Make it true Xara replacement please

[kirk23]

Xara is old  and lacking many necessary things.  Its  devs went some weird "cloud"  toyish way  still   I continue to use my ancient Xara 5     rather than freshly new  Affinity Designer.     The sad truth is  I have to make 10 clicks in Designer  where Xara request me only one.   It's still so much more convenient in so many small tiny features.

Few of them:

1. Any bitmap  you place in your doc is a bitmap fill of a vector shape. you could scale ,tile, rotate , skew , tint, color edit with levels,  refresh and replace to another file  individually or for evry piece  of same bitmap in a document.   At the same time you can edit , crop, cut etc its vector borders like any vector shape and make a feathered edge just with a slider.     

2. All objects in a document  vector or bitmap    could be tagged  with "name" and than  easily selectable  as having same tag.   You could select evrything tagged  " blue" and switch them off  effectively recreating Photoshop "layer comps" functionality  ( years before Photoshop did it)

4 . Brush  scattering selected number of bitmap and vector objects  randomly around its vector path

5. Photoshop plugins including Filter Forge  working as live effects on objects . Mesh deform staying live on bitmap objects.

 

 

[fde101]

21 hours ago, kirk23 said:

All objects in a document  vector or bitmap    could be tagged  with "name" and than  easily selectable  as having same tag.   You could select evrything tagged  " blue" and switch them off  effectively recreating Photoshop "layer comps" functionality  ( years before Photoshop did it)

This sounds quite like the "layer tags" feature I suggested a while back...  I guess I wasn't the first to have this particular good idea 

 

21 hours ago, kirk23 said:

Mesh deform staying live on bitmap objects.

And why not on vector objects while we are at it?

[kirk23]

On 12/18/2019 at 7:33 PM, fde101 said:

This sounds quite like the "layer tags" feature I suggested a while back...  I guess I wasn't the first to have this particular good idea 

 

And why not on vector objects while we are at it? 

Why not, I totally agree.   Sad thing is that  even open source free Xara extreme for Linux  even being severely cut of features  was in few aspects still  more convenient and easy .

Another cool soft I'd like Affinity borrow something from    is  what formerly   was  free  Creative House Expression.     It had same snake like "skeletal"  brushes but the repeating part  in the middle  could be up to 10 randomly alternating parts. Would love  Affinity bring it back too.        Expression had so many cool features I still think it was best vector soft ever created  , A Illustrator has never been  even close.  Then Microsoft bought it, made a castrated version and finally buried it altogether, I can't  find download page anymore.