Xara X to Be Released as Open Source

zero-one writes "Xara today announced that they are releasing an open source version of their vector drawing program, Xara Xtreme. They already have a Linux demo but source code is not available quite yet. Xara Xtreme on Linux will not only bring a leading-edge graphic tool to the platform, but with community assistance, has the potential to become the world's most powerful, easiest-to-use and simply the world's best graphics program. If they get this right it could bring the Linux desktop into whole sectors of the market that is has not been able to address before."

Comments

Sell Adobe?

[Nom du Keyboard]

Time to sell my Adobe stock?

Re:Sell Adobe?

[xTantrum]

Probably, the intro they have for downloads is pretty sick!! but why does the british lady sound like she's about to asphixiate(sp?)?

Exaggeration?

[fragmentate]

First, read this this.

All tools add value to the Linux desktop, but if it's not user-friendly none of that matters. To be able to say we have the exact same tools as Windows means nothing if those tools are frustrating to use. We recently began the process of ridding ourselves of certain proprietary software (primarily Microsoft products). It's been painful because after watching a Window-savvy person struggle with Linux I began to understand why Linux hasn't really kicked-in on the desktop yet.

I think the value of a single product is being overstated here. The Linux development community has to work on usability first, as well as product integration. There is a level of inconsistancy between applications that hampers Linux-desktop.

When I think back to the very early versions of Linux (1.0.xx) it's come a long long way. But no single product along the way has contributed any large amount. Primarily, it has been the work of the individuals that understand that, although we don't want a duplicate of Windows, we do want something that people making the switch can more easily slide into.

I am always excited when a new product is ported to Linux-desktop (simply X?). But let's keep things in perspective -- although Xara is quite "neat", it's not going to attract legions of people to Linux all of a sudden.

In truth, this may all help Mac OSX more than Linux...

Re:Exaggeration?

[airrage]

Hear! Hear! Excellent post. I would like to expand on the "not just one application" will matter all that much. IMHO, the reason that switching to Linux is so difficult on the DT is that you are not gaining any additional functionality. I mean Office has a spreadsheet, starOffice has a spreadsheet. I mean if the only spreadsheet in town ran on Linux then everyone and their brother would run Linux (and play games on Windows, just kidding).

So one thought-paradigm I think many of us try to get out there (and the parent does an excellent job of this) is that to be of any use you have to be equivalent (at least) in any one area, or provide additional value at least on the DT.

Just my 2 cents.

Peace Out.

Re:Exaggeration?

[lidocaineus]

When I think back to the very early versions of Linux (1.0.xx) it's come a long long way.

Um, not to nitpick, but what exactly constitutes an early version of Linux? An early (1.x) Linux kernel? Because that doesn't really make any sense... Maybe you mean an early Linux distro, like Slackware 1.0? eh?

Re:Exaggeration?

[agraupe]

I think he used the kernel version as more of a timestamp than an, "I used Linux X.XX and foo bar, etc." Referencing a kernel version will have more relevence than a specific version for a (possibly) obscure distro, to all members of the linux community at that time.

Re:Exaggeration?

[HardCase]

Sure he made sense - Linux is the kernel. GNU/Linux is the operating system. C'mon, if you're going to be pedantic, at least do it right!

-h-

Re:Exaggeration?

[Anonymous Coward]

When I think back to the very early versions of Linux (1.0.xx) it's come a long long way.

Parent is a troll, suckers.

Re:Exaggeration?

[Antique Geekmeister]

And also read this, http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/cups-horror.html . It's Eric Raymond's fairly famous rant on the poor design of open source interfaces, with suggested rules on how to avoid or fix some of the issues.

Re:Exaggeration?

[10Ghz]

Isn't ESR responsible for GUI-abominations like this? I fail to see what authority he has to talk about poor design on open source interfaces....

Re:Exaggeration?

[ultranova]

Isn't ESR responsible for GUI-abominations like this? I fail to see what authority he has to talk about poor design on open source interfaces....

Um... What abomination ? The window seems to have a radio button group for setting the protocol to be used to connect to the server (whose name is shown in the topmost frame), including the "auto" protocol which presumably tries other protocols in order until a working one is found, and a text field for inputting the user name for the server. I fail to see any "abominations" here, except maybe that the "OK" and "Quit" buttons are on top and not bottom as usual - and maybe "Quit" should really read "Cancel". But anyway, the window seems pretty OK to me.

Re:Exaggeration?

[10Ghz]

Um... What abomination ?

Uh, hello?! OK/Quit on the TOP of the dialog-box? Three "Help"-buttons? In another dialog-box, the "OK/quit" has been replaced by "Save/Quit"? Consistency, anyone? Let's take a look at third screenshot shall we? The dialog-box is pretty large, but the actual content is in the middle to the window, wasting lots and lots of space. And the same style continues: lots of options visible all the time, instead of separating them to tabs (for example).

The GUI is crap, plain and simple. It goes against the established standards, it's poorly designed, it's confusing and it looks very, very bad. Instead of just ranting about crappy GUI's, maybe ESR should put his money where his mouth is, and fix his own GUI's?

Re:Exaggeration?

[Domini]

I doubt this will help Mac OS X more than Linux.

I for one find OpenOffice for Mac OS X running in X11 unusable.

Only native UI ports will be any good on Mac.

OpenOffice is my preferred Office app on Windows and Linux, but, sadly, MS Office for Mac is still best.

Re:Exaggeration?

[civilizedINTENSITY]

My God sir, but you are an anal GUI-nazi, related undoubtly to the grammer nazis who used to frequent here! The interface is clean and clear and self-explanatory. It is a breath of fresh air.

Re:Exaggeration?

[golgotha007]

It's obvious you have never worked with xwindows before. I better clue you in so you can ward off looking like a complete ass in the future.

First of all, that screenshot with too much real estate is simply an old toolkit in a maximized window. We're talking old here, of course it looks wonky. Would you agree that windows 3.1 looks wonky, too? Well, they are from the same era.
If you read ESR's GUI rant, you would see he talking about the CUPS GUI on a modern distribution (I believe Fedora). Then, you try to compare that with his own work from 10 years ago! Sheesh, get a clue!

Re:Exaggeration?

[10Ghz]

It's obvious you have never worked with xwindows before.

Well, I use it almost every day, does that count?

If you read ESR's GUI rant, you would see he talking about the CUPS GUI on a modern distribution (I believe Fedora). Then, you try to compare that with his own work from 10 years ago! Sheesh, get a clue!

Age is not a valid excuse for stupidity. So what if the GUI is 10 years old (is it?). It's still crappy and goes against the common guidelines of GUI-design.

Re:Exaggeration?

[10Ghz]

The interface is clean and clear and self-explanatory. It is a breath of fresh air.

HAH! Anyone who believes that is either blind or stupid (or both)!

Re:Exaggeration?

[Delphiki]

Um, not to nitpick, but

What do you mean not to nitpick? That's all you were doing.

Re:Exaggeration?

[lidocaineus]

Yeah. It's called a colloquial expression. You know, like, "Not to nitpick, but you just said something obvious."

Re:Exaggeration?

[lidocaineus]

That's not what I meant. It just sounds confusing, since he refers to the system as a whole, not just the kernel, but refers to a kernel version (I'm assuming). IOW, ambiguity. I just wanted to know what he was referring to; I couldn't care less about the whole Linux-GNU/Linux can of worms.

Press Release and more info...

[Simarilius]

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

I used Xara X

[Willy on Wheels]

Back in 2001, it was fun for creating graphics for my games I was developing. Of course I did not bother with it after the 30 day trial. This could be good, it will be a big step to putting the Linux desktop on wheels.

Speechless

[someguy456]

Wow, this is their flagship product!
I've no idea what it does, but thanks, we really appreciate it /OSS 1, M$ 0

Re:Speechless

[Anonymous Coward]

It says right in the slashdot short, it's a vector drawing program. If you can't be bothered to read the article, at LEAST read the short, and not just the title before posting.

Re:Speechless

[Anonymous Coward]

Dude, I think you meant:

I've no idea what it does, but thanks, we really appreciate it /OSS 1%, M$ 95.0%

Why?

[popo]

" has the potential to become the world's most powerful, easiest-to-use and simply the world's best graphics program"

Why does it suddenly have this potential? Why is it suddenly the "easiest to use"? Why is it suddenly the "world's best"?

