Thank you and good bye! I'm no longer Xara's target audience.

[eobet]

I've been using Xara X for I don't know how long, but I guess it started around when Windows XP was released and I wanted to do these nice new drawn-with-vector icons. I was introduced to Xara X by a friend, who was a professor in computer science and (like me) impressed by well made small applications.

Xara X enabled me to create icons not only fast and with great ease, but it also enabled me to adjust them with pixel perfect precision and with great control over the outlines and shadows. It was very useful when it came to icon creation.

However, as the computers and software evolved, Xara lagged behind. Inventions like mesh fills, live tracing and live colors (enabling hue shifts etc) made it easier to perform advanced operations, which more suited the more and more complex tasks I received as my work responsibilities was also evolving.

A few years ago Xara added photo editing capabilities, something that will never ever be up to Photoshop's standards, and my tool of choice. Later, Xara added extended page layout editing capabilities, something that will never ever be up to Indesign's standards, which is my tool of choice for that. Now, Xara has added web editing capabilities, something I am not even interested in.

My conclusions are that if I ever need to create a Windows XP icon again, I will turn to Xara. But for all other tasks I have to do, I have better tools and on top of that, I'm a Mac OS X user these days.

So, thank you for these years, but I must reiterate what I said in an old thread I posted: I've moved onto the professional world with large corporate clients, and Xara has remained in the small, hobbyist sphere.

For reference, here is the actual project which made me transition from Xara. The layer palette with the grouping and isolation mode editing made these kinds of mock-ups so much faster to produce with Illustrator:



My latest work also could never have been completed in such a fast time using Xara. I had to scan several drawings and composition them together. Done with the live trace and live paint of Illustrator which enabled me to swap colors on the fly and quickly make corrections to my lines with a Wacom tablet:



I'll say good bye with this selection of my past Xara work: