Why did you buy Xara the first time?

[joel]

My first experience with computer graphics was Draw 7. Somehow I found the i-us site and Gary's tutorials. The earlier ones were done in Draw and that was part of my learning experience. I also subscribed to the Corel Magazine. In both of these sources Gary's Xara tutorials intrigued me, so I purchased version 2 through the i-us site and it's been an evolving process ever since!

I use Xara for almost all of my graphic and printing needs in my office. This includes business cards, stationery, post cards, stickers, forms, brochures, promotional materials, etc.

Regards, Joel

[Ross Macintosh]

Being a real Macintosh I of course had a apple macintosh which I played around with. My office bought a 486 and coreldraw 5. I had fun playing with that because it brought many capabilities I had not experienced on the mac. I also experienced how frustratingly slow it could be.

One day I saw a two page spread in a 'Tiger Software' catalogue for Corel's newest offering - CorelXara. I suspect that ad was the only promotion Corel ever did for Xara. I ordered it from Tiger (an American company) - the final price after exchange on the money, duty, shipping, Canadian taxes, etc. was still much less than buying coreldraw and the ad convinced me it was a better product. In order to run the application I bought the first apple powermac on the market - 66mhz. Apple sold it with a 'dos card' that was a 486dx2 with 16mb ram running win3.11 if I recall correctly. Amazingly I ran CorelXara 1.0 with the application residing on a Iomega scsi zip drive! The setup, due to limitations with the dos card wouldn't print properly. Soon, growing to love xara I realized it was more important to me than a mac and in order to get more out of the program I bought a PC. I bought my upgrade to 1.5 from I/us but lost my purchase info and was therefore locked out of the member only xara content. I rather regret that I grew up with xara without the benefit of Gary Priester's influence. If I had been privy to his xara content I'm sure I could have learned much easier.

Regards, Ross

<a href=http://www.designstop.com/>DesignStop.Com</a>

[bcdeb]

Mentions Xara in his book on Photoshop 6. I downloaded the trial version and found the Xaraxone through a search engine. I ordered my CD shortly thereafter. Xara is *certainly* the best you can get, for the money. I've never used any Corel graphics programs so I don't know how they compare or if they are worth the much greater expense.

[Egg Bramhill]

.......I owned an Acorn Riscos computer and got interested in vector drawing via the onboard DRAW program. I saw a demostration of Artworks and had to have it. 2 or 3 years later at an Acorn Computer Exhibition CC were demonstrating the then new Xara, with it's transparencies. Unfortunately they had decided not to continue developing for the Acorn, so I had no choice but to convert to a PC.
The Acorn was a great computer, with a wimp enviroment years before Microsoft introduced Windows 3. It always amazed me how Corel Draw could be a industry standard when I saw it's crawling screen redraw and lousy screen aliasing.
But thats indusrty standards for you.
Egg

[Soquili]

I stumbled across Xara3D4 on tucows site. Decided to go to Xara.com to download the demo and saw a link to I/us. There I saw the link to XaraXone. After looking at Gary's tutorials, I downloaded the beta for XaraX and the following day I bought it.

Thank you Gary, and all the wonderful people that frequent this forum.

Oh, and the wonderful people at Xara Ltd. without them, what program would we be using. [img]/infopop/emoticons/icon_biggrin.gif[/img]

Soquili [img]/infopop/emoticons/icon_smile.gif[/img]

[a4hire]

I started doing computer graphics in 97. Then I had a copy of PSP 5 and PS 4. I found a neat web site that I visited all of the time called AndyArt. They had a big contest for animated buttons. One of the prizes was Xara webster. I did not win the contest. But I had downloaded a trial version of webster and I thought I should have this program. So I bought it. Then on the Andy art web site, which was sold out to the now scream design site.
http://www.screamdesign.com/
I found a link to the I-US web site. Then I discovered there was a better program called Corel Xara 2. I remember writing to Gary and asking him about the program. After spending some time at the xara xone at i-us and seeing Gary's tutorials I decided I must have that too. Then Xara dumped corel and released X. So it was a natural progression that I should upgrade and buy a copy of Xara X. I have been here ever since i-us was bought out and the forums moved here.

[RTK]

... do it too...

I was doing some late night research (in a beautiful wine-haze) on something totally un-related... and I ended up on the "i-us" site.

Somehow I ended up browsing Gary's tutorials - I downloaded the free trial of Xara so I could do the cool looking "Target Practice" tutorial... and I was hooked!

Risto

diri@videotron.ca

[jwt]

I'm not a professional designer, just a dabbler wannabe - so had no experience of the "professional" packages.

Started with Xara 3D. Added Webstyle for quick and easy web components. Rounded off my Xara collection with Webster.

Then saw an ad for CorelXara 1.5, so bought it and discovered the XaraXone and forums etc. There was an obvious anticipation with many postings relating to the "soon to be released" Xara X, so I guess I got carried along with the enthusiasm and bought Xara X too.

So, there you have it - an example of someone who found his way to Xara's best having started with their simpler software aimed at amateurs like me.

I'm still hopeless at producing worthwhile graphics for myself, but Gary's tutorials, the gallery and the generous and helpful forum contributors inspire me me to keep trying.

And yes, I have downloaded Webstyle 2, and will be buying the upgrade... I intend keeping all of my Xara products up to date as they all have their individual place in my armoury.

JWT

[This message was edited by JWT on August 24, 2001 at 19:46.]

[Christine Farrelly]

I started using Xara with version 1 pre Corel.

I saw the ad in a magazine showing the gradient transparency and just 'had to have it'.

I then discovered the I-US site and Gary's tutorials... need I say more.

I have also used CorelDraw since version 2 - doesn't get much use these days though - except for converting some graphics formats.

Christine

[pduggan]

Had to transfer my old Acorn Draw and Artworks files to PC in a workable vector format, and a colleague thought Xara might be what I needed... [img]/infopop/emoticons/icon_cool.gif[/img]



Peter</p>



Peat Stack or Pete's Tack?</p>