I'm happy its being opensourced and ported to Linux too, but typically the process of opensourcing and linux-porting doesn't go hand in hand with making an application best-of-breed.

This isn't flamebait, just a reality check.

Re:Why?

[Anonymous Coward]

Why is it all those things? Likely because it's another Slashvertisment, hand over enough cash and it doesn't matter what the post says.

Re:Why?

[poot_rootbeer]

" has the potential to become the world's most powerful, easiest-to-use and simply the world's best graphics program"

So does MS Paint, but I fully expect that potential to go unrealized.

Re:Why?

[Albanach]

The reason it has the potential is because XaraX is already a fantastic small, fast, stable offering from a programming house that's been developing graphics apps for decades. When Xara launched their vector graphics app first for Acorn RISC OS and then on Windows, the features like transparency and speed were groundbreaking.

Seriously this means an excellent program in an area underserved on linux (vector graphics) will be available source and all.

Re:Why?

[rzebram]

Every graphics program has the potential to be the easiest-to use and best graphics program, that's why we have this word. It doesn't mean that it is, it doesn't guarantee that it will be, it just has the potential.

Re:Why?

[walnut_tree]

The Xara program has been around for a few years - every incarnation has had excellent magazine reviews. It has a loyal base of users and one of the primary reasons is it's powerful set of features and its easy-to-use interface. They are not starting from scratch on the usability front - they already have a head start. If you have a Windows PC, the best way to see for yourself is to simply download the trial version and give it a spin. Even better, compare it to Adobe Illustrator with its plethora of floating palettes and you'll see how tired and old-fashioned the Illustrator interface feels in comparison. Of course, these are all my subjective opinions; but then, what isn't on Slashdot? :-)

Re:Why?

[Dreffed]

I have to agree, Xara grew up on the Archimedies RiscOS platform as Artworks, the team as Computer Concepts produces som very innovative products, it was a pity RiscOS lost out in the brawn over style schools placement battles of the 90s. I have been using the application since the mid 90s, and now it is to be ported I don't need my Windows install anymore :) at last, I am very happy

Re:Why?

[kabz]

Yeah, I remember watching DaveD's superfast image rotation routines. The PC (12MHz 8026 was the 'biz') didn't get *near* the 'ol Archie at that time. This is about 1989, when the initial work on a drawing package was started. This was a natural fit for our DTP package, Impression, which was going great guns, despite (in intial versions) the ease with which the parallel port dongle code could be hacked around.

I went back to Uni after working on Impression (and wrote my MSc thesis using it), and have watched Xara with interest over the years. Great to see that they are still doing cool things. I hope someone manages to port it onto OS X too.

Re:Why?

[EternityInterface]

For example, when you click and drag an object, you see the entire object being dragged, not just an outline. Of course, other programs support a similar feature in which you click and hold the mouse button down for a couple of seconds before dragging. But in Xara X1, you just click and drag straight away: live dragging and editing is the default. And unlike other programs, this works instantly whether you're editing a single object or a group of 300.

That does really sound incredible.

One thing which I remember being in Illustrator for too long, is what you had selected, was inverted. Even an outline is annoying since I want to know how it effects the surroundings when I change the object.

The most important thing though, is that all graphic programs should be vector based. Basically everything is created that way already - text, filters, brushes, adjustment layers... The only thing not included? 1 pixel brush. But since Adobe wants to sell us multiple programs, you won't see that happening (even if they add tiny functionality like "text on a path" to PS).

The most important thing for me in this relation, is if you use a low opacity brush, or lots of adjustment layers, you'll get horrible banding. But if you have it all vectorized, you'd just have to render it at a higher bit depth then downscale - and even better - you'd be able to work much faster since there wouldn't be a need to show the highest quality all the time.

Re:Why?

[supabeast!]

That sounds like the same bullshit open-source zealots have been spouting about The GIMP and Blender for years, and in that time, neither one has been able to displace their competitors in their respective industries. If this software was really good, it would be selling enough units that it wouldn't be getting released for free to try and get some publicity. And if it isn't that good now, there's no reason to think that a bunch of OSS coders are going to make it any better.

Re:Why?

[Hosiah]

This isn't flamebait, just a reality check.

Slashdot is bouncing back your reality check due to insufficient funds.

Re:Why?

[dangitman]

The reason it has the potential is because XaraX is already a fantastic small, fast, stable offering from a programming house that's been developing graphics apps for decades.

With modern graphics requirements, multimedia, format support, colour management support, etc, it's a bit difficult for the "world's best" graphics application to be particularly small. After all, it could hardly be considered world's best, without addressing the most advanced users and professionals in the task that it is designed to do. What makes this software so good? I didn't bother looking much further after seeing the website, which was full of "Easy, fun! Enhance your photos!" marketing drivel.

Re:Why?

[afd8856]

1. Work in 16 bit instead of 8bit color depth
2. What's stopping you from using the vector tools in Photoshop to have your desired workflow?
3. I would be really curios to see your "vector shadow effect" compared to a raster based one. To me, it seems imposible to have complex, photorealistic effects created with vector. Even the most complex vector creations can be distinguished from those raster-based equivalents.

Re:Why?

[EternityInterface]

3) But it's all mathematical calculations. ( Vectors, rays, fractals, ... )

Raster based = you use brushes. Unless it's a bitmap you're drawing with, the brush has to come from somewhere. Where you draw could easily be stored.

(Now we go off-topic and PS-bashing)

As it is I have PSCS2, and I happened to want to blend some screenshots together. So, we have an example.

132 screenshots, 24bit 800x600.

That would make it a moderate 181mb. (800*600*3*132)

If my commands were just saved, not much more memory would be needed.

This is not what happens, winXP says the memory usage is 360mb, but then a 1x1 image only opened it gives 65mb. 295mb then.

If I click on a layer, there's a half a second wait. When I click on "normal" to bring up the blending mode selection, then click "darken" there's a half a second wait.

The lag is seemingly... harddrive access time. But I have 1.7gb memory, with 1gb free? This is the reason <5.0 doesn't work with XP, reports "not enough memory", because you don't have a sickly huge swap drive. PS needs to use your hdd no matter what. Dated technology, just piled on crap since 1.0.

How is this related? Some people might like watching paint dry, but the reason I've heard of professional (payed) painters going digital, is simply because it was faster. But there could be load of improvements on that subject.

Of note is the psd (from Imageready, with its "import folder as frames(=layers)" option) is only 14mb. It's of N, some really undetailed graphics. Hypothetically, in the preview mode, in a 2d program that works like a 3d renderer, we could store the images as 8bit, even 6bit (64 colours) without much quality loss, but with 1/4 memory usage (45mb).

Example #2: Let's take something really simple, we want to fuck around with the hue.

In Gimp, I have to let go of the slider to see any change.

In PS, it updates in stages, takes a second or so. (Gimp has this too, which it has copied badly from PS, like 90% of the program)

Then I have an image database program (Thumbs+), which isn't made for editing images. Its capabilities there are basically the same since the windows 3.11 version. It updates in 1/10th of a sec.

I'll be trying out how Xara to see how it works with this now.

Re:Why?

[ultranova]

I would be really curios to see your "vector shadow effect" compared to a raster based one. To me, it seems imposible to have complex, photorealistic effects created with vector.

SVG has a clever way around this problem. Remember that vector graphics are, in the end, a kind of programming language that tells the computer what to draw, and they generate a bitmap image upon execution. Now, SVG also has commands to perform filter operations on that bitmap after it has been constructed (just to be clear: in SVG rendering model, each element gets rendered into a separate temporary canvas which then get pasted on top of each other, and filter effects can be applied to these temporary canvases). You get a number of filter primitives, and can construct a custom filter by combining them.

Here's an example SVG file that produces an image with a drop-shadow and highlight. I'd posted it here, but Slashdots lame lameness filter complained about too many junk characters :(.

Please note that Inkscape and Inkview don't currently support filters, so you need to use something like Batik to view the file properly.

Even the most complex vector creations can be distinguished from those raster-based equivalents.

They most certainly can, and every comparison I've ever seen reinforces my resolve to use SVG rather than raster graphics, even if it is a bit more complex to use. As soon as you need to zoom or rotate, raster graphics gives craptacular quality, but vector graphics stay razor-sharp.

