Iv'e followed Xara from it's creation on BBC computer machines (Artworks) to it's transformation to Windows OS.

The killer app here was it's speed. Coral Draw had a standard template of a red barn surrounded by conifer trees. It was painful to view Coral Draw rendering this scene. Coral Xara rendered the same image almost instantly. That speed advantage has dissappeared over the years.

The next big advance was a major switch with the ability to create WYSIWYG web-sites. I know this has been much maligned for distracting the software away from it's origin of vector graphics. However I believe the original Xara build (Camelot?) was by now long in the tooth and was restricting advances re vector enhancements. (I may be wrong here but that's my understanding)

My other passion was Macromedia Flash, vector based animations. The vectors were Xara creations. I used to build web-sites completely Flash driven. Unfortunatly from almost dominating the internet 20 years ago it slowly declined to become defunct today. (For good security reasons.)

Today I create Flash type vector animations using Xara & SVGator. SVGator has limits. Unlike Flash you can't (presently) import animations of variable timelines, but within Xara's placeholders I can stack various SVGator svg animations within placeholders to create similar effects.

My favourite Xara tool is the Contour tool