Prognosis for Xtreme Pro for the Mac

[Egg Bramhill]

Doug,

Read post #6 above

Egg

[coldfuel]

Isn't there quite a good emulator for running windows software on Macs?
What about running Xara Xtreme Pro on that and cut and paste to native Mac graphics software? Would that work?

Hi Doug,

Then there is no point making the switch to Mac, may as well stick with a PC. Experience from Mac users i have spoken with is that the Windows 'emulator' is not nearly as good as a decent PC running Windows XP in terms of performance. What i like most about the idea of running Xara on a Mac is the performance, stablility and ability to run all other graphic programmes from one base unit (I.e. we can run, Xara, Photoshop and Dreamweaver on a Mac and not have to switch between Mac Pc for differnet apps)

XaraPro on a Mac...it just makes sense.
If Xara added support for AICS2 into XaraPro i could see a lot of Mac/AI users making the switch to Xara for vector work and once that happens the ball will start rolling and we may start seeing Xara as an industry accepted format for printing!?

Maybe im getting a little carried away...

[jedfrechette]

Then there is no point making the switch to Mac, may as well stick with a PC. Experience from Mac users i have spoken with is that the Windows 'emulator' is not nearly as good as a decent PC running Windows XP in terms of performance.

First a disclaimer the only Mac I currently have is PPC so I haven't personally tried any of these solutions, however, I have used similar methods to run Windows programs under Linux so...

coldfuel is certainly right that using an emulator (e.g. Parallels) will be slower than running a native application. The emulator needs to produce a fake computer that Windows can run on. For example, when a program running in the emulator asks Windows to draw a pixel on the screen Windows asks the fake computer to draw it, the emulator then asks the real computer to draw it and eventually a pixel gets sent to your monitor. Clearly there is going to be a lot of overhead.

So living with an emulator will be slow but the real question is: Will it be slow enough to be a problem? Maybe. If you mostly need the emulator for Xtreme I suspect that you will be ok. Xtreme is pretty fast. As a point of reference I can run Xtreme under Windows in VMWare on my, shall we say aging, Linux box, an AMD Athlon with 0.5 gig of RAM. Full redraws can be slow but the program is certainly usable with fairly complicated drawings (>10k objects).

However, there may be a higher performance way to get your Xara fix until they can stabilize their cross platform code base. In the Linux forum Odat reported that Xtreme Pro runs using Wine. Wine is an Open Source implementation of the Windows API. In theory, Wine provides a way to run Windows programs natively on Intel *nix platforms. This is how Google provides a Linux version of Picassa. I say “in theory” because Wine is under active development and doesn't support all function calls so things don't always work. What does all of this have to do with OS X? Well OS X is a *nix and CodeWeavers is currently working on a commercial version of Wine, Crossover Mac, that may let you run Xtreme natively on OS X. Crossover Mac is currently in public beta so someone with an Intel Mac could test out Xtreme with it.

Once again, I have no idea if either of these methods will work satisfactorily, they are clearly stop gap measures until there is a real cross platform version of Xtreme. However, if I was in the market for a new PC and my main reservation about getting a Mac was no Xara a Mac Pro would still be at or near the top of my list.

Hope this helps.

[davelash]

Jed,

Your info on Crossover for Mac is incredibly useful. I'm going to try it out.

To all: thanks for this discussion. Since I need a hardware upgrade to boost speed, I've decided to buy a MacPro and run it as a PC on graphics projects until XXP is out on the Mac. I sincerely hope that will be in 2007.

XXP with multi-page functionality is a killer app, in my opinion -- there is no equivalent all-in-one package, as weird as that is. I would expect Mac users to be among the early adopters. Here's hoping the Mac version is a priority at Xara.

[Doug]

Doug,

Read post #6 above

Egg

Missed that one, thanks!

[Frank Edwards]

Probably pie-in-the-sky thinking but, in terms of greater market exposure, including xara in either the i-life or appleworks suites would be a pretty exciting prospect. Xara has been down the road before with a major graphics software house and may not wish to do so again. But to get on board with an increasingly popular hardware/operating system platform and a firm that's always had charisma and a certain caché, that would be a different matter. Not to mention the exposure to all those graphics professionals who would have xara on their machine by default.

[FH Addict]

Hello,
I am an Addict FreeHand User and as you know Adobe decided not to developp anymore this marvelous software. I don't like Illustrator, then i took a look around and discovered Xara. It reminds me FreeHand with its swiss knife possibilities (except Xara is stronger as an image editor ;-).
Today, I heard about Xara and the multipage which FreeHand does for long time now. So could you please consider my present list for christmas :
• Xara Xtreme Pro for Mac (native osx)
• import menu for FreeHand files
• A better "Apple-like" interface

Many FreeHand users are feeling bad today because they are going to lose they favourite software. I invite people from Xara to take a look at these people, about their needs, their complaints.

http://www.enrichdesign.com/freehand.html

http://www.adobe.com/cfusion/webforu...cfm?forumid=17

[remi]

I think, the best way to support the porting of Xara Xtreme to Mac OS X is, to talk with Mac developers and make them interested in helping the Xara developers with the great Xara Xtreme for Linux project. This is a Open Source Project and it runs already under Linux. You know Mac OS X and Linux is not sooo far away. But in the moment, there are not enough Open Source developers available to porting the Linux code to Mac OS X.

So, to get Mac OS X developers into the Open Source project is the key of success to implement a Mac OS X version of Xara Xtreme in short time.

Go for it:

• Talk with Apple developers in forums.
• Make them crazy about Xara Xtreme!
• They will find a lot of good information for this project at http://www.xaraxtreme.org

Remi

[FH Addict]

I read http://www.xaraxtreme.org for a long time now and nothing is moving for the Mac OSX developpment. You know, even in France, there was a message in a huge mac devoted web site to promote the developpment of Xara for Mac OS… in fact the mac community doesn't know anything about Xara, the only few just know about a Windows applications with a Microsoft-like interface. So you can imagine there is no impact about Xara into the Mac Community. The only thing to do should come from the managing board of Xara : why not giving a try for a Mac version. So many new Designing softwares are coming into the Mac area but they are so far from Xara.
One other point is, people are fed up with the monopolistic behaviour of Adobe, people are waiting for something NEW (and not expensive) !!!!!!

[bembelembe]

I agree with FH Addict.
Xara developers should look into Freehand more. Many users of Freehand users need similar application to migrate. FH users are frustrated with Illustrator and are looking alternative. I think that Xara has tremendous potential but still, I find it's interface not intuitive and organisable as of Freehand's (or Illustrator's and InDesign's). Now when Xara finally has multipage, this great application is a step close to fulfill needs of Freehand users.

As FH Addict posted, people from Xara should read these forums and they will easily see what functions many users of vector applications need.