Re:Why?

[Anonymous Coward]

Well don't forget this is what everyone was saying in 1993 or so when Xara Studio was a RISC OS vector graphics program that was going to "fight with the big boys" in the PC space.

Corel bought them out and sat on the product for a decade.

Now it's going to Linux. w00t.

Re:Why?

[mtdnelson]

I have to agree, Xara grew up on the Archimedes RiscOS platform as Artworks, the team as Computer Concepts produces some very innovative products, it was a pity RiscOS lost out in the brawn over style schools placement battles of the 90s.

As soon as I saw this story, I had to make a comment.

I used to use ArtWorks on my Dad's Acorn A5000, maybe 10-13 years ago now. It was an outstanding platform, and Computer Concepts' software was stunningly well designed. It was fast, reliable, and had some very cool features.

I always found their software more intuitive very easy to use as a novice - for example, CC's Impression Publisher, which was a proper 'desktop publishing' package, is also the best word processor I have ever used. I think that says something about its ease of use! ArtWorks was similarly easy to use.

After using the Risc OS, I migrated to Windows, which I always thought was a big step backwards.

Now I'm using Linux for almost all of my computing. So personally, I can't wait to try Xara Xtreme, despite not having used the program for at least 10 years of development. I can well believe that it could be the best vector graphics program around soon.

this is great news

[Anonymous Coward]

TO THE MAXXXX!!XI!I

I don't like this...

[digital-madman]

Serously... I don't.

I like the GIMP, and this project could take away from the GIMP. Sure, gimp has a learning curve and not the most well designed GUI. But it is working its way to photoshop'ish status.

Xara has pro's and con's...

A major pro would be bring desktop publishing into the linux realm, and a little away from Mac. But again.. this is more a commerical market then home market. I thought Linux should be breaking into home markets as a desktop OS.

And here's a con: I don't see how this is going to do it. Joe-six pack doesn't really need vector drawing. Joe-six pack wants his digital-camera picture editing software.

But kudos for getting more commerical markets interested in OSS/Linux

-Digital Madman

Re:I don't like this...

[someguy456]

Only one solution: The Ximp! (sounds better than Gara?

Re:I don't like this...

[Anonymous Coward]

Gimp, meet Abiword

Xara, meet OpenOffice.Org and Mozilla

Re:I don't like this...

[mrchaotica]

A vector graphics application has nothing to do with the GIMP, save for the fact that they'll interoperate a little better with GIMP's new "SVG copy-and-paste" feature.

If you want to worry about Xara taking away from some other Free Software drawing program, worry about Inkscape instead.

Re:I don't like this...

[fortunate_monk]

I don't entirely know what I'm talking about but I believe Gimp is raster-based and Xara is vector-based, so they would more likely work side by side than compete. And, uh, correct me quickly if I'm wrong.

Re:I don't like this...

[RatBastard]

I like any alternatve to The Gimp. The Gimp has the worst interface I've seen in a graphics application I've seen since the horror days of DOS-based apps. and many of them were easier to use than The Gimp. The Gimp isn't bad for what you pay for it, but even though it's available for my Mac I still chose to spend money on Photoshop because I can at leats get things done in Photoshop. I don't have the time or energy to try and figure out what the hell The Gimp wants me to do in order to get it to do common tasks. I want to spend my time getting things done.

Re:I don't like this...

[Ucklak]

This isn't a competitor to Gimp.
It's more of a competitor to Inkscape.

Gimp is a competitor to MSPaint, Photoshop, Corel PhotoPaint, JASC Paintshop Pro.
Xara is like Acrylic, Illustrator, Inkscape and even Macromedia Flash.
Flash adds a timeline with animation but it is vector based.

Gimp is a raster editor. If your canvas is 640 pixels across and 480 pixels down, you have 640 pixels times 480 pixels of resolution to edit in. Scalable with software help. Quality varies with size.
Xara is a vector based program. Your canvas size has no limit. 100% scalable.

Artists use vector programs to 'create' in. It's what is used to create icons that we sometimes take for granted but the reality is that someone had to create it. (like fonts)
Raster programs are used to edit existing content to produce a final result. Think http://www.worth1000.com/

Re:I don't like this...

[Julian Morrison]

Faced with a choice of GIMP or Xara, I think I know what Joe Six-pack would choose, and it wouldn't be GIMP. It's easier to ignore unnecessary features than to twist your mind around a terrible UI. I mean for frick's sake, brightness/contrast is in the layer menu?

GIMP gets used on Linux because it's the only tool, not because it's a nice tool.

BTW, mixed vector and pixel editing is one of those things you can't see the use for, until you need it. Very typical use: marking up and labelling an image. That's a pain to do in gimp (path and stroke? sounds like teenage courtship). Not much alleviated by exporting to a vector tool that doesn't have the first clue what to do with pixels.

Re:I don't like this...

[Tet]

I still chose to spend money on Photoshop because I can at leats get things done in Photoshop. I don't have the time or energy to try and figure out what the hell The Gimp wants me to do in order to get it to do common tasks.

That's funny... I feel exactly the opposite. I use GIMP because it lets me achieve what I'm trying to achieve. I don't have the time or energy to try and work out the combination of mystic runes needed to persude Photoshop to do what I want. I appreciate that I'm in the minority here, but the fact remains that I find GIMP to be obvious and easy to use, while I find Photoshop to be awkward and unintuitive.

And of course, none of this has any relevance to the discussion. GIMP and Xara/Inkscape/Sodipodi serve two different markets, and to say that one diverts development effort away from the other is just ridiculous.

Re:I don't like this...

[sabernet]

It's not made for Joe Sixpack. It's made for Jon Graphicdesigner. Who may not wanna pay the exorbitant license fees for Windows if he can avoid them.

Re:I don't like this...

[dfjunior]

Problem for Jon Graphicdesigner is that the version for linux won't have Pantone support (according to the company, it's licensed and cannot be "open sourced").

The lack of Pantone support will definitely be a barrier for professionals to adopt it.

Re:I don't like this...

[unoengborg]

First, Xara is a competitor to Inkscape and Sodipody not Gimp.

Second, I think Linux has much less to offer to the average home user than it has to business. E.g. Linux have much fewer games and othe entertainment software availble. The administration tools are designed to handle hundreds of users or more and are overly complex for single/few user home systems.

So if Linux ever will get major market penetration that will most likely not happen by Linux winning home
users over from windows. It will be by large organizations that can benefit more from the features available in Linux. The home users will then follow.

In other words the more applications that fit on a professional Linux desktop the better. Xara seams to fit that profile very well.

Re:I don't like this...

[RobertLTux]

What somebody needs to do is cut a deal with the pantone folks to create a "pantone calibrate" module that can be dropped into any program that needs it (even if the module only worked for *nix platforms).

Re:I don't like this...

[Anonymous Coward]

If you want to worry about Xara taking away from some other Free Software drawing program, worry about Inkscape instead.

Which would serve them right, since they took pretty much everything away from Sodipodi and then have continued the idiotic march towards GNOME desktop standards.

Re:I don't like this...

[Anonymous Coward]

I mean for frick's sake, brightness/contrast is in the layer menu?

It's in the layer menu because it only affects the current layer. Otherwise it would be in the image menu.

If you're going to attack gimp, at least do it on legitimate grounds. For instance, where the fuck is the layer bins/sets support? Why can't you increment brush sizes? How come you can't move text while editing it? How about what the fuck is with holding shift and clicking on new layer button to not manually set the layer size? This is a function that I have NEVER even figured out where you would use it, let alone why you would have it set as default! Also annoying are things like the lack of auto-crop in the layer menu, something I would actually use, unlike the manual layer boundary size option that IS there.

You would also be within reason to complain about the bloat in the gimp menus, something photoshop suffers pretty badly from too. But by pulling that out as your one big argument for why gimp's UI is so horrible you are only demonstrating how little understanding you have of the program.

I'm also not sure where you're getting off on the path and stroke, thoat's pretty straight forward. But the lack of layer styles (possibly what you actually meant) is a big issue.

Come on people, can we at least have a clue about how the UI works before attacking it? Or at least better arguments than that it isn't like windows and x windows application? Or at least use the program for something more advanced that the capabilities of xpaint!

