Wednesday, May 24, 2006

Xara LX now usable for real work!

Xara LX has now reached the 0.5 milestone and is usable for real work! You can now save and export files, the program contains the help files and it rarely crashes. Of course, there is still a lot of work remaining but I can already see many opportunities to put this software to use.

For those who missed my previous post: Xara LX is a Linux (and MacOS) port of supposedly "revolutionary" vector (and bitmap!) graphics package. I say "supposedly" because I didn't use recent versions of similar professional packages so I cannot really compare them. However, the decision to open-source this program means that Inkscape has more than met its match, I'm afraid. It seems almost too good to be true that this package is now available for free to all Linux users while Windows users still have to pay for it (if I understand the situation correctly).

I recommend downloading the latest daily build from their homepage (this is also an excellent opportunity to get accustomed to Autopackage) and trying it out. It contains several impressive demo images and it took me only a few minutes to create this masterpiece:



And it was FUN!

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

World will be a better place from now: i can stop using stolen XaraX. With Xara LX I'm prepared for complete migration of my home business to Linux platform. Inkscape has some good ideas (object alignment is IMHO best I have ever seen) but usability of Xara is unmatched.

Anonymous said...

Not sure - is it inspired by Kryspin, Albert , Chucky or...? :)

František Fuka said...

lemondale: All of them. Plus Milos Zeman.

Anonymous said...

As i understand this, Inkscape is mean as substitution for QuarkXpress, InDesign and similar (used primary for creating documents with many pages or for page composition at all), but Xara is "replacement" for Illustrator and Corel and other vector editors. So i think both of them have future.

František Fuka said...

karl: I think you are mistaken. I quote from Inkscape homepage: "Inkscape is an Open Source vector graphics editor, with capabilities similar to Illustrator, Freehand, CorelDraw, or Xara X"