What is your biggest WOW effect \ feature in Xara?

[rsrsrs]

where you use it and say, this is so cool,
where you blown away,
where you say, thanks so much xara.

For me, its Clipview.
and the Curves in the Fill and Transparancy Tools

[handrawn]

soft grouping - being able to group things without affecting their stacking order and across layers

[Boy]

As an XDP user: the combination of design tools (vector & bitmap) with web -- and print -- publishing capability.

[gwpriester]

The first time I saw Xara demonstrated was in 1996 by the marketing director of Corel who were marketing the product as CorelXARA.

When the presenter demonstrated creating a linear transparency by click and drag, I was hooked. I still think this is the greatest feature for me.

[Acorn]

A hubristic response from me - when Xara implemented my suggestion to accommodate code handling for ClassNames (Name: htmlclass="aClassName").
80% of my offerings would simply not have happened.

Acorn

[Boy]

... and the easy and intuitive use of most tools and functions.

[bwood]

As an XDP user: the combination of design tools (vector & bitmap) with web -- and print -- publishing capability.

^^^^ I’m with @boy on this one. I used the WD first, then graduated to Pro+. The package ideal for web and print. And a respected community. No other package on the web does it all.

[siran]

Incredible zoom / sub pixel alignment and editing.
Ability to edit opacity masks, blends or moulds at any time.

[Egg Bramhill]

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

[browj2]

The reason that I got Xara in the first place was because of the ability to use it with Magix Movie Edit Pro (MEP) to create animated and static graphical overlays on a video clip, going from into Xara with the video as the background. I can rotoscope a mask (shape) the changes form over time. The result goes back to MEP as an overlay XAR object. It can be reopened from the XAR object in MEP. I am still amazed by this when it actually works properly, which is almost never. Between Xara and Magix, they have managed to break, fix, break, fix, make it unusable, partially fix... over the years. I complain each time. Right now it works, but only in the session as the XAR object gets emptied if the project is closed and reopened. I save the XAR file first or render out from MEP. Grrrr.
Still, it's a great feature.