Re:I don't like this...

[nidarus]

Some minor points:

1. Icons are far from always created in vector programs. Many of the OS X were obviously created using 3d or raster programs (in fact, they have this tutorial where they show how they made one of their icons, using photoshop). So were, as far as I remember, Firefox's main icon and default theme. It's easier to achieve certain things with raster programs, especially when it comes to photo-realistic icons.

2. It's pretty simplistic to claim that artists "create" in vector programs, and "edit" in raster programs. Corel Painter is a raster program, and it's certainly not for "editing". On the other hand, one of the most common uses for vector programs is to manipulate blocks of text, which is closer to "editing" than "creating" (pre-made text, pre-made fonts).

You use vector programs to make precise, scalable graphic elements, and you use raster programs to make photorealistic, or otherwise blurry graphics. In the end, they all edit in some way, and they all create in another. It really depends more on the job than on the tool.

Re:I don't like this...

[Julian Morrison]

You're thinking like a programmer, or maybe like a graphics geek.

It's in the layer menu because it only affects the current layer. Otherwise it would be in the image menu.

Now see, it's stuff like that that causes GIMP's UI to suck. Understand: layers are not what the program is there for. Layers are a means, not an end. Unless forced by necessity, UI controls should serve ends, not be subordinate to means.

I'll give an example to explain. Here's another way the brightness/contrast UI control could have been done. First: in regard of layers, what's the normal thing a user wants to do? A novice user won't be using layers. A pro will, and normally wants to affect the current layer. So, default everything to affecting the current layer. Straight off the bat that saves a lot of UI duplication! Make the common case simple, the rare case possible. So, allow edits to all layers at once if a toggle is set (I'd put it prominently on the layers dialog). Meanwhile, the "colors" and "transforms" menus go at the top level, because they're the sort of thing every Joe Digtal-camera wants to use. So from being buried two levels deep in a place that relates to an incidental technicality, brightness/contrast is instead up in front where the user can "grab it and go".

Coincidentally, this approach I outlined above would add new features in a simple way. Autocrop the layer, autocrop the image, depending on the "affect one/all" toggle. (Joe Digtal-camera isn't using layers, so the toggle behaves as if set to "affect all", and does what he expects.)

BTW path and stroke, you must be a graphical geek if you think it's tolerable. It's a pitiful hack! "Stroking" a vector (render to editable pixels) is a rare case. Normal case should be as with other combi vector/pixel editors, vectors remain vectors and are "stroked" when you export to JPG. Yes it might be nice to have a menu option to stroke a vector, for the cases when you need it. It shouldn't be the normal way to operate! (I understand GIMP's attitude is "I edit pixels, vectors had better start acting like pixels if they want to be edited". Thinking like a programmer again!)

Re:I don't like this...

[Anonymous Coward]

it's funny that the same people who rail against microsoft and their products/tactics, for creating a lack of competition in the software world, are so quick to dismiss open source projects that in any way threaten the ones they already hold dear.

Re:I don't like this...

[spitzak]

Obviously you have not been paying attention. I remember at least two flames in earlier discussions where somebody said "it's really hard to make a flyer in Gimp". When asked about Photoshop they than said "On Windows I'd use Illustrator, obviously.".

Re:I don't like this...

[symbolic]

Um, maybe this isn't what you intended to say, but raster programs are very readily used to "create" stuff - I come from the Painter camp where raster-based creative work is very common. I suppose this might not be true if you're more accustomed to Photoshop, whose primary focus has been compositing and retouching.

Re:I don't like this...

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh, you're right. I'll give you that about the stroking paths. Had never occurred to me that it only paints a raster image when you stroke path since I've only had a need to do that once in GIMP. That's not because I'm "thinking like a programmer", it's because I don't use vector-stroked paths for image editing. Incidentally, this is probably because of the poor way that photoshop handles its vector drawing and manipulation.

Though I think there are a lot of places where GIMP's poor vector handling matter a lot more than with stroking a path. Primarily in text handling.

It's too bad, because until the release of Photoshop 8 (aka CS) GIMP looked like it could seriously have been a year or so away from not just being completely competitive with Photoshop, but dominant. But as with so many open source projects, particularly on Linux, it is controlled by the wrong people who spend time doing useless things (like converting to GTK2, which doesn't really solve the problem of it being GTK) when they could be implementing features, improving quality of said features, or porting to a toolkit that doesn't suck.

Re:I don't like this...

[Ucklak]

I have yet to see an iconographer make icons using a raster based program. It just doesn't make sense. You're limited to the size you create them in. If it's for web, that's OK for most cases.
A 3D program like Maya or Blender IS a vector drawing program. Not a raster based. Textures can be raster based.

In the end, it really depends on the end result.

Re:I don't like this...

[dangitman]

A 3D program like Maya or Blender IS a vector drawing program. Not a raster based. Textures can be raster based.

That's a pretty silly comment. they are vector AND raster based. The vast majority of output from 3D programs is raster-based. Anyway, why the need for this stupid vector/raster semantic fascism? Both work well together, and all your screen output and printer output (unless you still use a pen-plotter) is rasterized anyway. It's not a game of which is "better" than the other. they are simply different, and complimentary. What decent artist would bother discriminating among tools like this? Use what you need to use.

Re:I don't like this...

[Ucklak]

The parent like most users/people that aren't into digital arts, seemed to not know the difference between the two. Some people thought that Acryllic is Microsoft's answer to Photoshop when in fact it's competing with Illustrator. Xara is not a competing product with Gimp but a complementary one. That was my point.
An artist will use what ever tool he can express him/herself with the easiset. I've seen artists jam out hundred of icons in Illustrator and hundreds of textures/patterns in Photoshop within a sitting. Pretty neat stuff to watch the progress on sometimes.

Now when we get a 3d display going, that will be cool.

Re:I don't like this...

[Anonymous Coward]

> Xara is a vector based program. Your canvas size has no limit. 100% scalable.

Really? No limit? So in Xara I can keep zooming in until I get bored?

Re:I don't like this...

[afd8856]

Gimp may be powerfull and all, but I gave it a shot last night and I had to quickly abandon it. All I wanted to do was a multi-value gradient. That gradient editor is horrible, slow (as in workflow) and non-intuitive. The #gimp guys recommend iit that I should read the manual. Well, I'm a part-time graphic designer and I never read the Photoshop manual. Why would I want to read Gimp's just to figure out basic stuff?

Re:I don't like this...

[Kjella]

Really? No limit? So in Xara I can keep zooming in until I get bored?

Yes, really. If you kept zooming in on say a letter, the line would stay sharp (not jagged or pixelated) no matter how many times you zoom. The line is described by a formula, not pixels and can be rendered in any resolution. It's incredibly boring though, since noone would bother creating detail smaller than can be seen in the final result, so all you'd see was a smooth edge. If you wanted something interesting to zoom in on, I'd try a fractal instead (not used in graphics software, just cool to look at).

Re:I don't like this...

[Anonymous Coward]

> Sure, gimp has a learning curve and not the most well designed GUI.

Not the most well designed!!!11!1!11111

The truly APPALING interface of the Gimp is the main reason I still use Paint Shop Pro on Windows for all my imaging needs. If the only only image manipulation program was the Gimp I'd simply not bother. The interface is a total mess and a usability nightmare of overlapping windows hiding each other.

If Xara has a sane interface it could be yet another task I can now use my Linux box to achieve.

So hats of to xara if this means one more step towards a Windows free box.

Re:I don't like this...

[Anonymous Coward]

Hey, but wouldn't it be cool if someone figured out how to make a 3d program produce a 2d vector graphics image? The basic projection to a plane should be pretty straightforward, but getting the lighting effects down to an editable vector drawing format might get interesting... or is this already a solved problem?

Re:I don't like this...

[Anonymous Coward]

GIMP is a piece of shit. It has had plenty of time to "work it's way" to Photoshop status and it has failed. Xara could "take away" from the GIMP? Jesus, it's about time they had some competition. The GIMP is a classic example of why competition is a good thing and what happens if you have none. Ten years and the UI is still utter rubbish.

Re:I don't like this...

[ByteSlicer]

...JASC Paintshop Pro...

That's called Corel Paintshop Pro nowadays.

