I love the speed of use and the fact that you can wade into Xara at your own pace... e.g. use just the toolbars initially, until you feel confident enough to start using the many UI tricks and keyboard shortcuts to achieve more drawing in less time.

It's not just that Xara is fast - it also gives more and better feedback as you manipulate your images and objects - all in real-time (other than some of the more demanding Photoshop plug-ins - which are not really the core of what Xara is about, so this does not detract in any way from the speed and convenience of the overall design workflow).

The text handling tools have matured well over the past couple of years - now supporting some really useful capabilities, including advanced layouts, multi-tiered bullets / lists / numbering, automatic flow between 'linked' text panels, embeddable graphics that remain anchored at a specific position in a paragraph even as your text continues to evolve.

Xara really is a one-stop shop for almost every graphical need, from fine art, to vector illustration, to data visualisation, to photo manipulation, newsletter construction, application UI wire-framing and web design.

Topping it all off, Xara is great fun to use and any time I fire it up it becomes the highlight of my working day!