Thank you Xara! Thank you TalkGraphics!

[jens g.r. benthien]

Thank you Xara!
Thank you TalkGraphics!

I’ve joined this great community December 1st, 2000. I remember the times, when Xara carried the Name Corel Xara - the very first version I started my ultimate vector drawing experience to convert my ideas and visions into clean computer graphics and onto paper.

I had been impressed by the incredible speed of Xara, the simple menus, the ease of use, the uncluttered graphical user interface, and I enjoyed experimenting with the seemingly endless options of this object oriented program.

I remember the many nights I spent at TalkGraphics, exchanging ideas, looking for solutions, meeting other people around the globe.

I remember the times, when we used to make drop shadows 'by hand', until the developers gave us a simple, yet powerful button to generate a drop shadow.

I remember putting many objects and images for textures into the gallery to have them at hand when needed. This was (and still is?) a fantastic feature.

I remember the many logos, illustrations, labels - you name it - I have done with Xara in the blink of an eye.

The last version I used to work with is the Xara Xtreme (I guess it is the version 3). End of 2008 I migrated to the Mac, after my equipment had been stolen while I enjoyed a nice evening in a restaurant at the coast of Andalucía in south Spain. Just by coincidence it had been the time I went back to my roots - photography (large format photography to be specific). But I still made designs in 2D and 3D, so the need for Xara was still there. For 3D I used Xara to develop the basic shapes for so called sweeps or extrudes in CAD applications. Or to create large posters like this one:

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/...ADa_poster.jpg (I am sorry, I can't post an image here)

Believe me, I have tested and tried several applications for the Mac, but none of them could even come close to what Xara offered me. I really missed my 'bread and butter application’!

Intaglio was rather incomplete, Illustrator was a PITA. So I installed VirtualBox on my Mac, put Windows XP Pro and Xara Xtreme into it and ran Xara almost seamlessly on Mac OS X. However, VirtualBox used a lot of memory. It almost grabbed anything it could get. But I didn’t mind, as long as I could use Xara.

A big 'Thank you' to Gary Priester, who is a fantastic moderator, giving the community help, ideas, tips and tricks to master Xara and who is the inventor of the XaraXone! And a big 'Thank you' to all the others whose names I don’t remember after 14 years.

But now the time has come. After 14 years extensive use of Xara on Windows computers and a Mac it is time to say 'Good Bye'. No, I don’t want to retire, I guess I never will. But finally another small company released 'Affinity Designer', which is as incredible as Xara, but running natively on Mac OS X. It is fast as well - real time if you know what I mean. I guess this program doesn’t have all the features of the latest Xara version, but it offers all the features I need for graphics and illustrations.

Last night I converted all Xara files to PDF files. Hundreds, thousands of files. Open, export as PDF, ok, ok, close window. Stupid work for hours, but I finally made it after staying awake many hours after midnight.

Now I am starting into a new era of transforming my ideas into reality. Of course, a new program (or 'App' as people prefer to call it these days) won’t give me ideas - this part of the creative process still depends on the human in front of the computer. So basically it is a matter of convenience to make 'the switch' to a native Mac OS X program.

This is just a good bye, not a farewell. I know I will keep visiting this forum from time to time. Too many good memories are connected with the good times and vibes for many years.

As the great Steve Jobs used to say:

One more thing.

Pause for a minute. Times are changing fast. The world changes. Society changes. Resources are exploited more and more and are even destroyed. It is a wish of my heart to keep this world as wonderful and beautiful as it used to be, so let me point you to a video of a presentation of Prof. Dr. David Suzuki. He is not an economist, he is a geneticist.

What he tells us with 'The Legacy' is something that will have an enormous impact on our future - your future and the future of your children.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S2b7SpLpN5A

Please help spread this link - the more people will think about it, the higher the chance for our world to remain a beautiful place for many generations to come.

[This is not a commercial product, advertising or promotion, it is reflections about our life, our past and future]

In this sense: Thumbs and heads up, enjoy your life, keep your ideas flowing and convert them into reality as long as you can!

All the best,

jens g.r. benthien

[pauland]

Jens, I have no idea why you would say goodbye even if your principle graphics software is changing.

TG is an interesting melting pot of people and it's always interesting to see what people are up to and there's more here than just Xara.

Stick around.

Since you said Goodbye, may I say Welcome Jens?!

Perhaps TG might like to incorporate another section for affinity since several TG members have been using the software?

Paul

[gwpriester]

Good luck Jens. We'll always be here.

Xara was working on a native Mac version but when they were acquired by Magix all work on the Mac and Unix versions (as far as I know) stopped.

Maybe someday, this project will be revived. Especially if Serrif is successful with Affinity Designer.

[The Alien]

Affinity designer looks pretty nifty. Have you tried Inkscape by any chance? It's pretty widely used and available on Mac too as far as I know.

Anyway, good luck on your ventures!