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If you're a Windows user, I might point you to the latest version of Xara. Not only does it do 95% of what Photoshop does, it does a lot of other things too, and in my opinion, does them better and much faster. For a fraction of the cost.

My only complaint is that it is not available for Mac. I run Xara on my Mac in a Windows VM... and I still like it better than Photoshop.

Have a look at Xara Xtreme, unbelievably easy to use, fast, powerfull, low memory usage, good manual/help and reasonably priced on Windows ($80).

Also, the source has been open for a few years (http://www.xaraxtreme.org/), and has been ported to Linux, runs fine AFAIK although the project appears to have stalled mid-2006.

Just to be slightly less off-topic, Corel has owned this product for a short period but probably hasn't managed to position it properly versus CorelDraw. At least they didn't kill it.

No, I don't work for them, I've just been a huge fan since 1998.

Someone into graphics and photography is not going to be happy with the Linux offerings, no matter how complete, since the apps don't even exist for the platform.

While I agree different Linux distros come with different programs there's not much of a problem with apps for graphics and photography. Sure Adobe hasn't released Photoshop for Linux yet, but it can be installed on Linux systems with WINE or CrossOver. Even if Linux won't install CS3, though it doesn't have everything CS3 does, there's CinePaint, formerly Film GIMP, used in the movie industry. For graphics other than for photography there's Inscape, Xara Extreme, Blender, and other programs that are cross platform. Actually because I want to learn it I picked up a book yesterday on Blender. Now, only if I could find one for CinePaint. And yes, though only an amateur now I hope to break into photography freelance. Because I've only done film and not digital work, I'll probably be working with film a lot at first. But I'll scan film and work digitally, so I'll tryout CinePaint first and then only if it doesn't workout well will I get Photoshop. Then to save money on it I'll get an old version then get the upgrade version.

Ah, it's be good to get back into the darkroom.

http://www.xara.com/products/xtreme/default.asp?t= &v=

1. Inkscakpe http://www.scribus.net/Inkscape
2. Xara http://www.xara.com/
3. Skencil 0.6.17 http://www.skencil.org/

The ability to produce CMYK color separations has been re-introduced to Xtreme Pro. This includes on-screen preview of CMYK and spot color plates, PANTONE® color support, spot colors, on-screen printer gamut preview and a lot more. Xtreme is now able to produce professional CMYK print results either via PDF/X support or via direct 4 color and spot-color separation via the print dialog. Both options include crop and printer's marks. The direct separations printing includes control over print screening and screen types, emulsion side down and other advanced settings.

The best environment I've ever worked in was an office that was an old country house, and most offices had 2 people in them. A few had 3 people. It's probably still the most productive environment.

However, one of the reasons was that there was a communal kitchen (well, when I say kitchen, it was a sink/drink making facilities at the end of the corridor), and people used to go there for tea/coffee breaks at 11am and 3pm. And when I say those times, I mean we would do it religiously. There was no official time or anything, it just seemed to be a subconscious consensus (it sometimes reminded me of synchronisation of menstruation via pheromones, but only superficially :-)).

The important thing was, those coffee breaks would often last 30-40 minutes. To a manager, that seems like an awful lot of wasted time - 15 coders standing around chatting for an hour a day. But the important point was that was where/how we socialised, and how a lot of problems were solved. It probably saved a lot of time, because you had 15 smart people standing around hearing (mostly) about what everyone was working on that day, and the problems that had come up. Everyone knew what was going on in all the other sections of the project they were working on, and how things were going.

Interestingly, when a kitchen was opened upstairs (we were on two floors) the staff then split into two kitchen groups. The managers were upstairs (along with some of the coders), and the downstairs guys often complained that they were out of the loop, and didn't get to hear about everything they should have. So it's a tricky balance, but like I say, I've never been so productive. Other aspects of the company were less than ideal, but the physical working environment was pretty good.

I still can't believe I only drank 2 cups of tea a day while working there...that can't be right.

...Xara Xtreme. Yes I'm biased. I used Xara 1.5 to create production quality graphics for a magazine nearly ten years ago and I still haven't come across an illustration program that was as fast or as easy to use until I grabbed the latest build of Xtreme. See here for the Web-specific features. Ignore the Windows-only requirements menu - there's a very stable Linux build in the Downloads section.

For a nice quick design prototype, I'd love to hear if there's anything better.

Read the FAQ.

They are explaining why they open the code and why they choose the GNU GPL.

I think that using the GPL is the only way for them to reuse features of Inkscape and other free projects that are missing from their product. We can ask ourself if they are not wanting to divert the Inkscape community.