Re:I don't like this...

[00lmz]

...doing useless things (like converting to GTK2, which doesn't really solve the problem of it being GTK) when they could be implementing features, improving quality of said features, or porting to a toolkit that doesn't suck.

I guess you know what the G in GTK stands for, don't you?

Re:I don't like this...

[xalres]

25,601% is the current zoom in limit.

Re:I don't like this...

[nidarus]

Well, considering that in the end, at least in Windows and Mac OS X, the icons are raster images, scalability is not that much of an issue. On the other hand, if you want to use complex reflection/shadow effects, or use photographic elements (such as in Mac OS X's Preview icon), you're better off with Photoshop rather than Illustrator. It depends more on the kind of icon you want to make.

As for 3d programs, they do share more with vector drawing programs than with raster based ones, but they are considered to be a separate category. You rarely hear people say "Vector based programs (like Illustrator, Freehand or Maya) or raster based programs (such as Photoshop or Painter)". Btw, I said "3d or raster" in my original comment. I never claimed that the two are the same.

Re:I don't like this...

[nidarus]

On the one hand, you're correct on them being different and complimentary. There is no "vector vs. raster" flamewar going on in professional circles. Graphic designers/digital artists use both.

On the other hand, I don't get your claim about 3d programs being both vector and raster. As you pointed out, more or less all of the output devices are raster based. Does it mean that all vector-based programs are both vector and raster? Or maybe it just means that the terms "vector" and "raster" mean something different than you think?

Re:I don't like this...

[dangitman]

Does it mean that all vector-based programs are both vector and raster? Or maybe it just means that the terms "vector" and "raster" mean something different than you think?

To a degree, yes. As I said, nearly everything is rasterized for printing or screen display, even if used as a vector for other purposes. I thought my commment was pretty obvious. 3D programs are generally much more hybrid than 2D software. For example, output from 2D vector software is often output to vinyl-cutters, CNC routers or Postrcipt printers as a vector format. Usually 3D output ends up in Photoshop or a video animation.

You use vectors to create 3D objects and you apply raster textures, render in a rasterized format, etc.

I'm not sure why you think I am confused. I've been working with vectors and pixels for a couple of decades. What are you suggesting my misunderstanding is? Or did you not understand my post?

Re:I don't like this...

[dangitman]

I use the "Strata 3D Vector" plug-in for Strata 3D. it's fairly primitive, but oputputs Flash, Illustrator, etc, and has options for shadow and lighting rendering. It is fairly cheap as 3D software goes, and Strata is dead simple to use compared to the majority of 3D applications. It has a stunning raydiosity rendering engine.

Re:I don't like this...

[nidarus]

I didn't know you've been "working with vectors and pixels for a couple of decades", and I'm not expected to. I just read your post. For all I know, you're a clever AI bot.

In any case, when people (at least in the graphic design field) use the terms "vector-based" or "raster-based" they're not talking about the most common output method. Besides, as far as I know, your claim that most 3D programs are vector/raster hybrids is highly unusual.

Guess what? Won't happen!

[_undan]

Illustrators and designers like their shiny macs and have (generally) spent years learning the Adobe suite. Why do you think nobody gives 3 tosses about Corel?

Okay, so 10/10 for style, minus several million for yet another "OMG OPENSOURCE WILL SAVE TEH WORLD SQUEE" post.

And, before anyone says "But, GIMP!" - I work with ACTUAL designers. They all think it's an ugly piece of shit.

Re:Guess what? Won't happen!

[digital-madman]

I FULLY AGREE!!

It is a ugly...uber ugly... a ugly only richard stallman could love.

BUT IT WORKS!

Yeah it took me years to learn to work with, and all its little bugs and script-fu nightmares. But once you really get into it. I can turn out results on the same level (or better) then some with photoshop.

-Digital Madman

Re:Guess what? Won't happen!

[MikeFM]

On the other hand the majority of designers I know are simple minded idiots that can barely use Photoshop and Illustrator let alone anything else and all their designs look amazingly alike as they have no ability to think outside their own little box. Most designers come from a graphic arts background and have no experience in designing good interfaces or problem solving. If something wasn't taught to them in class they just can't handle it.

I know a couple GOOD designers and they are intelligent enough to see that different tools are better for different things you want to do. Personally I can't stand the interfaces of Photoshop and Illustrator but will sometimes use them when I need to do something GIMP or Inkscape can't yet do. On the other hand there are things that are hard to do in Photoshop and Illustrator that are easier in GIMP and Inkscape. It comes mostly from which tools you know best and a bit from the way the tools were designed. Being able to use all the tools you have available lets you do awesome work.

Even good designers sometimes have blindspots that are amusing. One of the best I know I heard the other day complaining to another designer that animated gifs always have white borders around the image. Duh. Years in school and work experience and neither knew how to get rid of the borders left over from converting an image to a gif? Of course you'd think Photoshop and Illustrator would take care of that issue automatically anyway since it's a fairly common problem. Anyway the point being that designers look at interfaces more from a stylistic point and they may miss the benefits of usability.

Re:Guess what? Won't happen!

[Muvlo Redond]

Actually, you work with several "ACTUAL designers". There are a lot of other "ACTUAL designers" who don't work with you, and not all of them think that the GIMP is ugly or a piece of shit.

Re:Guess what? Won't happen!

[kerrle]

Agreed; I'm one of them. Of course, the lack of good printing support is still preventing it from getting used for offline media, but between Gimp and Inkscape, you can do just about anything online, and I personally find that Gimp is often the best tool for the job.

I've been around a bit, too - Photoshop and Fractal Design Painter on Mac, and DPaint 2 for DOS are what I started with. That doesn't mean my opinion is any more valid, but I have at least seen what else is available.

Re:Guess what? Won't happen!

[Blakey Rat]

Of course you'd think Photoshop and Illustrator would take care of that issue automatically anyway since it's a fairly common problem. Anyway the point being that designers look at interfaces more from a stylistic point and they may miss the benefits of usability.

If you're talking about anti-aliasing, the problem is that you can't correctly anti-alias an image with no alpha channel (like a GIF) unless you know the background color it'll be sitting on. Photoshop, Illustrator, etc assume it'll be used on a white background, but if you're going to put it on a black background, you'll need to actually save it that way. (Since Photoshop assumes transparent = white, I usually just add a black background layer, save the image as GIF, then open it up in GraphicConverter and use that to set 'black' to 'transparent'.)

Of course, I understand the point of your post which is that I (a guy with no formal graphics training whatsoever) know how to solve that issue while they (people with years of training and experience) don't.

Re:Guess what? Won't happen!

[Anonymous Coward]

If you're talking about anti-aliasing, the problem is that you can't correctly anti-alias an image with no alpha channel (like a GIF) unless you know the background color it'll be sitting on. Photoshop, Illustrator, etc assume it'll be used on a white background, but if you're going to put it on a black background, you'll need to actually save it that way. (Since Photoshop assumes transparent = white, I usually just add a black background layer, save the image as GIF, then open it up in GraphicConverter and use that to set 'black' to 'transparent'.)

Geeez... is that hard to read the manual? Press F1 and look for matting and transparency options for save for web.

Re:Guess what? Won't happen!

[Blakey Rat]

Heh, thanks for the tip. Part of the problem is that I'm a lot more comfortable with GraphicConverter than I am with Photoshop Elements... I've been using GraphicConverter for years to help with images edited with everything from Superpaint 3.0 on.

Re:Guess what? Won't happen!

[MikeFM]

Exactly the problem I meant. It'd seem that some more elegant solution should exist in such high dollar software than just assuming a white background. Of course not using gifs is a better idea but that is a whole different discussion. ;)

I guess my point was not only that I know the solution while they didn't as much as that just because they are graphic designers doesn't mean they are experts in how graphic design software should be made. Even experienced graphic designers don't know all the tricks of the tools they use let alone in other tools. Like most users they tend to feel that what they learned first is the best tool for the job. I actually learned Photoshop first but I find GIMP easier to use most of the time.

If there were a drawing program I'd like to see ported to Linux it's Paint Shop Pro. It's not really a photo manipulation program but it's great for drawing. It's a shame that GIMP doesn't make more effort towards supporting basic drawing usage. All it'd need is a couple of new tools. I hear that the next major version will better support drawing tablets so maybe they are working on such needs. Software like Gnome Paint are fine but they are more of a beginners level of program.

