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

[esanabri]

Paul I totally agree, I have moved on to MAC and the first thing in my briefcase was XARA!

I do believe the the greatest thing a man or a company can do is to broaden the horizons of the "common" person...

all of the "professionals" that can't do "miracles with artwork" are few and far between... but us the "hobbiest" the people who are improving our media with a powerful simple to use and AFFORDABLE program like Xara, these are the people that by the thousands are making a difference...

so to those who moved on I say good bye, there a 1,000 new ones who will replace and enhance our lives with their contributions...

[Bob Hahn]

Next week I will have owned my iMac for 1 year now. I really enjoy my Mac and I see no reason to switch back to a PC or own a companion PC.

Currently I'm still using Xara on my Mac by running the free VirtualBox with Windows XP.

But this has been a year now for me doing this and I would like to stop the need to boot up XP in order to run Xtreme. Just as I made the switch from PC to Mac, I'm starting to look at other options out there in graphic software. I still love Xara Xtreme, but other Mac users aren't going to install Windows XP on their Mac in order to run Xtreme.

Apple software is easy to use and designed that way. Bundled programs like iMovie and iWeb, make it very easy for the home user to edit movies or create web sites. To me, Xara Xtreme is very much like a Mac program but created only for the PC.

The number os OS X users is smaller than Windows, but still that's millions of potential Xara users being turned away.

I'd like to see Xara Xtreme succeed, but I too like to succeed. If Xtreme can't venture to the Mac, I may look in seeing who else is out there and then my turn to the dark side would be complete. Come Xara. Join me. Together we can rule the galaxy!

[jens g.r. benthien]

I think not.

http://store.apple.com/uk/browse/guide/windows

I've already mentioned it in another post: why should I install a superfluous operating system on a stable and reliable system? Even Windoze XP Pro for which I have a licence needs more space on the hard drive than the highly performant OS X.

I wouldn't build a shabby Ssangyong engine into a Ferrari - would you?

[philt]

Eobet and other professional illustrators may unwittingly be settng Xara up as a straw dog here. The complaints and criticisms he and others raise are valid--e.g. need for more advanced vector tools like mesh fills, tracing tools, masks &c. But considering Xara's history and size the company have made good businss decisions.

Eobet says he is no longer Xara's target audience. Well, I think it would have been a mugs game, still would be, for Xara to try going head to head with Adobe, say, because this would require more resources and market share than they have. Instead Xara have sensibly put their efforts into building outstandingly good products for lower and mid-range users with a view to building a strengthened position for themselves in that market. I also know from hanging around the TG forums for quite a while now, that there are plenty of Xara users who are top-notch professional calibre graphics persons. So....

Xara's 'target audience' must include many like me who whatever their gifts and skill levels can't afford or else don't need highly sophisticated up-market tools like those of Adobe. For these users Xara is a gift. Xara's loyal and expanding user base suggests that they are on the right track.

XWD is a good recent example. Its of limited use and value to professional web developers who must rely on ASP.NET or some such in their work, no question. But XWD has still been a big hit. Not out more than a couple months or so and now, Xara having tested the water, already integrated into Xara 5. Sure, Xara might else have put their money into more and advanced graphical tools, but I'd bet XWD has helped Xara gain popularity and market. I hope it's being reflected in their bottom line.

If so its my guess that eventually, and maybe even sooner than later, we'll be seeing some of those advanced graphical tools that many have been asking for, maybe even see a product that can begin to compete with Adobe. Meantime let's hope that Eobet and others like him keep an eye on Xara and revisit these forums from time to time.

[BONES]

A life without Xara leaves a huge gap. But obviously that's the price you have to pay if you switch to a superior OS.

In what way is MacOS superior to any other? Do vendors write suprerior drivers for their hardware? No, Apple write all the drivers and often do a very poor job of it. Is it more configurable for particular needs? No, in fact it is far less configurable than any other OS. Is it more stable? No, not one little bit. IN fact, in my experience it is far more difficult to resolve stability problems that do arise than any other OS.
Overall, Apple provide computers that could, at best, be described as pro-sumer. Anyone who wants to rely on a computer to do anything even remotely challenging to their system would be crazy to buy a Mac, especially in this industry - their graphics drivers are simply appalling for anything but the most basic applications. They thrive on the ignorance and blind loyalty of their user base to perpetuate this myth of superiority. Give me a budget and I will build you a PC that will be superior in every way to a similarly priced Mac.

I'd like to see Xara Xtreme succeed, but I too like to succeed. If Xtreme can't venture to the Mac, I may look in seeing who else is out there and then my turn to the dark side would be complete.

