The size and offset of the selection bounding box now automatically increase in size on very small objects, making them much easier to select.Xara Designer Pro X combines graphic and web design, illustration, photo editing, and desktop publishing – all in a single compact workspace. A single application for all your creative work. Powerful illustration tools, innovative photo editing, flexible page layout, and unrivaled WYSIWYG web design. And every time I demo it to a friend after a 10 minutes or so of use they all just give up saying "too complicated" / "not intuitive enough".Quite simply the world’s fastest graphics software. Instead everything is become more complicated and harder to work out. And the original Xara Studio was by far the simplest of interfaces to learn. It's all SUCH a shame because Xara is so brilliant in so many other ways.
Why cant we do something like Control/left-click drag (to move the screenful around), as happens in Photoshop.Īnd making it so hard to change the snap tool settings is equally irritating - particularly if your screen is full of shapes and you cant find any background area to right-click on. (Who on earth came up with that one?)Īnd having the "push tool" /Hand tool only available on a tool button or H is too painful too. Why cant we just use a corner selector and maybe hit control or shift to force the locking of scale widths?Īnd having "scale line widths" as the name of the option that makes lines snap to the center of lines rather then snapping to the edges of lines is unthinkably obscure! Absolutely bonkers. Many of the things they try are perfectly sensible but for no good reason they don't do anything in Xara.Īnother irritations is things like "lock scale widths" shouldn't be located on some fiddly button (which one a newbie user has accidentally unticked they will probably never find before giving up). I cannot begin to tell you how painful it is to watch new users - yes, even those who are highly "computer literate" and who might well know say Photoshop & MS Powerpoint pretty well - even those people struggle like crazy in the first half hour of Xara use! And then entire interface needs to be rationalized and simplified so as to lower the learning curve. IMHO, Xara desperately need to start again with lots & lots of user trials with completely new/virgin users. And lines with arrow heads then finish where the line ends rather than "somewhere beyond the end of the line". I would like to see connectors on shapes. things like business process model / flow diagrams) easier. Personally where I wish Xara would evolve is making the creation of diagrams (e.g.
It is becoming more and more bloated and each upgrade costs yet another £85 or so. Re XDP11 the upgrade costs for the top-of-the-range Xara products have recently become too frequent and too expensive.Īlthough I do broadly love Xara and have used it non-stop since Xara Studio about a million years ago, I don't really like the way Xara has been evolving. That said I never did manage to fully answer my own problem. Also in my defense, the 3rd was 3 days after the first! I think you're the first to raise a Post and answer it three times in a row.Īpologies. => You will now be in Grid snapping mode. Keeping the mouse left click still held down you now release the Shift key holding down a left click on a black little square,Ĥ. It turns out that you can get Xara to change mode back to Grid snapping if youġ. Now I do like being able to change mode easily but if you are changing mode then you need to tell the user that it has happened! You now have your new rectangle selected - as indicated by the 8 black squares around it.Īt this point if you change the size of the rectangleĪ) by dragging the middle right square left or right => it jumps to the nearest grid point.ī) by dragging the top middle square up or down => it jumps to the nearest grid point.Ĭ) by dragging the middle LEFT square left or right => it jumps ignores the gridī) by dragging the BOTTOM middle square up or down => it jumps ignores the grid As you drag, Xara is snapping onto the grid. Click on Rectangle tool, click and drag to create a new rectangle. Right-click => top snap to grid (and if necessary zoom in so that you can see you grid properly)ĥ.
(Note: I am using Xara Designer Pro X10 (10.5 CD x) running on Windows 8.1 圆4 )Ĥ.