Re:Guess what? Won't happen!

[Hosiah]

have (generally) spent years learning the Adobe suite.
I work with ACTUAL designers. They all think it's an ugly piece of shit.

I *AM* an actual designer, and it never fails to amaze me how people will comfortably devote "years" to learning proprietary software that costs $485.00 http://reviews-zdnet.com.com/Adobe_Photoshop_7_0/4 014-3633_16-8918085.html , but cannot be bothered to investigate the menus in Gimp for five minutes for free to discover all the features they claim Gimp is missing. But, uh, oh, yeah, *sure*, you guys are ALL THAT!

Re:Guess what? Won't happen!

[Anonymous Coward]

You people don't have a clue about Photoshop or Illustrator. You sound so clueless that I doubt you even used Photoshop as much as you say you do. Is a shame that so many people don't know about 'Save for Web' feature, found in the File menu. My advice is to go read the manual.

Re:Guess what? Won't happen!

[KayosIII]

I am an ACTUAL DESIGNER and I DON'T think the GIMP is an ugly piece of shit, I am well aware of its limitations and it could definately be improved. But quite frankly most designers won't touch anything that is not photoshop and if photoshop doesn't do it well they don't seem to think its worth doing - until photoshop finally gets the feature that is and then they won't stop raving about it.

Re:Guess what? Won't happen!

[Anonymous Coward]

Designers I know also think Photoshop is an ugly piece of shit. BUT it does all the things they need, while the Gimp doesn't and/or buries it under 5000 menus. So photoshop it is.

Re:Guess what? Won't happen!

[GeorgeMcBay]

I *AM* an actual designer, and it never fails to amaze me how people will comfortably devote "years" to learning proprietary software that costs $485.00 http://reviews-zdnet.com.com/Adobe_Photoshop_7_0/4 014-3633_16-8918085.html , but cannot be bothered to investigate the menus in Gimp for five minutes for free to discover all the features they claim Gimp is missing. But, uh, oh, yeah, *sure*, you guys are ALL THAT!


If you make a good living doing a job and there is one primary tool that you use for most of your work, the difference between free and $485 is meaningless.

Re:Guess what? Won't happen!

[NamShubCMX]

Yes but for some people, the difference between Free* and 485$ is meaningful.

* (as in speech)

Re:Guess what? Won't happen!

[Anonymous Coward]

So he is doing his work as free (in speech and beer) Give me a fucking break will ya.

Re:Guess what? Won't happen!

[Pecisk]

Why do you wonder? Users are usually ignorant to learn something completely new, so they will think as many as dvice excuses to not to even check out GIMP screenshots :)

That's the life :) And they will be losers, in the end. Those who learn and addapt, will stay.

Re:Guess what? Won't happen!

[neko9]

And, before anyone says "But, GIMP!" - I work with ACTUAL designers. They all think it's an ugly piece of shit.

i'm designer and i agree :)

Re:Guess what? Won't happen!

[Anonymous Coward]

you can investigate the menus in Gimp for some very long five minutes, if you need things like CMYK ...

Re:Guess what? Won't happen!

[acb]

On the other hand the majority of designers I know are simple minded idiots that can barely use Photoshop and Illustrator let alone anything else and all their designs look amazingly alike as they have no ability to think outside their own little box.

Unlike a lot of the graphic design coming from within the open-source community, which manages to boldly break the constraints of the box, paying no heed to outdated rules of colour, shape or composition.

Re:Guess what? Won't happen!

[Hosiah]

the difference between free and $485 is meaningless.

Then so's the difference between five minutes and several years, or, for that matter, the difference between intelligence and stupidity, right?

Re:Guess what? Won't happen!

[MikeFM]

Most of the open source community has no training in graphic arts at all which is why having real graphic artists contribute helps so much. You should never let programmers decide what things should look like.

Luckily well written programs can change their look easily as improved graphics become available. Most of the graphics included with software by the programmers are meant just as place holders both in commercial and free software.

I do know a couple exceptional graphic artists as a whole graphic artists are artists and not user-interface engineers that've been trained in usability. Just because they think Photoshop is easier to use doesn't make it easier to use.

Re:Guess what? Won't happen!

[RoboPimp_3000]

Well if you are a professional designer you can use the $485 as a business expense to offset taxes. And if you have clients paying hundreds or even thousands of dollars per project than $485 isn't that much. Lots of people rant about how expensive Photoshop is, and for a general user, I agree, but for a professional designer it pays for itself fairly quickly. Sure, many pros will use programs in addition to Photoshop, but I don't know of one worth his salt that doesn't use Photoshop altogether.

yeah... what about it?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yawn... how many times has this been posted now?

You think so?

[Anonymous Coward]

NAH! They'll screw it up somehow, much to the dissapointment of linux users and the accumulation of rage across slashdot viewers, yet to the glee of MS fanboys.

OSS may be cool, but its existence has always been doomed to it's capitalist competitors.

Xtreme

[Anonymous Coward]

Dude! It's XXXtrEEEEEEME!!!

These marketing drones really need to hop off the trend bandwagon for a change.

Re:Xtreme

[wtmcgee]

My first thought when reading the article was:

Released for free? Xcellent!!!!

How much?

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:How much?

[aichpvee]

Watch the video demos, looks pretty professional to me.

Glasgow Best bet for Linux Raster graphics

[temojen]

With support for 16bit/channel images and colour management, Glasgow (a branch of CinePaint) is shaping up to be a real contender in the Raster Graphics editing space. Some concerns though:

• The documentation for cinepaint really really really sucks
• The CinePaint/Glasgow developers seem to be under the impression that ALL of their users are in the motion picture industry, not still photographers). Consequntly, (as of CP 0.18) they've left out handy stuff like cropping and sizing the images in physical units (not resampling).

Why this article summary seems to imply that Vector graphics is the only market, I don't know.

Re:Glasgow Best bet for Linux Raster graphics

[Anonymous Coward]

Seeing all the unfulfilled promises of Cinepaint I expect a stable GIMP release with GEGL before a fully featured Glasgow. And I get a working version while they are working on it.

Re:Glasgow Best bet for Linux Raster graphics

[temojen]

The current development release of Cinepaint (0.19-1) has High bit depth and colour profile support; The current development release of gimp (2.3.4) has colour management, but still downsamples my images.

FreeBSD version?

[vivekg]

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!

Re:FreeBSD version?

[Anonymous Coward]

Probably a mis-conception, although I haven't RTFA yet, their probably using the BSD Daemon to mean Open Source, although a *proper* *BSD version under:

ports/graphics/xaraxtreme

would be cool :)

Re:FreeBSD version?

[Anonymous Coward]

Given that I can run the linux binary of Enemy Territory without a hitch, I'm sure there's going to be a way to run this. Having said that, and since it's going to be open source, I'm sure a fine person will do a FreeBSD port quite quickly.

I have to say that I'm very much looking forward to this. Thank you Xara guys.

a friend of mine swears by Xara X

[xutopia]

He drew up a map in it in about 5 minutes. It reminds me of Cool Edit Pro except it's for drawing instead of sound. Before you master it, it seems like nothing big but once you start knowing how to get the power from it you can not go back to another tool.

Re:a friend of mine swears by Xara X

[Anonymous Coward]

Cool Edit Pro? More like Deluxe Paint III for the Amiga.

That program rocked. I have yet to use such a cool illustration program.

Re:a friend of mine swears by Xara X

[doombob]

"Cool Edit" is now an adobe product. Their old website takes you straight to Adobe

Xara X Source

[Anonymous Coward]

Working with the Xara X source is interesting. There's a lot of code, and it is commented, but some of the design decisions were bad. For example, there were a lot of macros, and is kind of calls.

The cynic in me wonders if this has been done as a way of developing bits of software on the cheap, and that the really clever bits won't be open sourced.

It is a little bit strange...

[Pecisk]

That annoucement reads like total marketing crap. I know Xara, their products are quite popular, but I would not claim so loud such goals. And by the way, we have tools which are user friendly and I'm used to :)

But ignoring that, I just can say - welcome! For example, open sourcing for Blender was really best way to go. Propably for Xara Xtreme too.

Re:It is a little bit strange...

