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:

[gwpriester]

Sorry to see you go but Xara Xtreme is not for everybody.

Good luck.

[MarkMyWords]

I understand entirely. For many of us, it does seem like Xtreme has been standing still for some time now. Clearly their priorities, for whatever reason, are not what they once were and they have chosen to concentrate on low-to mid-level web capabilities. Those of us who don't use such tools feel somewhat neglected, but we have to live with their decisions, they owe us nothing.

That's life.

[behzad]

I totally disagree with your post. It makes no sense. I have been using xara in the commercial industry for years. I love it. Sure it is not photoshop and it is not meant to be, but i can tell you that it is for me better than illustrator.

Xara is a great compliment to adobe products. Professionals use a number of different products to create their work and you really don't make much sense.

The addition of the web features does not take away from what xara already has. Sorry but good luck.

[Dominique]

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

Soit Photoshop est hautement supérieur, mais au prix stupéfiant où il est proposé, il faut faire partie des nantis ou alors économiser sur la nourriture et les vacances. J'exagère, mais à peine.

Je vous trouve un peu mesquin de nous présenter vos logiciels professionnels hors de prix alors que Xara vous a contenté le temps que vous l'avez utilisé.

Pour moi, Xara reste le must: simple d'emploi, accessible et malgré tout fonctionnel et polyvalant.

J'imagine que la multitude de logiciels professionnels dont vous avez accès, vous trouverez un programme qui sache traduire le texte d'une conscrite qui se plaît dans la "cour des petits", que vous n'hésitez pas à traiter par dessus la jambe.

[kinetica]

@ eobet, Does this mean you won't be buying version 5?

@ Dominique, un peu sévère!

[eobet]

Ok, one final note, because I want the discussions here to be constructive:

I totally disagree with your post. It makes no sense. I have been using xara in the commercial industry for years. I love it. Sure it is not photoshop and it is not meant to be, but i can tell you that it is for me better than illustrator.

You can't just say "it's better for me" without providing an example, otherwise you aren't adding anything to the discussion.

For example, in my middle drawing above, I used the live trace (with tweakable levels of tolerance) to instantly convert a scanned drawing to objects, and then I used my wacom tablet to correct a few lines (Illustrator intelligently reconstructs any line you draw near) and finally the live trace to color it (again, Illustrator intelligently finds gaps in the drawings which prevents color from spilling over into other areas if you've missed a small gap, and I can just fill any object like a paintbucket tool in Painter and even do hue changes to the entire drawing like in Photoshop).

That's at least five examples of features Xara lacks, which makes this process several orders of magnitude faster in Illustrator, and in your comment you chose to ignore commenting on any of those. That is not how you do constructive criticism or have a meaningfull discussion!

Xara is a great compliment to adobe products. Professionals use a number of different products to create their work and you really don't make much sense.

Again, that's the second time you said that I didn't make any sense, and you can't say that without properly explaining why.

I'm a professional and as I explained I do use different products, and that is my point, not yours! That is why I argued that in the little niche where I find Xara useful, not much has been done for me in all these years. Instead, Xara has branched out to many other areas, instead of trying to be very, very good at the one thing it started out as: a very slick and fast object editor.

You are arguing directly against what Xara seems to be trying to accomplish. With the photo editing, page layouts and web editing, Xara clearly appears to be going for an all-in-one package, rather than a compliment to anything else. And on top of your logic being flawed, you don't even provide any evidence of the contrary!


-

Over the years, I've tried to hold rational and structured discussions on this forum, but the blind fanboyism of some Xara users have sabotaged this, and I have to admit that that is also one of my reasons for saying good bye.




EDITS:

Soit Photoshop est hautement supérieur, mais au prix stupéfiant où il est proposé, il faut faire partie des nantis ou alors économiser sur la nourriture et les vacances. J'exagère, mais à peine.

If Google translate has this right, thank you for reinforcing my view that Xara is mainly for hobbyist users.

@ eobet, Does this mean you won't be buying version 5?

I didn't buy version 4 either. I managed to succesfully argue that the company I was working at should provide me with a license. I don't think that would work for version 5.

Personally, I just bought Adobe CS4 because the GPU accelerated realtime rotation of the Photoshop drawings is something I could really use.

[MarkMyWords]

The addition of the web features does not take away from what xara already has. Sorry but good luck.

Actually, the point is that, for non web designers, little, of note, has been added for quite some time now. Sure there have been more tweaks, but from my point of view these have made almost no impact. The 3D extrude is nice, if limited, the object gallery is long overdue and very good, but these amount to small beans as far as I am concerned.

Where are the floodfills, the (proper) masks, the natural media brushes, mesh fills, mesh distort, extrude along a line, live vector effects, actions, (I'm sure others can think of much more)? A lot of this stuff is fast becoming standard in vector software. For vector illustration, Xtreme is leading the way in speed and lagging behind in most other aspects. Even then the above mentioned productivity improving tools really eat in that advantage.

Personally, I think the shape editor is vector graphics best tool for clean linework (which is 90% of what I do in the program), though this is not a universal view, it is an added draw for me and I will use it for linework until something better comes along, but I would be reluctant to create large and complex full colour work in Xtreme (I have tried), regardless of it's speed.

[jens g.r. benthien]

I totally disagree with your post. It makes no sense.

It makes sense because Xara is still not available for the Mac. If it would be, I'd go for it.

The Mac is a very important platform for illustration and art work, so I really wonder why Xara is leaving this opportunity for others who can't even get close to what Xara can do.

I could cross upgrade most of my Win applications, in most cases with the identical serial number. ArtRage, PhotoLine, Photomatix Pro, Adobe Acrobat, LZ, VueScan, etc. Some are not (yet) available for the Mac, like Rhino (but the beta is already running), NoteTab Pro (I'm using Text Wrangler now which is close), Cinema 4D XL (version 7 doesn't run on Mac OSX and an upgrade to the latest version is too expensive and doesn't make sense to me for my purposes) and - you've guessed it - Xara.

Worst of all: I can't even open or convert the Xara file format to any other format like PDF <sigh>.

So I'm currently using Intaglio which is more finger cracking than something you can work with. Except for Acrobat I refuse to install any Adobe products because I don't like to adopt my work flow to that of some weird software engineers.

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.

[pauland]

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.

I think not.

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