However if the performance of their engine is as good as they claim, there maybe some interesting bits. Too bad cairo will not be to use some of them (Cairo is distributed under LGPL).
We can also expect them to contribute to the wxWidgets project at it is the library they choose for GUI components.

Take a look at this video. It shows off some of Xara Xtreme's capabilities. I am quite impressed and can't wait until the full Linux version is released! It can use photoshop plugins too!!

From this page http://www.xara.com/products/xtreme/default.asp?t= it looks like it will work on FreeBSD desktop too.. but I'm not sure!

How much does a slashvertisment cost?

Also, check out the screenshots here: http://www.xara.com/products/xtreme/screenshots.as p

Sorry, but this does not look like a professional tool.

This comes hot on the heels of them sponsoring the uber converter project to the tune of $10000 to create a XAR>SVG conversion util, to increase compatability with inkscape. Press releases for both can be found at http://www.xara.com/press/ uber converters at: http://scratchcomputing.com/projects/uber-converte r/ inkscapes at: www.inkscape.org

"...because Photoshop has no real competition..."

You may be right about having no competition. My brother is a graphic artist for over 15 years now. He has used them all, he claims. He swears by this vector base graphic software: http://www.xara.com/ I've never used it but I have watched him crank out stuff on Xara at amazing speed.

ArtWorks was not brought by Corel. My understanding is that Computer Concepts formed a new group called Xara when they started writing software for the PC. Xara first released a version of ArtWorks for the PC called Xara Studio. Xara then entered an agreement with Corel to market the next version of Xara, CorelXara, which wasn't very widely promoted (perhaps because Corel had an interest in another vector drawing application gaining market share). That agreement with Corel has now expired and Xara are slowly developing their vector graphics application again.

The Flash file format is open. I don't understand your point. Just because something is proprietary doesn't make it not open, or bad for that matter. There are tools out there which output Flash and are not made by Macromedia themselves. There are even open source Flash production mechanisms. Yes, Macromedia could at some point change the file format to obfuscate it, yes they could make it non-backwards-compatible, they could even decide to abandon Flash completely. That doesn't put the genie back in the bottle, and its still not making Flash a bad thing in and of itself.

I guess after it tanked with Corel, the developers managed to buy their rights back--Xara X is going strong. I bought a copy just last year--it's a splendid little vector-drawing app, and it's still quite cheap. Doesn't seem to be under a huge active development schedule, though.

The resources for you to do it yourself are readily available. Apache/PHP/MySql for the server are extremely easy to work with, even for most newbies (did it when I was a noob).

Design is a little more difficult. Windows users can benefit from expensive web editors such as Frontpage and Dreamweaver. However, if you're willing to learn HTML, XML, etc. (which doesn't take long), you can use a standard text editer (anything but notepad). I use UltraEdit.

For page design, I like to use Xara WebStyle. For PHP scripts, Hotscripts.com is the place to go.

Need a content management system? Check out the ones provided at opensourceCMS.

When you get redraw glitches with that, it's often hard to see what's going on. Pressing the turbo button on our 486-66 machines would turn them into a very slow PC, which made it really obvious where the redraw was screwing up :-)

CorelDRAW is still the best illustration package available for PCs today, bar none.

SVG is the most fantastic vector based graphics format ever created

I beg to differ. I personally think it's a real shame the Flare file format didn't gain widespread acceptance.

It does really smart things to aid compression, such as interleaving 4-byte relative coordinates. A path is defined by an absolute origin, followed by relative coordinates for the rest of the path. These are then interleaved in XXYYXXYYXXYYXXYY format.

For example, a square, x0=100 y0=100 x1=200 y1=200:

Point 0: 0x00000064, 0x00000064
Point 1: 0x00000064, 0x00000000
Point 2: 0x00000000, 0x00000064
Point 3: 0xffffff9c, 0x00000000
Point 4: 0x00000000, 0xffffff9c

Interleaved bytes:
00 00 00 00 00 00 64 64
00 00 00 00 00 00 64 00
00 00 00 00 00 00 00 64
ff 00 ff 00 ff 00 9c 00
00 ff 00 ff 00 ff 00 9c

Flare has a 'Start GZ Compression' tag, and that stream of bytes compresses *really* well.

Since Flare is such a rich tagged format, there's already a 'Square' tag, which is just a specific case of n-sided polygon. You can also embed (un-gzipped) JPEG data, and a huge bunch of transparency and fill options.

As far as ease of programming is concerned, I wrote a simple Flare InputStream/OutputStream pair in Java in about half a day with no previous knowledge of the format, and a wireframe displayer using Java2D in about an hour. The spec was clear and easy to understand.

