"interested skeptic" needs some feedback on Xara pros/cons

[gary]

First of all a big hello to the Xara Discussion Group!

After reading the glowing remarks from many professional graphic designers on the i-us Xara pages, I have become interested in the software.

Here's my question: If this software's so great (and also cheap), then why is it not prominently used in every design studio? Why are Tools like Corel Draw, Illustrator or Freehand used more? Where's "the hook"? Or is it really simply a "well kept secret"?

Thanks in advance for any and all feedback!
Gary Vey

p.s. i now use photoshop and corel draw (corel since ver. 2)...

[imagination is more important than knowledge - a.einstein]

[gary]

First of all a big hello to the Xara Discussion Group!

After reading the glowing remarks from many professional graphic designers on the i-us Xara pages, I have become interested in the software.

Here's my question: If this software's so great (and also cheap), then why is it not prominently used in every design studio? Why are Tools like Corel Draw, Illustrator or Freehand used more? Where's "the hook"? Or is it really simply a "well kept secret"?

Thanks in advance for any and all feedback!
Gary Vey

p.s. i now use photoshop and corel draw (corel since ver. 2)...

[imagination is more important than knowledge - a.einstein]

[ED]

Good points Mark but don't forget the context sensitive on-line multimedia help system. This is one of the most impressive features of Xara. Becoming productive with XaraX will be almost instant and getting answers to "how to's" will be just as fast if not faster.

No one else has a Multimedia Help system that can compare to XaraX. Just wait and see. Does any competing products even have a Multimedia help system? I have already experienced what this can do for newbies (and me too [img]/infopop/emoticons/icon_smile.gif[/img]) This is an awsome feature often overlooked. You gatta see it in action to believe it.

... Now where is my CD? (looking up, down, left and right) [img]/infopop/emoticons/icon_smile.gif[/img]

The BEST is good enough!

[dk_art]

I think big companies get into a groove and can't get out easily even if they wanted too (just a theory). They've been using Photoshop, Corel Draw or whatever for years and it would be very hard to just all of a sudden switch to a different program (even if it did have better features or better user interface) and learn that and lose money in the learning time process. Just my thought anyway and I don't base a program's actual merit upon how popular it is since sometimes the most popular things have problems ... I judge pretty much on the use of the demo.

I think the demo is absolutely essential... I won't buy a program without a trial version. My web editor I bought had a 45 day trial period... time enough to become dependant on it :-). Although the 15 day trial for XaraX is alright, I think 30 days is the least amount of time any demo should be for. Of course some companies (cough *Corel* cough) apparently don't believe in downloadable trial versions and I think are foolish for being so restrictive.

Of course feedback from the software company about any bugs discovered is good. There have been several bug complaints about XaraX recently and the Xara team has always written replies to this board and often said that these things were fixed for the next download. So this info is comforting too.

DK

[doobs]

welcome to xara world gary...
yes it's the graphic world best kept secret but if you promise to tell all your friends about it we'll let you in!
i once was a skeptic too till about a week after downloading my first corelxara2 demo.
the best thing about xara is it's sheer intuitiveness which i have not found anywhere else as far as graphic software is concerned....and i have tried quiet few!..add speed ...a great supportive xaran community ...all this reasonably priced...(i've just happily upgraded this evening).
if you need any convincing download the beta...tutorials and movies available.
but best of all i've lost 22kgs the first month of using xara.
cheers.
philippe [img]/infopop/emoticons/icon_smile.gif[/img]

[gnurf]

And I (still) don't use Illustrator [img]/infopop/emoticons/icon_biggrin.gif[/img]

And one more comment about exporting tifs:
If Xara would support CMYK export I would probably export a lot of my work directly to CMYK jpeg, but now I have to go via Photoshop to do the coverting (and while I am in PS I usually apply an unsharp mask as well, and if you don't - try it). And therefor I chose to export as tif so I don't mess up work, and LZW to save disk space (because I usually use a Zip-drive).

-Paul

[gnurf]

Yep, it was I who complained about the tif compression. And I just also compaired the LZW compression with both Photoshop and XaraX - and to my surprise it gave just about the same result (filesizes). [img]/infopop/emoticons/icon_confused.gif[/img]

AMOF I had a poster job a while ago where the filesizes of Xara and PS LZW TIF:s differed quite a lot. I also mentioned it in this discussion group at that time.
Oh well, I guess I have to take back the critisism about the LZW part.

-Paul

[doobs]

dk
about the weigth loss thingy..well i use xara x "lite" but seriously it was just some outrageous claim to confuse our new skeptic mate gary even more.
come to think of it i do have many more friends and my bank balance has increased tenfolds since i started using xara... [img]/infopop/emoticons/icon_smile.gif[/img]
philippe

[xrenex]

Xara is more artistic and CorelDraw has more prefabricated stuff aboard.

Xara once advertised with: Less is more.
Believe me with Xara this is true [img]/infopop/emoticons/icon_smile.gif[/img]

[mike engles]

Hello

Apologies to Stan.

If XaraX tifs are larger, it it usually because of anti-aliasing on the edge pixels.
This can turned off using the quality slider.

Mike Engles