Xara Designer Pro X10 Released

[Luke.Hart]

I think you've just confirm Kate's comment:

1) Mike wants a feature that's pretty niche (package designers)
2) KIR23 wants features for game graphics design.
3) Others want SVG with SNAP support.

If any of these were implemented 5% of 'Pro' user would be happy and 95% would still claim there's nothing for them.

[Hajeem]

Hi,

recently bought DPX9. Got the manual and CD just a few days ago. I am an absolute beginner and so far I think this programme is userfriendly, the support is great but...............I was a bit dissapointed having to buy an update so soon after purchasing PDX9. Can it be 3 weeks now? At the most? Despite that I really thought about investing again in this update but I was a bit taken a back because of the reactions about this update.

My first and foremost question is however why is not there a policy that new purchases include an upgrade if the upgrade is executed so soon after the initial purchase. I am very glad with the program and I think it has a lot that I consider very useful so my final conclusion is that I have value for my money but as I said, I would like to have seen a sort of guarantee for new buyers that include uppgrades for at least a short period after their purchase.

Hajeem

[feklee]

Others want SVG with SNAP support.

Before adding features like SNAP support, the first step would be to fix Xara's SVG export, which is broken at least since Designer Pro 7, and which produces bad quality SVG code (lots of unnecessary transformations).

[feklee]

Can it be 3 weeks now?

They say: "A 30 day money back guarantee is provided with all Xara products and so if you buy something and you're disappointed, then we will refund your money on return of the product."

So, I guess you could make use of that, and then simply buy the new version. Contacting support seems a good idea.

[jon404]

@ Mike W -- re spot color printing -- getting back to where I left off before full-color digital printing came along. This DPX 10 is strange. Made a test file, 2 pantone spot color boxes, and several words in black type. No matter how I set the File > Imagesetting dialog, telling it to make separations with crop marks, all that came out via Export to PDF was a single page, in color, with crop marks.

So then I sent it to the Adobe print driver, and this time it made the separations in b/w as you'd expect, but without the crop marks... even though Print Options was set to have crop marks (same as before with Export to PDF).

If I were doing a spot printing job, this would drive me nuts... like your silkscreening... or packaging. Although -- I guess you could take it on faith that all the PDFs had the art in the exact right place on each one. But there would be no way to quickly adjust the screens from a test print, without the marks.

What am I missing here? Off the top, it's really goofy...

[handrawn]

There were not the same glaring fix-or-die weaknesses in vector features. Plenty of suggestions, yes, but no consensus on ‘must haves’. We understand that means that many illustrators will understandably decide not to upgrade this time, and we have to live with that......

.....Plus we have a new project in the works too, directly related to and hopefully guaranteeing the long term future of Camelot (the engine that drives the whole Designer suite) which has been taking our resources for over a year. All of this we try to balance, at least over the life of several upgrade cycles. Nothing has been abandoned (but we are throwing more people at it!)

Thanks for the post Kate - I am sure that most of the serious illustrators understand the commercial pressures that Xara is under, and it's good to know that the drawing side is getting on-going attention and will be the focus of the next update

For myself. I started with raster in the days before Painter was bought by Corel and what attracted me to vector was the ability to scale on screen and paste up pages in an object oriented way - in those days screen rendering in raster when zooming was bad news due to lack of effective antialiasing, well that's all more or less fixed now thanks to openGL, and modern 64bit computers with 64bit applications are far better at handling the large images too

it's got to the point where I can draw black raster line-art very quickly and expressively freehand, and if I want it vector then I use vector magic or similar; quicker and less faff than node pushing or using the freehand tool in xara and having to slow down so as not to confuse the screen redrawing and effectively 'falling off the bike' so to speak

the screen redrawing is the really crucial one for me - new layers on either side of current [is there another serious app that does not do this?], modern brushes, absolute nib sizes for shape builder/eraser, flood fill, nested layers, being able to see the rest of the drawing when editing inside a group, all the things I have supported would of course be useful as well and it good news to hear that Camelot is getting serious attention

disappointed this time as last time, yes - but looking forward to seeing what you come up with next time... but for now two versions behind I'm going to have to bow out

[csehz]

I think you've just confirm Kate's comment:

1) Mike wants a feature that's pretty niche (package designers)
2) KIR23 wants features for game graphics design.
3) Others want SVG with SNAP support.

