Bouton's Wish List for Group Participation on v 11

[Gare]

There's no rule that says any everyone is not welcome to make their own post in "Dear Xara". I didn't even realize until my posts grew into a thread with version 9 that several people were tacking on their own requests to my personal ones. I don't mind discussions as long as they are civil ad constructive, right here.

Amoore is the Moderator for this area; perhaps someone should ask here about the structure of future requests before it becomes unwieldy and chaotic?

Well-presented requests invite Programmers and other PTB to read and consider the requests. Bitching and in-fighting would msake a reasonasble person blow this thread off.

And I agree with Og, that the sooner we start mutually cobbling a do-able list, the sooner TPTB might consider the merits, especialy in the light of the "what did we do wrong?" pall cast over this version.

My Best,

Gary

[handrawn]

please define 'doable' I have no idea what is and isn't - do you? - can you tell us? - or we just going to have to guess, those of us [most of us] who know nothing about the coding and the modularity of the program...

xara is supposed to be a program for designing things - I design things top down, line art and then as many layers below as are necessary, I am sick and fed up with new layers being at the top of the stack and having to drag them down time after time after time after time after time - so an option to put new layers above/below the current, to me that's doable, easy, a programmer should be able to do it with eyes closed and one arm behind their back - but I bet it's not, or it would have been done by now

and nested layers - there is a reason most every other program has them, for example when you design alternatives that need to be switched in and out with one click - xara groups are no good, cannot edit within a group and see the rest of the drawing in situ at the same time as you edit, dumb, so setting them up is making a rod for the back when trying to match colour changes and anything else that needs to be in sync inside/outside of the group

I am not trying to be negative; I am resisting the cynic in me that hears "Qu'ils mangent de la brioche"; I know Xara cannot please everyone and would be silly to try..

but a definition of 'doable' please - do you have one?

[handrawn]

.... so an option to put new layers above/below the current, to me that's doable, easy, a programmer should be able to do it with eyes closed and one arm behind their back - but I bet it's not, or it would have been done by now

a kindly Xara employee has pointed out to me that you can already do this - and whatever else may or may not be said about version releases, Xara remain the most helpful of companies for my money - the trick is to right click on a layer and select new layer from there and it will be placed immediately above

so I am mortified that I did not know this, but at least pleased to know I was right to think it could be done - Granny told me never to gamble, I lost the bet

[angelize]

One thing for the web design side that would provide good solid feature would be to bundle XT-CMS with the WDpremium and Designer Pro versions. TG member Xtom created this system to work with Xara software and I've been working with it on a site that hopefully should be nearing completion soon. It's easy to install and set up but if there were some way it could be bundled so that after you set up your page templates in Xara you would have an option to publish to CMS you would do this the first time and the CMS files would be uploaded to your webspace, the template (html page files) would be uploaded to the themes folder using the filename from your .web file and Xara would provide you with a link like it already does but this link would take you to the admin login of your CMS, where you set up your configurations (not difficult to do) Then after that when you publish changes to this site from xara the profile would be set to publish the files into the themes folder, and again xara would present you with the link to log in to the CMS

[handrawn]

Steve - Don't participate if you don't want to. But consider that as we speak, plans are probably being made for version 11. The sooner we come up with a representative list the better our chances of getting these suggestions in early enough that they can be explored and added to the next versions.

Sorry Gary P; for you I have great respect and admiration - what you say is true, especially 'versions', in that it is likely too late already for version 11

........................

IOW without requesting that all the engineers tear up the core engine so one person can import PSG layer with Adobe's Layer Styles in place and editable—we might actually get as widely requested feature or two in the nest version.

This just really annoyed me, and I was pretty upset to begin with
Kate said that Camelot was being overhauled [in so many words]

It's possible Gare means PSG, but I'm thinking he meant PSD which means the likes of me were wise to start going elsewhere; we no longer count, if indeed we ever did.. just unhired, unpaid help

I have possibly derailed this thread, for which I am sorry also...

[theinonen]

I had a play with the trial version and there are actually many ways the vector drawing tools could be improved by adding some CAD like features. Those would also go well with the designer part of the name.

[Albacore]

I use Xara as a drawing programme and that's it! OK I might take an odd bitmap in a do a few corrections to them but those things only take a few minutes. I took time to learn PS ages back so that's is my main bitmap editor and it's an old copy going back to CS2. Also through my job I had to learn Adobe Illustrator but I still want to use Xara as my main drawing tool but lately I find myself using Illy more than Xara because it is light on the tools that I want.

If I can ask Gary B on what he means by "create your own strokes and pressure profiles". Does that mean we could create a brush with a fixed angle, roundness, or diameter with tilt as well which could mean just about a real Calligraphic brush or do you mean something else because I would think that would be a big step forward. It beggars belief that on an iPad I can sketch away to my hearts content using a variety of free drawing apps which I then can import into Illy through the cloud which are all vector with custom profiles but I can't do the same on a Pro version of Xara through my desktop programme.