Will OS X version use native Font Selector & Color Picker?

[BPFowler]

1. Native spell check. (Safari is underlining my mistakes as I type right now. Camino and Firefox don't.) I find this very convenient. It would be nice for Xara to take advantage of the built-in spell checker and implement this eventually. Microsoft Office:Mac stubbornly uses it's own dictionary.

If Camino can't do it, then it would be a bold man to make a promise to have this working in the near future. The native spell checker (like Services) is available to Cocoa Applications, so in one sense you are asking for Xara LX to be a Cocoa Application (plain wxWidgets (wxMac) is carbon, like BBEdit, Photoshop the Finder and so forth). This is not impossible: There is a wxWidgets Cocoa project, for example. If you are only going to be satisfied by a Cocoa Application then you are probably going to have to learn a lot about the Model-View-Controller design pattern, and replace the wxWidgets View classes with Cocoa ones, providing a Cocoa interface to the internal Xara LX data model. Whilst this may not be easy - you probably want to retain the Xara look-and-feel - it is certainly possible, and you are very welcome to either sit down with a copy of XCode, or join with other people who will, and produce the exact application that suits you. Because Xara LX is licensed to you under the GPL you do not need Xara's co-operation to get started, but you will need (I'm simplifying slightly) to be prepared to make your sources available to anyone who receives your binaries. This will matter when you get to selling the Todder Extreme LX!

2. Some menu examples: As a Mac user, I would expect "Preferences" to go under the "Xara" menu and not under "Tools" or something. Similarly, I would expect to go to "File>Open Recent" instead of looking at the bottom of the File menu as in Windows. These seem like trivial things, but any Mac user will tell you how good it is to have all apps consistent and predictable.

To be consistent and predictable, Xara's first step is to match the GTK (Linux) version. Actually, I haven't yet seen a full-featured wxWidgets application for the Mac (perhaps wxMUD is there, but IIRC, I can't get it to compile), so it is possible that Xara LX is breaking new ground. (If you know of one, perhaps you could post its name or URL so we can have a look at it). If you study the wxWidgets documentation and examples either on the web or in the Brookyln Bridge book, you will get a feel for how closely the menus match your ideal, and whilst I am not certain about "Open->Recent", I think that Menus will match your OS X expectations.

3. The entire iLife suite uses a Media Browser.

Do you mean that each iLife application has a connection (perhaps using Spotlight) to a system Media Browser, or that each of these applications has its own Media Browser widget? If the latter, then we will probably include one, if wxWidgets provides it; if the former then it sounds like a good RFE

4. Maybe the most important consistency of all: Print.

The first versions of Xara LX will use the wxWidgets printing sub-system; Xara LX will also have an export feature, based on Vectorstation. Maybe PDF export will be on a fast track and treated as a special case (certainly if Xara LX can use OS X's printing system seamlessly, then PDF output comes for free). Maybe additional work will be required to reach the standards that Xara (the company) have in mind for Xara LX, I would be surprised if anyone could say at this stage.

5. I hope the eventual install process goes as follows: 1. download app into app folder. And I hope the uninstall process is like this: 1. drag app into trash. (not that I'll ever want to trash Xara!)

At last, a question I can answer! The answer to this is definitely: Yes. If you are based in the United Kingdom, come to the LUG Radio Live, and I will give you a CD with the then current Mac Xara LX which you can install and uninstall to your heart's content. If it is important to you, I can give you a DVD containing the full source code and build tree. (The current revision is 1370, about 200 revisions get added per month, so we are looking at about r1574 are we not)

6. Also, just personal preference here ... but I think the OSX version of Xara would look and function better with a unified window (a là iTunes or Safari) over a pin-striped window.

Well, many Linux developers certainly act as though the ability to skin an application solves all usability and Human Interface problems. Whilst there are probably better things to do in the Summer months, you could while away a wet Autumn afternoon reading MPT, Havoc Pennington and Daring Fireball

I hope Xara can understand this and make their great app at least a little consistent in OSX.

You have several options:

1. Start coding for the Mac OS X version now
2. Contribute to wxWidgets code or documentation
3. Develop a competing Cocoa Xara LX fork
4. Test the first Xara LX versions and provide feedback
5. Work on the Linux version may free resources for the Mac OS one, and would certainly clear the way for it

Xara have made it clear that Xara LX is a community venture, and if individuals from this community do not step up and work on the Mac OS X version, then there will not be a high quality Mac OS X release. You cannot pass this back to Xara. They have made their code open source, and Free Software, and we cannot demand that they do more. The Xara devs are active on the list, answer questions here, have provided an XCode project and when time permits do make Mac OS X builds; Xara has committed to creating a Mac OS X deliverable. I can only repeat that the timeliness and quality of that depends on people like us!