You will fail in this endeavour unless, like the OP, you are happy to spend an order of magnitude more money. As he points out, InDesign, Photoshop and Illustrator make Xara redundant. What he fails to mention is that as part of Adobe CS4, you will be up for anything up to two grand to replace $250 worth of Xara.
From his description, it sounds like Illustrator would make a great companion to Xara for tracing stuff, I gave it away as a bad joke at v8.0, except that it costs several times more so you tend to want to use it for everything. I would question the value in that, because unless you spend most of your time tracing, you'll save up more than enough time doing other things to offset having to fix up traces manually now and again.

I've already mentioned it in another post: why should I install a superfluous operating system on a stable and reliable system? Even Windoze XP Pro for which I have a licence needs more space on the hard drive than the highly performant OS X.

WinXP takes up 2.3Gb on my HDD. Even though I am running a 64Gb SSD, I find that a perfectly acceptable size for something that does as much as an operating system. I have also only experienced a single OS crash on WinXP, in more than 6 years of use. In more than two years I have never experienced a single crash under Vista on my work PC, which cops far more abuse than my personal workstation. Now, I will concede that Vista takes up far too much disc space for my humble SSD, or I would be using it for sure.

I wouldn't build a shabby Ssangyong engine into a Ferrari - would you?

You'll find most Ssangyongs run Mercedes engines, as they were formerly owned by Daimler, which is a perfect illustration of the kind of ignorance upon which most base their decision to buy a Mac.
In any event, there is not so much as a single component in a Mac that is not also available for any PC user. OTOH, there are almost limitless PC configurations unavailable to a Mac user. I'd suggest a more apt analogy would be why buy a Ferrari if all you are going to use it for is commuting to the office? To take it step further, I'd liken Windoze to a Bentley Continental GT - all the driving pleasure, speed, performance and style of a sports car but if you need to pick the kids up from school or put a week's worth of groceries in the boot, you can do that. The price you pay is a bit of extra weight but it's more than offset by what's under the bonnet.

[BONES]

Anyhoo, I'm obviously a little late to this discussion, so rather than read another 11 pages, I'll just throw my two penneth worth into the fountain.

I am incredulous that anyone is surprised that a $250 application is not as good in every conceivable area as a suite of applications costing around $1500 or so. I am more than happy to accept his claim that Illustrator is much better for tracing. Problem is, if Xara put a whole heap of work into that area, I wouldn't find the least little bit of use for it for any of the work, paid or otherwise, that I use Xara for.

For me, as a full-time professional artist, Xara continues to serve me well across many disciplines and my reliance upon it continues to grow with each new release. Since I first started using it in 1999, it has gradually but completely replaced CorelDraw/Illustrator and Photoshop. Up until Xtreme, I still kept Photopaint around but lately that has become redundant and Xara has further been able to address my word-processing/layout and web design needs completely and comprehensively. So where once I had to have an entire suite of far more expensive applications to support my work as a broadcast designer and visual effects artist, I can now rely 100% on Xara for all those tasks. Although, to be completely fair, some of the burden has been taken on by Combustion, whose non-destructive editing and superior colour tools make it a better choice than Photoshop anyway.

I'll always support Xara, even though many of the new features in recent releases are of limited or no use to me, simply because they are one of the few developers who put at least as much effort into improving what goes on "under the hood" as they do into bells and whistles. If I had dismissed the latest release as having no new features I need, I would have missed out on the most noticeable speed improvement I have ever experienced with any product.

Think of it this way - imagine all the things you could teach a 6th grade class about graphic art using Xara, then think how much harder that would be with CS4. Sure, no-one is going to get work as an artist if all they know is Xara, but for giving people the big picture with a great user experience, it's perfect!

So use specialist applications for most of your work and Xara for everything else. It has worked for me for going on 12 years now and I rely on it far more today than I ever have in the past. It may not get better and better in specific, narrow disciplines but as it spreads it's mighty wings, it casts a shadow on all of those areas outside your specialty and that's what makes it great. I use it now for writing documents [resumes, short stories, etc], for all my quotes and invoices, for all my web design needs [except Flash, which I still do in Combustion], UI design, flow-charting, sketching of ideas, matte painting [with Combustion], photo editing, bitmap repurposing, texture maps and even just to make notes while I am doing other things.

To conclude [this does feel like an essay, doesn't it?], I don't think I have ever been in Xara's "target audience". That it continues to do more and more of the things I need to do never ceases to amaze and impress me. It's a jack-of-all-trades with a depth of features and breadth of ability that is simply astonishing for such a reasonable price. And that's not even taking into account it's ease of use or unmatched speed. If Xara cost as much as CS4, I'm sure no-one would use it and the OP and others would have some validity to their cirtique, but as a low-cost alternative for those who don't need everything CS4 can do, it is without peer.

[Xcellent]

In what way is MacOS superior to any other?

