So, here we are half way through 2012. And about time somebody made another request for Xara to bring Designer to Mac OS X.

Let's recap...

Xara Designer Pro X, or Xara 8.1.2 has just been released.

Mac OS X 10.8 has just been released to critical acclaim only one year after Mac OS X 10.7

The Mac App Store continues it's rapid ascent, just passing the 10,000 app mark.
In January 2011, the Pixelmator bitmap graphics software passed the $1m gross mark.

But, as they say in France, the more things change the more they stay the same...

There is still no decent vector graphics editor on Mac OS X.

Two former classics are now both dead: Freehand and Expression.

Forget Illustrator; forget Fireworks, ZeusDraw, Intaglio, EasyDraw, VectorDesigner, iDraw, LineForm, Inkscape. They all get it wrong.

Perhaps the closest match to Xara would be Sketch, which recently won an Apple Design award for its interface. It is a good interface, but still not as easy to use as Xara. And it lacks a number of tools and features.

So, I am still using Xara in VMware Fusion. Most things work "fine" but there is a lot of jumping through hoops - PDF creation, printing, font duplication and so on. I dream of a native version and how much easier my life would be with all the benefits it would bring.

Which brings me to the question: what are Xara, or Magix, waiting for? At what point will Mac OS X become a market worth going after?

Personally, I think that point was the launch of the Mac App Store, January 2011. We're 18 months down the line now and if anybody had any doubts in the Mac App Store being a viable method of publishing, those are surely now laid to rest. There a market here ripe for the picking.

I look forward to any thoughts.

Thanks for reading.
matt