[Rac3r5]

thanks... until now I had no idea Blender existed.
seems like a pretty decent app...

cheers..

Re:It is a little bit strange...

[arose]

Try the FAQ.

Fireworks?

[Anonymous Coward]

How does this product compare to Macromedia Fireworks? Is there an open source quasi-equivalent of macromedia fireworks out there?

If they do it under the GPL

[narrowhouse]

They specifically mention the GPL here:
http://www.xaraxtreme.org/news/11-10-05.html

This will be huge news, sodipodi and inkscape could use their algorithms for new functions. Abiword could support their file formats. The Gimp could build compatibilty in easily. Bravo Xara, I will be the first one to mail a check when I know this is really going to happen. I just hope this doesn't go down like the GOBE Productive announcement a few years back.

Re:If they do it under the GPL

[ettlz]

If this is not a hoax, and I sincerely hope it's not, let's hope it starts a trend.

Are you listening, Wolfram?

Re:If they do it under the GPL

[justsomebody]

I was having the same opinion until I read mailing list on Inkscape about this. Talk about one sided canibailzing without prejudice (would take theirs, but hell no, they won't resell mine).

http://sourceforge.net/mailarchive/forum.php?threa d_id=8520852&forum_id=36054

p.s. Last comment (or it was last at the time I read was probably the only inteligent comment, about shared LGPL libraries)

Re:If they do it under the GPL

[Pecisk]

hmmm,you didn't get it that way. They talk about copyright assigment and that Inkscape have SO much contributors that they can't even try that - it would be huge job to locate all of them, get them assign their copyrights, etc. etc.

That's the whole issue.

Re:If they do it under the GPL

[Anonymous Coward]

I hear ya.

Re:If they do it under the GPL

[Anonymous Coward]

Too bad you won't be sending them a cheque.

Re:If they do it under the GPL

[t35t0r]

From the FAQ:

Having said that it's conceivable that a version of the Open Source Linux port could be converted back to Windows. But it would not be the official Xara version (it couldn't use the Xara name), it wouldn't include any customer support or any of the licensed components we can include. So we hope it doesn't happen, because that would jeopardise our ability to continue. Put simply, if we can't earn money from the product somehow, we can't employ full time engineers working on the Open Source product, and that helps no one.

It's not inconceivable. It will happen, maybe even under cygwin, but it will. Windows users will start to get mad since they have to continue to pay (and no they won't switch to linux). Sure the OSS version would not include some of the proprietary plugins, but if the user really wants or needs those then he/she would be happy to pay for them by purchasing the retail version. With an OSS version ported to Windows, all that Xara could do is just sell their support and expertise. But with so many online forums, chats, and help pages would their support even be necessary?

It seems to me that Xara is really shooting themselves in the foot.

And on Linux that means it has to be Open Source in order to stand any chance of success

I also think this is not true. I think they should have done the exact opposite. That is port it to linux and macosx, keep it closed source, and sell their product at their current low price on all platforms. Not only would this help them, but it would give support to Xorg/Xfree + whatever window manager/desktop + linux kernel as a feasible graphics platform with a commercial backing. If they are scared about being bought out (are they even a publicly traded company?) then open source the linux / macosx codebase in the event that it seems imminent that they will be bought out.

Re:If they do it under the GPL

[MenTaLguY]

Talk about one sided canibailzing without prejudice (would take theirs, but hell no, they won't resell mine).

That's the reality though. Everyone on the Inkscape side had, so far, been working with the understanding that (as far as Inkscape goes) we're staying in [L]GPL-land; Xara's announcement can't unilaterally change that.

Also, in practical terms, Inkscape's like the Linux kernel; due to the number of individual copyright holders we couldn't relicense if we wanted to, so it's simply not possible for much Inkscape code to make it into Xara-commercial, even if it made it into Xara-GPL.

p.s. Last comment (or it was last at the time I read was probably the only inteligent comment, about shared LGPL libraries)

Thanks. As I wrote in that email, I do think it's worth investigating ways to share future code without compromising on the [L]GPL stance. We can also probably share experience and algorithms.

Re:If they do it under the GPL

[dancpsu]

What happened to GOBE becoming GPL? I remember getting excited about it a while back, but was the source ever released?

Re:If they do it under the GPL

[nihilogos]

If the way Wolfram writes code is anything like the way he wrote 'A new kind of science', then it's probably safest if he doesn't open source anything. Ever.

Re:If they do it under the GPL

[Anonymous Coward]

Windows users will start to get mad since they have to continue to pay (and no they won't switch to linux)

Why? The Windows version has just been slashed in price. Windows users are getting it far, far cheaper than anything comparable (less than a fourth the price of CorelDRAW, less than a tenth the price of Illustrator).

Windows users made the choice to run a commercial OS. If they want software for free, they can easily switch to a free OS.

Or is your argument that it's "not fair" that Linux users will be given something that Windows users won't? Deal with it. If I give one beggar $5, and another beggar $10, the one I gave $5 has no reasonable complaint.

Re:If they do it under the GPL

[Omnifarious]

That doesn't seem a very fair assessment of the discussion. I don't think anybody was specifically against them reselling their code. They were specifically against them relicensing their code under something other than the GPL. I don't feel that's unreasonable at all.

Other than that, there was specific talk of a back-and-forth. Talk of making improvements to an LGPL version of their rendering library if they wanted to do that, and other things. I got the strong impression that the inkscape people would be perfectly happy if Xara used Inkscape code in a GPL version.

It seems to me that it would greatly behoove Xara to try to separate out the things that can't be GPLed and isolate them into runtime loadable modules that can be distributed separately. Then they might be able to get away without dual licensing stuff.

Bah Humbug

[jmorris42]

Ok, so some old hoary ACORN codebase that got ported to Windows years ago and apparently never developed a large userbase is going GPL because they realized they were fscked and never were going to achieve a breakout in today's rapidly consolidating Windows 3rd party app marketplace. So if folks would just stop working on Inkscape long enough to help us port this crufy old code from Win32 to whatever toolkit we eventually decide on it will just rule, trust us! But please don't build a Windows binary because we want to keep on doing our shareware thing over on that platform.

Sorry, this would have been news five years ago, but we have all seen this story play out enough times now to not be interested. They could at least have held off on the press release until they had a believable start on a port, i.e. a tree that builds and at least does something on X.

Re:Bah Humbug

[narrowhouse]

This will be worth a lot if it is GPL just so that the algorithms can be used. The inkscape developers are always looking for sources for things like morphing functions, gradients, etc. Even if this program where a falling corpse the parts are worth salvaging.

Re:Bah Humbug

[Anonymous Coward]

Ok, so some old hoary ACORN codebase that got ported to Windows years ago...
ArtWorks, the original RISC OS version, was written entirely in hand-crafted ARM assembler. Its anti-aliasing only did 8 shades (IIRC, might have been 16). It also didn't support transparency, and the chap who now maintains ArtWorks said that pretty much the whole renderer had to be rewritten to support it.

Xara wasn't a port. It was a clean re-implementation. And an extremely lovely piece of software it is to, and I've been begging for something even 10% as good for Linux for ages. Inkscape et al simply don't cut it.

Re:Bah Humbug

[Anonymous Coward]

Ok, so some old hoary ACORN codebase that got ported to Windows years ago and apparently never developed a large userbase is going GPL because they realized they were fscked and never were going to achieve a breakout in today's rapidly consolidating Windows 3rd party app marketplace.

Insightful my ass. Clearly you don't have a clue about what kind of application this is. Here:

http://www.xaraxtreme.org/about/

go download the demo video's - look at them - and tell me that Linux graphic artists aren't creaming their pant right about now. This is not just "some old piece of crap" application and their goal is to reach the same level of functionality it has on Windows (Yes, It actually builds on Linux right NOW. Rendering works too but the tools aren't finished yet). Now, I'm not a graphic artist but even I can see how desirable an application like this could be on our open source platforms (Yes, I know about scribus, Sodipodi and Incscape but they can't match this level of functionality yet). Did you ever consider what we get out of this? We get a full-featured, GPL'ed, vector drawing application.

Xara is in the same position with Adobe that Linux is in with Microsoft. Adobe dominates the market and even if their product is really, really good they don't stand a chance. By doing this they get all the Linux and Mac users. Yeah, there will probably be "issues" - there always is - but we really should let them have a crack at it to see what happens before we start bitching.