I wouldn't call it superior but in my experience it is more stable (i'm preferring and use Win personally). The instability is mostly drivers on any computer systems and connected hardware that is not fully supported due to badly written drivers. (Or drivers haven't been continued to develop or simply discontinued to sell new hardware with (again) badly written drivers (you most love creative).

Apples approach is: we write the drivers so we make sure it works. Again, in my experience, this is the case and makes apple stable IF you use the hardware that is officially supported. But come the day you need additional hardware or you want a specific graphic card or sound card, you might not get it to work at all.

[fsteve]

You sir, are a troll, and I present the following evidence to support my claim:

EXHIBIT A

Who is "we"? How can you presume to speak on behalf of anyone but yourself?

The accused then goes on to degrade Apple and anyone who buys their products as if his opinion of MacOS is gospel:

My experience with stability is somewhat different from yours. I've found MacOS to be as likely to crash as Windoze.

How interesting. My experience with XP is that it can freeze at the drop of a hat and that it may blue screen any time you try to plug in new hardware. At one point, I had to reinstall XP once every six months because otherwise it got too bloated and slow. So I've found XP to be utter crap.

IIs it more stable? No, not one little bit. IN fact, in my experience it is far more difficult to resolve stability problems that do arise than any other OS.

In my experience, you have to do bloody guesswork with finding the right .inf file or registry post in XP to resolve a stability problem, which often have such strange names that they're impossible to guess. With Mac, all you do is go into the Preferences folder and delete the appropriately named file and you're done. So again, I've found it to be much simpler to resolve stability problems in OS X.

They thrive on the ignorance and blind loyalty of their user base to perpetuate this myth of superiority. Give me a budget and I will build you a PC that will be superior in every way to a similarly priced Mac.

And after you've built me that PC, can I call you at any hour of the day for the next year and send my PC to you to have all my problems fixed? Perhaps you then instead suggest I buy a Dell which has similar customer support, but then I'd get a computer loaded down with "free" bloatware instead of actual usable things like iPhoto, iMovie and Time Machine.

Oh, and I forgot, you have to build the entire PC into the screen itself.

...the kind of ignorance upon which most base their decision to buy a Mac

Right, because everyone and their grandmother wants to educate themselves about the risks of phising, trojans, botnets, viruses, worms and things which makes an unpatched XP's life expectancy online about 5 seconds, whereas on a Mac you don't even need anti virus software?

So please shut up about MacOS. This thread is not about the merits of Apple products, and you can't convince me that a Windows PC is better with bloody stupid self referencing anecdotes. I responded to your posts to prove how silly this is, and if you respond to mine you'll only have proven it further.

---

Unlike BONES, I've actually read all 19 pages of this thread, and everyone seems to have missed one important thing:

If you look at the OP post, at the project which made him switch from Xara, you will note that it seems to detail quite an intricate document manager for internal handling and evaluation of contracts/projects.

Now, what company does this at such a detail level and needs a database to handle all projects? My bet is a company with millions if not billions in turnover. Now, I doubt that such a company cares if a software costs $250 or $2500. That's peanuts for them. I do, however, think that such a company cares about a 24hr support number and proper support case handling, instead of having to find an obscure 3rd party internet forum and then wait two years or longer for a fix.

[HayTay]

" Quand on veut noyer son chien, on dit qu'il a la rage"

"When one wants to drown his dog, say it has rabies"

Very apt, Dominique.

eobet,

Xara Xtreme is just a tool. You can choose to use it or not. If you want to continue using Xara X and it has the tools you need, by all means, carry on... or don't. If Illustrator, Photoshop and InDesign enhances your work flow and produces the artwork required by your clients in a timely fashion you'd be remiss in not using them.

I've used several versions of CorelDraw through the years and jumped ship when I discovered Xtreme 3.2. I find myself cursing at the monitor a lot less now . That's not to say that I don't ever use CorelDraw X3 anymore. I also use several other graphics applications because Xtreme cannot easily create, or recreate, a number of effects.

Personally, I don't see anything in the cherub graphic that couldn't have been done using Xara Xtreme, CorelDraw, InkScape, or a number of other graphic editors. Use whatever application(s) you like and feel comfortable using. I doubt very much if there will ever be one of anything that satisfies everyone.

Good luck to you,
HayTay

[dogbertbh]

What I don't understand about this thread.... is this actual thread's purpose.

The message I took was "Xara isn't for me anymore.". Not only did I get this by the subject, but I wasn't even sure why I, or anyone else, needed to know at all.

Isn't this like going to a party where everyone you know leaves, and then you yell out to all the other people still there, that you don't know - "All my friends have left - so I'M LEAVING AS WELL!!!"

Just wondering.