Unfortunately, the side-by-side comparisons Xara had aren't available any more, but they were stunning. A ~50K JPEG rendered logo from NBC's homepage was redrawn using Flare in about 5K, and (although different due to the artist's skills) was of the same visual quality, if not better.

The Flare files on the Xara gallery have been sadly removed, but you can see how rich the format is from some of the samples: Microscope, Watch. I seem to remember these were less than 100K Flare files.

SVG is the most fantastic vector based graphics format ever created

I beg to differ. I personally think it's a real shame the Flare file format didn't gain widespread acceptance.

It does really smart things to aid compression, such as interleaving 4-byte relative coordinates. A path is defined by an absolute origin, followed by relative coordinates for the rest of the path. These are then interleaved in XXYYXXYYXXYYXXYY format.

For example, a square, x0=100 y0=100 x1=200 y1=200:

Point 0: 0x00000064, 0x00000064
Point 1: 0x00000064, 0x00000000
Point 2: 0x00000000, 0x00000064
Point 3: 0xffffff9c, 0x00000000
Point 4: 0x00000000, 0xffffff9c

Interleaved bytes:
00 00 00 00 00 00 64 64
00 00 00 00 00 00 64 00
00 00 00 00 00 00 00 64
ff 00 ff 00 ff 00 9c 00
00 ff 00 ff 00 ff 00 9c

Flare has a 'Start GZ Compression' tag, and that stream of bytes compresses *really* well.

Since Flare is such a rich tagged format, there's already a 'Square' tag, which is just a specific case of n-sided polygon. You can also embed (un-gzipped) JPEG data, and a huge bunch of transparency and fill options.

As far as ease of programming is concerned, I wrote a simple Flare InputStream/OutputStream pair in Java in about half a day with no previous knowledge of the format, and a wireframe displayer using Java2D in about an hour. The spec was clear and easy to understand.

Unfortunately, the side-by-side comparisons Xara had aren't available any more, but they were stunning. A ~50K JPEG rendered logo from NBC's homepage was redrawn using Flare in about 5K, and (although different due to the artist's skills) was of the same visual quality, if not better.

The Flare files on the Xara gallery have been sadly removed, but you can see how rich the format is from some of the samples: Microscope, Watch. I seem to remember these were less than 100K Flare files.

SVG is the most fantastic vector based graphics format ever created

I beg to differ. I personally think it's a real shame the Flare file format didn't gain widespread acceptance.

It does really smart things to aid compression, such as interleaving 4-byte relative coordinates. A path is defined by an absolute origin, followed by relative coordinates for the rest of the path. These are then interleaved in XXYYXXYYXXYYXXYY format.

For example, a square, x0=100 y0=100 x1=200 y1=200:

Point 0: 0x00000064, 0x00000064
Point 1: 0x00000064, 0x00000000
Point 2: 0x00000000, 0x00000064
Point 3: 0xffffff9c, 0x00000000
Point 4: 0x00000000, 0xffffff9c

Interleaved bytes:
00 00 00 00 00 00 64 64
00 00 00 00 00 00 64 00
00 00 00 00 00 00 00 64
ff 00 ff 00 ff 00 9c 00
00 ff 00 ff 00 ff 00 9c

Flare has a 'Start GZ Compression' tag, and that stream of bytes compresses *really* well.

Since Flare is such a rich tagged format, there's already a 'Square' tag, which is just a specific case of n-sided polygon. You can also embed (un-gzipped) JPEG data, and a huge bunch of transparency and fill options.

As far as ease of programming is concerned, I wrote a simple Flare InputStream/OutputStream pair in Java in about half a day with no previous knowledge of the format, and a wireframe displayer using Java2D in about an hour. The spec was clear and easy to understand.

Unfortunately, the side-by-side comparisons Xara had aren't available any more, but they were stunning. A ~50K JPEG rendered logo from NBC's homepage was redrawn using Flare in about 5K, and (although different due to the artist's skills) was of the same visual quality, if not better.

The Flare files on the Xara gallery have been sadly removed, but you can see how rich the format is from some of the samples: Microscope, Watch. I seem to remember these were less than 100K Flare files.

SVG is the most fantastic vector based graphics format ever created

I beg to differ. I personally think it's a real shame the Flare file format didn't gain widespread acceptance.

It does really smart things to aid compression, such as interleaving 4-byte relative coordinates. A path is defined by an absolute origin, followed by relative coordinates for the rest of the path. These are then interleaved in XXYYXXYYXXYYXXYY format.

