Layers Poll

[alexbozhenov]

People,

It seems like a very very strange discussion.

Layers have to be improved or completely re-designed for sure.

The poll's question are clear, but it hard to read (understand) correct final results... because I can answer some questions positively (there is a room for dual answering)... As I understand, the main question is to learn, is there any need (or how many people want) for layers to be more convenient to work with... No doubts, for simple drawings the current layers logic is pretty good enough, but doing a bit more complex design we starts talking about productivity and convenient... It's obvious, so there is nothing to even discuss.

Also, having more advanced layers logic would allow users who make "simple" design with no problem or slowing down Xtreme's speed, and also users with "complex" design would be happy to work in more convenient environment...

[BONES]

Bones, could you please tell me how do you select in the attached .xar the black circle (or ANY other colored circle) with max 3 mouse clicks? Thanks.

Click no. 1 - Open Name Gallery
Click no. 2 - Select colour "Black"
Click no. 3 - Press "Select"

There is more than one way to skin a cat. Sure, it was kind of cheating and I definitely wouldn't work that way because I don't like taking my attention from the drawing, nor do I like having galleries eating up screen-space. I would be far more comfortable simply moving the other circles out of the way, one at a time until I got to the black circle. The number of mouse clicks is less relevant to me than maintaining my focus on the drawing. Its why I tend to use those shortcuts that allow me to stay focussed, like changing tools and combining shapes, even though I am not normally a hot-key kind of guy.

I don't wanna challenge anyone, i'm very keen to learn how other people, esp Bones would do such task. This is a very very simple example i posted which (to me) is a good reason to use layers. Maybe there are some mysterious shortcuts i missed for the last 14 years since Artworks?

Of course, if I gave that file back to you after moving the circles to their own layers, you would have to turn each layer off until the layer with the black circle was exposed, which would take you 5 clicks, even though you already know that it is the bottom circle.

On the subject of turning off layers to speed things up, I did some more testing last night. I moved 200-odd objects to a new layer, leaving only one simple object on the first [a rectangle], then I turned the new layer off and nudged the rectangle. It took about 3 seconds to move. I turned the other layer back on and nudged the rectangle again and it took pretty much the same amount of time to move. So putting things in layers and turning them on or off doesn't seem to affect redraw speed when moving objects.
However, and this is really interesting, one of my 200-odd objects was actually a group containing nearly 3000 separate objects that make up a "boilerplate" texture and when I ungrouped them, zoom definitely slowed down noticeably when both layers were visible.
I was doing it on my little laptop, which doesn't have QuadroFX graphics so I thought I might see the zoom redraw issue mentioned by others but it was equally smooth with one object or 250. So even a humble 128Mb GeForce seems OK on zooming up to a point.
These results tend to show that groups and layers both improve efficiency to similar extents and either can be used to speed up redraws. Interesting, huh?

[BONES]

... or maybe its not interesting at all. Go figure.

[JLukeW]

With Xara 4's rollover support requiring a layer for each popup image, I find myself with 10-20 layers that I'd very much like a thumbnail preview of as well as the ability to group.

[sgiff]

Was this poll taken before or after Xara5 came out because if it was before I doubt we will ever see a nested layers in Xara. From my experience the folks at Xara never change UI functionalities once they have created them, they only add new stuff but never go back and rethink old stuff.

[steve.ledger]

The Poll was created 23 August 2008, Xtreme 5 Pro with it's new advanced object gallery where everything in your document is presented in a heirarchical, expandable list, was released 4th June 2009.

I think this represents a rethink of layers since earlier versions?

[covoxer]

...I doubt we will ever see a nested layers in Xara. ...they only add new stuff but never go back and rethink old stuff.

Adding nested layers is an addition of the new stuff not rethinking of what we have. After all it doesn't require any changes to the existing behavior, does it?

[angelize]

Could nested layers be something we might see in Xtreme 6?

[covoxer]

No one can tell until the release, I'm afraid.

[bigrick]

Complete overhaul