but it's much worse on Windows (and no, I'm not referring to win98; there are other extreme annoyances, such as menus not working properly (bugs 954797, 1250240) and the dialogs-not-on-top (bug 969321) as well as the general clunkiness and clumsiness).
...and if you think the UI is clunky, then the development experience is even clunkier. If Xara were releasing their Windows stuff and it used the Microsoft toolchain I wouldn't hesitate to defect, and I'm saying that even before I've know whether their source code is legible. A debugger that doesn't crash just as you think you're finding the bug, a compiler with precompiled headers that (mostly) don't cause internal compiler errors, debug builds that don't require a gig of physical RAM to be able to link in finite time, the list goes on. Developing on Inkscape is just not as much fun as it should be, and I've always wanted a single programme that is both Artworks and Impression.
OK, rant over. The main purpose of this post is because I've remembered that Xara's offices aren't far from where I live (27 miles as the Google Maps flies, to be precise). I'm not sure whether this is going to be useful information, but I figured it's worth pointing out just in case it needs to be known (for the purpose of launching a daring midnight raid to steal their Pantone licence, perhaps? :-) ).
Richard.