For example, a square, x0=100 y0=100 x1=200 y1=200:

Point 0: 0x00000064, 0x00000064
Point 1: 0x00000064, 0x00000000
Point 2: 0x00000000, 0x00000064
Point 3: 0xffffff9c, 0x00000000
Point 4: 0x00000000, 0xffffff9c

Interleaved bytes:
00 00 00 00 00 00 64 64
00 00 00 00 00 00 64 00
00 00 00 00 00 00 00 64
ff 00 ff 00 ff 00 9c 00
00 ff 00 ff 00 ff 00 9c

Flare has a 'Start GZ Compression' tag, and that stream of bytes compresses *really* well.

Since Flare is such a rich tagged format, there's already a 'Square' tag, which is just a specific case of n-sided polygon. You can also embed (un-gzipped) JPEG data, and a huge bunch of transparency and fill options.

As far as ease of programming is concerned, I wrote a simple Flare InputStream/OutputStream pair in Java in about half a day with no previous knowledge of the format, and a wireframe displayer using Java2D in about an hour. The spec was clear and easy to understand.

Unfortunately, the side-by-side comparisons Xara had aren't available any more, but they were stunning. A ~50K JPEG rendered logo from NBC's homepage was redrawn using Flare in about 5K, and (although different due to the artist's skills) was of the same visual quality, if not better.

The Flare files on the Xara gallery have been sadly removed, but you can see how rich the format is from some of the samples: Microscope, Watch. I seem to remember these were less than 100K Flare files.

Don't really know. Only about half the CS students on my degree course were actually interested in CS anyway, as far as I could tell.

As for NT 3.1, I think it wasn't so much version 1 ph34r, as maintaining parity with Windows 3.1, which was the best known version of Windows at the time. So you had Windows 3.1, and Windows NT 3.1 for 'power-users'. Well, ok, 3.11 was out at the time, but I digress.

MS pulled the same trick with Word - they wanted to sync version numbers between Word for Windows and Word for DOS, so WfW went from v2.0 to v6.0 with no jump in between.

Same thing happened with Visual C++ - they wanted to resync all the devtools version numbers (C++, VB etc), so VC++ went from v2.0 to v4.0 - there was no v3.0 of VC++.

In a fit of bizarre psychology, some companies now sync version numbers with their competitor's products (actually, thinking back, that might have been why Word went to v6 - to sync with WordPerfect).

For example, the product I used to work on went from v1.0 to v2.0 to v2.5 and then to 'Version X', because the competitor was also at version 10.

Go figure.

Tim

Or FreeKhand
KreeHand
Freehank.

or Xara K... don't know what I'm taking about? The greatest graphics program on earth... Xara X.

Anyone who doesn't believe computer graphics can be 'real art' should check out the work of Vladimir Konstantinovic. Maybe start with The Sacrifice of Abraham. There are links to some of his other images there. You have never seen "computer art" like this. What was the comment someone made in the early posts on this thread, about starting by duplicating the old masters?

Vladimir does this stuff in his free time, using Xara, the best damn vector graphics package available. (yes, that's right, those are vector images). He actually works at a Russian TV station. Amazing, no?

Anyone who doesn't believe computer graphics can be 'real art' should check out the work of Vladimir Konstantinovic. Maybe start with The Sacrifice of Abraham. There are links to some of his other images there. You have never seen "computer art" like this. What was the comment someone made in the early posts on this thread, about starting by duplicating the old masters?

Vladimir does this stuff in his free time, using Xara, the best damn vector graphics package available. (yes, that's right, those are vector images). He actually works at a Russian TV station. Amazing, no?

Check out the new Xara X's .xar and .web formats. Xara X produces very compact and dazzling vector graphics for the web.

http://www.xara.com

Check out Xara at www.xara.com

Xara is vector illustration program which has many web-enabled features.

It's a SPEED demon, thus making it a joy to use.

It was so ahead of its time that the latest version of CorelDraw stole many of the features found in Xara (but Xara is inexpensive and very stable).

> (BTW it sure would be nice for browsers to support a vector format or two).

The following is, sadly, Windows-only, however...

Xara (www.xara.com, makers of the superb CorelXara vector drawing package) have a browser plug-in for their .web format files.

See these pages for details...

• http://www.xara.com/webformat/
• http://www.xara.com/support/xaraplugin/

> (BTW it sure would be nice for browsers to support a vector format or two).

The following is, sadly, Windows-only, however...

Xara (www.xara.com, makers of the superb CorelXara vector drawing package) have a browser plug-in for their .web format files.

See these pages for details...

• http://www.xara.com/webformat/
• http://www.xara.com/support/xaraplugin/