Open Source - Chris Dickman's Blog

**gwpriester** · 22 March 2006, 12:54 PM

Chris Dickman is the host of Graphics.com and was an early champion of Xara. He started i/us from which the TalkGraphics forums evolved. And he hired me years ago to create Xara tutorials.

He has a BLOG (doesn't everybody?) on graphic design and has just added a piece about Open Source . Have a read and post your comments.

Gary

**ivan louette** · 22 March 2006, 01:17 PM

Excellent idea Gary ! I remember very well the i/us time !!!

kindly,
ivan

wW · 22 March 2006, 04:30 PM

Great news indeed Gary, thanks for posting the link! Couldn't have posted this at a better time. I'm getting a warm feeling all over...

Xara's winter is nearing it's end! Just a matter of time & patience now.

AWESOME article & it was nice hearing from Chris Dickman again!

**eobet** · 23 March 2006, 04:39 PM

To get new developers up to speed, Xara has made all its internal development email of the past six months available online, as it will be doing with all ongoing dev email. That takes nerve.

I only found a "dev mailing list archive" but that seems to be the open source developers (which was an interesting read in itself).

Where can I find the Xara developers mailing list archive?

**ZEBtoonz** · 27 March 2006, 09:46 PM

Just received Graphic.com's March 27th newsletter which highlights the article by Chris. I was just going to post a new thread when I searched and found yours, Gary

. I also noticed your comments as well as wW.

**The Alien** · 28 March 2006, 02:50 PM

Good read.

1) The title of that blog article is very fitting http://www.talkgraphics.com/images/icons/icon14.gif

2) It's ironic (in a good way) how this vector drawing program was largely written in asm, the most un-graphic and lengthy programming language I for one know of

Wonder what the open source code is written in (C++ or so..?) And whether decompiling has made the code look unconventional/weird from a programmer's pov.

Well, it's wait and see for me too, as I'm no programmer

**PhilM** · 28 March 2006, 03:43 PM

Hi,

Xara LX is written in C++ and it is "Object oriented" - for instance, when you are looking at a rectangle in your drawing there is a rectangle "object" in memory which draws itself when asked to.

When we moved from ArtWorks to Xara Studio we wrote completely new code, there was no direct translation from the old ARM assembler. We just brought the knowledge of what was good and bad from ArtWorks into XaraStudio (which became CorelXara, Xara X1, Xara Xtreme and now, Xara LX).

Phil

**TomWolf** · 29 March 2006, 09:40 AM

Hi,

I am handling PR for Xara in North America and recently submitted the Chris Dickman blog article to Digg, a newish so called user edited news site. It's pretty simple, stories are submitted and voted on or, "dugg" until they either fade away or get promoted to the main page. The more diggs a story gets, the more exposure it will receive. So, Talkgraphics members can help out by going to: http://www.digg.com/software/Surpris...ow_Open_Source , fill out the brief registration if you are not already a member, and "digg" the Xara LX/ Open Source story. Thanks!

Tom Wolf