I am an adjunct professor at UNLV and I teach two classes, Illustration and Concept Rendering, and Design Ideation. In my classroom are kids with Cintiq tablets hooked up to Mac Pro's(the big ones not the new trashcan.)
When they hired me, I told them that I was not an Adobe Illustrator guru. That didn't matter as much as being able to critique the student work. In terms of lecturing and demo, I often times show my process of hopping between Xara Designer Pro and Photoshop. For this I have to bring my laptop to class because all the machines are Mac. I hook up to the projector and switch between my Macbook Air running Xara and the Mac Pro on my desktop.
I had a student who was struggling to do something that would seemingly be easy in Illustrator, manipulating blends along a path. He was struggling with it for 45 minutes. Then he asked if he could try Xara on my laptop to do the same thing. It took him a couple of minutes to achieve what he was looking for after I showed him a couple things.
The look on his face was like a man who was discovering broadband after being on dial-up his whole life. After having the opportunity to TRY XARA he was sold. He was going to buy a student version after playing with it on my laptop for just a few minutes.
Now I warned him the drawback was becoming pretty much an outcast and that using Xara might limit him on jobs in the future.
But I can't help but think how easy it is to 'sell' Xara to someone who has only used Illustrator enough to encounter the frustrations with it.
I can't help but think that if Xara could somehow get on school computers and be available to people then they'd want to use it professionally. That'll never happen because the graphic design departments of most schools are Mac based.
But I don't see the point in showing students how to use Illustrator if I personally avoid using Illustrator as a professional. The students can see my process, my thinking process and techniques without the software getting in the way. I show them how I combine openCanvas, Xara and Photoshop. I show them when I use Flame Painter, Artrage, Corel Painter, and alchemy when necessary.
Personally, I really enjoy using Xara. And I wouldn't mind demoing it to people who have never seen it. In the context of the classroom, I don't care what software students use. Many of them prefer using Paint Tools Sai over Photoshop. Some use iPads to paint. The students who use Illustrator are significantly slower at production that students using other tools.
My experience with that student yesterday leads me to believe that Xara would be really easy to sell to end users. A Mac version would be super easy to sell. If a Mac version of Designer Pro were to be made available to students, specifically having it installed on the school computers, then they'd definitely use it. For every time someone runs into trouble in Illustrator, if they had the ability to just open Xara instead, they would.
I feel like an unpaid Xara evangelist, and I don't mind.
What has been your experience showing other people how you work in Xara? What's their reaction like?