Re: Xara LX a dead project ?
I just want to chime in and say that I'm also a non-coder, Mac owner and I'd just as well pay to get a commercial Xara to OS X.
I don't trust Paralells, but Vmware Fusion has a beta out so I guess I'll put my money to a new XP license instead and use my old Xara X1 via that.
Re: Xara LX a dead project ?
I am a Graphics teacher in the UK. I am also in charge of IT in my school. I have bought multiple licences for products from Xara Ltd (originally Computer Concepts): Artworks, through Xara, Corel Xara (sic!), Xara X, Xara X1 and Xara Xtreme. We use PCs in school, as do probably 98% of UK schools. Colleges are something different. In Art departments, generally Macs rule, for good reason. Xara, in all its forms, is the most capable and intuitive product of them all. No wonder (in my mind) that Corel did not distribute it widely. For my own use, I have a Mac, and absolutely love using OSX. The one thing that is missing, and I have tried ALL the other big Adobe, Corel, Macromedia etc progs, is an intuitive program for vectors. When I want to do ANYTHING, I use my Mac (17" Powerbook), until I need to do a vestor drawing, when I have to load up my PC to have the pleasure of using Xara, which I know so well. The fact that Xara now works with bitmaps and allows the use of Photoshop plugins is incredible to use. Some of the contributors here have suggested that Mac users are a different breed to PC users as there is a much lower interest in the community developing a program. Mac Users ARE a family type community with a mutual love of the technology, and I am absolutely in full support of the fact that if Xara did the conversion from PC to Mac, and sold it at the same price as the PC version, they would find a huge market for it. PLEASE find some time for your software engineers to do this, Xara, and let us know that things are moving!
Re: Xara LX a dead project ?
Hello Steve,
It is good to see that you did not fall off the face of the earth :)
I cannot speak for Xara Group Ltd.
The decision to make a commercial Mac version may still have the same issues that were mentioned several years back. The cost in man hours would not be cost effective.
The Open Source initiative may have a Mac version in time, but from the development archives there was I believe one Mac developer working on testing and finding resolutions to reported issues.
When development of the open source project continues, we can hope that more support from Mac developers may be available.
Re: Xara LX a dead project ?
I do remember the issue years back. But I can't help but think it's bad business. I've seen one or two ads in my graphical browsings on the web for xara EVER. I haven't used xara since XaraX1, so I don't know where the program is at now, but the compatability then with other popular apps wasn't that great either.
Xara is a superior product, so my only assumptions is that not enough effort has been placed on marketing, universal compatibility, and variety in platforms... and I can only assume that if they did go out on that limb, the profits would well be worth it. I know windows dominates the UK, but market it in the US, that's the great thing about the internet! But I am neither a marketing nor business major, so I guess I'll leave that to those that are and I'll go back to making pictures and forgetting xara exists :-)
Re: Xara LX a dead project ?
There were two commits to the repository on 1/31/07. Hopefully this means development is starting back up? :)