you do not understand the benefits of our photo tool if you suggest your other (bloatware) photo editors are good enough. They may be more powerful pixel editing, but in terms of performance, space, file size and speed, they are not going to get close to capabilities of the Photo tool (i.e. in terms of bloat, the topic you seem so concerned about - we absolutely and totally crush these alternative products. e.g. file size tests doing the same operations in Photoshop can produce files that are more than 100 times larger. That is a truly vast performance and space benefit)

You have a movie player that plays the training videos reliably. The player takes exactly 350Kbytes. a trivial amount. And yes you do need this because there is no other way of reliably playing the videos, often cited as one of the best features of the product. I can't believe you're suggesting a 350K overhead for reliable movie player is significant. Do we really want to try and launch what is surely the very definition of bloat - Windows Media Player. Instead we have a incredibly small, tight, optimized movie player that just works. So it's an absolute no-brainer that we include it, and no we're never even consider making it a user-option, since the costs to do so would be huge.

Extrude - well you might not want it, but again it moves the state of the art on, and those alternative (huge, bloated) 3D applications you mention can not do what we can, as easily as we can. Yes this feature may be aimed more at general user, non-pro market (but of course it can achieve many useful pro results) but are you suggesting that because it's not a Pro feature we should not include it in Pro. I suspect all Pro users would then feel cheated that they had a feature missing.

And the code required to implement the extrude is probably a tiny fraction of (hundreds of Kbytes only) the equivalent of other applications (and CorelDRAW and AI have both had crude 3D extrude tools for many years)

The HTML export feature takes just 228Kbytes. Again this is so trivial to be completely irrelevant, and adding options to allow users to chose whether or not to have the feature (or any of the features described here) in the installer would be an absurd waste of technical development resources and money - for a saving of a measly 228Kbytes. (And if you really do not want the feature, just remove the dll from the Filter folder, yes we do have a modular plug-in system in parts of the program). This feature has been described as revolution, by more than one professional graphics designer. So should we give user the choice not to see this feature - no way.

And more than a few people have said things like "I didn't really think I needed another HTML authoring feature, but wow this is really amazing and I'll use it a lot". So had we given the user the choice, they might never have seen the benefits. In fact the HTML export, even it's just for prototyping, is a really fantastic feature. Why would we ever give the user the option to not have it, to save a few bytes of disc space. That really is not logical, at all.

As to 'optimizing the code' unless you hadn't spotted Xara Xtreme is the most highly optimized application of its type, not by a small degree, but by huge margins. V4 is more optimised than any previous release in fact.

We have, for the entire lifetime of the Xara X product line, had users who believe they do not want this feature or that feature either because they do not understand it, or its benefits. And so we make decisions all the time on behalf of the users, on what we believe is right for the product. I kid you not but in the early days we had regular comments from users saying 'why did we need anti-aliasing, because it just makes things look blurry". So just as you might think you do not want the Photo tool, one day you'll realise just how much a revolution that Photo tool is, and probably come to rely on it.

(OK I realise that your complaint is not the Photo tool as such, but the other separate photo apps - but they are on the way out, so in that sense I agree with you).

Finally the dozens of small improvements, from the fact that zoom now works centered, to the improved path clipping (combine shapes) accuracy, to the much better text tool, to the higher quality anti-aliasing, any one of which might be the key feature you've been waiting for (all of these have been cited as the one reason certain customers have upgraded).