If any of these were implemented 5% of 'Pro' user would be happy and 95% would still claim there's nothing for them.

Can you advise then where are those happy users with the actual new features in this thread? Can you see anywhere 5% satisfied with the new Insert menu and SmartShapes? Or through those mentioned surveys you will get that positive feedback

[slavelle]

Hmmm. Being one of the "target" pro users - one who uses the product to design logos, create the graphics for website mockups for a client which I then export all the bits out of an create Joomla! templates, creating a few brochure-like things here and again, and occasionally needing to produce a quick and inexpensive non-updatable website - I still came here a bit disappointed that the Pro version ONLY includes the upgrades of the other programs and nothing "special" except the "whole" that those updates create.

More than likely, I will upgrade both licenses we use here because of the RWD features (don't really want to have to leave the application to go to the less-feature-filled WD program) and things like the color replacement, which we have to do often and as much as it has improved in past versions, I'm hoping this new version is a great step forward.

But I sure would like to see some focus on the creation and less bundled add-ons as features. A lot of software manufacturers do this without a lot of "core" change to the program, and it feels like a copout. When something is available stand-alone (like the font awesome stuff), it's underwhelming to see it as a "feature" of the new version on the main page and not just an item on the "by the way we also added this" list. Since I use these font-things in my actual coded sites, it's convenient for them to be easily accessible in Xara for the design phase, but hardly what I'd call a major feature.

And as cool as things like the new "shapes" that you can insert might be, they are limited to me, and scream "amatuer" a lot of the time. These are graphics that I'm only likely to ever use for a quick/cheap site, not for a custom designed Joomla! site. Again, interesting to have added in, but hardly a "major new feature", I think.

Getting some new blend modes, new abilities to create more complex and photo-shop-y images with those blend modes, some additional ways to manipulate gradients and transparencies, etc, would be great in the next new versions.

[mwenz]

I think you've just confirm Kate's comment:

1) Mike wants a feature that's pretty niche (package designers)
2) KIR23 wants features for game graphics design.
3) Others want SVG with SNAP support.

If any of these were implemented 5% of 'Pro' user would be happy and 95% would still claim there's nothing for them.

Well, well, well. Thank you for justifying inaction and being completely dismissive of Xara's users' desires who simply want some movement with enhancing, improving and innovating on the vector capabilities.

When version 8 (oh, wait XDP X) came out, there was the introduction of the eraser and shape builder tool...along with a host of other things people had asked for. The introduction of the text styles, photo manipulation, Pantone libraries were updated (does the new version use the version 2 palettes?), and heck, even being able to resize the darn color editor was handy. I upgraded from version 7.

Oh, Version 7? The live copies, editing inside groups (this could/should be improved), new snapping, tabbed document windows, etc. I upgraded from 6.

I began with version 6.

The short of it is that though the improvements and/or new features advanced at a snail's pace in some cases, they still happened and didn't make everyone happy--But they happened. And you and Kate get defensive and dismissive over users wanting even the above pace of development to happen? That is pretty silly, don't ya think?

While "my list" you quote and dismiss in an attempt to justify inaction is for a "specific industry," it really is fixing and or improving something Xara claims it does. And oh, like I said, I do more screen printing than package design. Both those industries need the same capability Xara claims to have (with the needed improvement of Print on All Plates hitting an exported PDF). Do you really believe screen printing is a niche market? That also is a silly thought.

Perhaps you and others with a few minutes to waste should review the What was new in previous version page at Xara.
http://www.xara.com/us/designer-pro/whats-new/older/

To sum up, even if Xara had made long-standing bug fixes and long standing usability enhancements, more people would have been happy in this thread. Add just the snail's pace of actual usable features, there would still be some grumbling, but not the extreme disappointment that is being expressed (by at least myself).

[tonylondon]

One more thing I’d add; TG has a concentrated core of illustration users which doesn’t quite reflect our total audience. That means you maybe don’t get the sense that I do, sitting here, that similar numbers of owners are making equally impassioned pleas for us to add new web, page layout and photo features. Our surveys suggest that a typical Pro owners uses all of them

Yes, it would be good to have some new layout features too. But I do accept the general tenor of your argument.