Re:Bah Humbug

[jmorris42]

> but we really should let them have a crack at it to see what happens
> before we start bitching

Ya lets let em show us what they got, but lets not get all worked up either until they do actually show us the code. So far the track record on large closed source packages isn't all that good. Netscape took how long to become a stable Mozilla/Firefox? Interbase and SAP DB are both still struggling to find their place in the FS/OS world. And this one hasn't dumped a tree yet and they admit it doesn't even fully build yet.

They admit they lack the resources to complete a port so unless the prospects are good enough to interest a fair number of quality devels with both wxWindows and win32 experience it is very possible for it to be stillborn. Not dissing em, just observing facts.

Re:yeah... what about it?

[Anonymous Coward]

Who cares? It should be the default first post, modded +5 Insightful, to every topic even remotely related to "Linux on the desktop". It completely reflects real life. Emerge this you Gentoo fucks.

Open Source but how much?

[keithamus]

Call me stupid, but I dont often assume things unless someone specifically states it. Now they said they were to Open Source the product, sure great, but will we need to compile it? Will we need to pay? Will the Windows version be OSS? If the Linux and Mac version are free, will the Windows one be? None of this was mentioned from what I read and understood.

Re:Open Source but how much?

[zero-one]

Their web site implies they want to do a full version for Linux and release it under the GPL. The website also says "The Windows version continues to include a shipping CD, they can buy a printed manual, and we provide direct customer support to paying customers. In addition the Windows version contains licensed code from third parties (some versions contain Pantone color support, licensed PDF components and other third-party Live Effects plug-ins, fonts and other things) which we can't make Open Source or free ... Having said that it's conceivable that a version of the Open Source Linux port could be converted back to Windows. But it would not be the official Xara version (it couldn't use the Xara name), it wouldn't include any customer support or any of the licensed components we can include. So we hope it doesn't happen, because that would jeopardise our ability to continue. Put simply, if we can't earn money from the product somehow, we can't employ full time engineers working on the Open Source product, and that helps no one."

Re:Open Source but how much?

[narrowhouse]

It all depends on how they license it. I agree that there are some questions here. If they open source this entire product under a BSD or GPL license with no extra stipulations then it could be package in a DEB or RPM and shipped with a distribution just like OpenOffice.org. Either one of those licenses would also allow a free version for Windows, OSX, heck even OS/2.

Re:Open Source but how much?

[Nimrangul]

If you read their damned FAQ you'd know that it is going to be GPL. The only thing stipulated will be that code submitted to them will be granted to them, so they can continue to multilicence it including patches from outside contributors.

Re:What about Linux?

[Tim Browse]

It's modded down because it's an oft-posted troll.

I am one very happy Xara Ltd. customer.

[isolationism]

Well, can't say I'm sad to hear it -- I emailed the folks at Xara Ltd. almost a year ago to ask if they intended to port their product to Linux to help ease my transition in that regard (having bought versions of their software since 1.0). Their move to open source is a bit of a shock (I would have been happy with a Linux binary ported using Wine), but it's all good -- better than I could have hoped for. Hopefully some collaboration/cross-semination will occur between the Xara folks and the Inkscape guys, who are also making leaps and bounds and deserve mention here for their amazing progress and excellent work.

Congrats to Xara for your bold new direction, if anyone from the company is reading. Rest assured that I'll keep slinging my business your way -- especially considering how you responded very well to my (and presumably other) inquiries. You've also just secured more years of business out of me, assuming porting to other platforms will now become significantly easier. Cheers.

Re:What about Linux?

[hubie]

I believe that this one gets modded down because it is a recycled post that shows up all the time, much like how the Netcraft/BSD used to. It is a post that can generate useful comments, but it now gets pulled out for baiting and trolling purposes. Some people claim it is part of the slashbot arsenal that gets posted automatically depending on the topic subject. Once one sees it in three or four times different discussions, one tends to mod it down for its repetition, not its content.

ok, so where is the source?

[Anonymous Coward]

waiting...

Artworks

[chiller2]

Grr! All of these great things have come from one place, namely the Acorn computing market who could have had it all and blew it. Xara is simply the PC port of ArtWorks for RISCOS. Now Xara is set for potential greatness. Just like when Acorn spawned ARM Ltd, and now ARM cpu's are everywhere. Where are Acorn?

Boo hiss and all that.

Re:Artworks

[Anonymous Coward]

I used to swear by Acorn. RISC OS did approach certain user interface things in a good way, and there were clearly some very talented people working in the Acorn world. Anti-aliasing was superb. The machine booted quick. The whole thing from the assembly code of the ARM processor which Acorn designed to the great desktop publishing programs was straightforward and easy to understand.

But don't forget, the only things that really ran quick were written in assembler, the OS was not pre-emptive, had no virtual memory for a long time. I lost a lot of work due to crashes. It worked quite well as far as it went, but it was severly limited in a technical sense. There really wasn't much abstraction going on - little seperation between low level hardware and the application.

It still sucks that default "font smoothing" on Windows is crap compared to anti-aliasing on RISC OS 2 (1989), that people still work in an application-oriented rather than document-oriented world. That Windows "Save as.." boxes still mystify new users.

I remember paying £160 (~$250) for ArtWorks, back in the day. I notice that Corel Draw did gain some similar features eventually - interactive graduated fills, anti-aliased display, etc. I never found it as easy to use though.

I'm still waiting for a graphics program with an isometric grid option (as in Draw, built into ROM in RISC OS 3). I used it all the time. :-(

Things were a lot simpler then. One thing I don't miss is my 4Mb A3010 crashing whenever I used up all the memory, or the flickery 52Hz SVGA mode I used to use.

I'm very happy that the software that grew from what I knew as ArtWorks is now certain to carry on living for the good of the general population.

Re:Artworks

[Sinner]

It's interesting that all this happened because Acorn included a good, basic vector drawing program with their machines. This created a community of people for whom vector art was second nature, programmers fluent in the concepts involved, and demand for more advanced packages. In hindsight the appearance of Artworks, which later became Xara, was inevitable.

After I moved to other platforms it took me a few years to shake off the expectation that I'd be able to simply create vector graphics, and accept that it was going to be a painful and humiliating experience. Maybe now I can return to the halcyon days of my youth.

Re:Artworks

[Simarilius]

That expectation that it should be easy to do vector graphics is what led me to code on inkscape. The same holds true for at least one other coder, and is the reason the selection cues in inkscape have a mode which works like !draw did. We still havent got round to that isometric grid yet tho....

Re:Artworks

[diodesign]

Acorn is dead, but their OS lives on and is being developed by a couple of companies, for desktop and embedded use. Artworks 2.5 is almost out, and it runs on ARM based processors (StrongARM, XScale, etc). It's being developed by another company that bought the source code rights from Computer Concepts (now Xara). Xara's software is derived from their Artworks beginnings. There's more on RISC OS developments here.

Source

[sn0wflake]

They already have a Linux demo but source code is not available quite yet.

They don't have it/can't find it/just demoing?

Re:Source

[leaping_laughter]

So, YOUR source code (and comments) would be ready for public viewing with zero scrubbing?

I manage several SDKs, and among the first things I do before a release is run a 'potty-mouth' search, and eliminate the overly-strident comments.

Re:Source

[arose]

There is probably also third party licensed code they have to strip, just like with Blender and other liberated programs.

What does this really give us?

[rknop]

I ask the question not as a rhetorical question, but because I really want to know.

What does Xara do that OpenOffice.org Draw does not? (Indeed, I still use XFig sometimes even though OOo Draw generally does more, because XFig does one or two things better than OOo Draw.)

I'll tell you the feature I really want: full postscript import, *with* embedded images. I an get pretty far now with ps2fig followed by whatever the heck the name of the program that converts XFig to OOo Draw, but I lose any embedded images in the eps file in so doing.

A secondary feature would be eps as "picture" objects *with* preview. OOo does eps as picture objects, but doesn't give you a preveiw unless the eps file itself has an embedded preview.

But are there other things one would find in Xara that OOo Draw doesn't do?

Re:What does this really give us?

[IdntUnknwn]

So now I'm curious, what exactly can OpenOffice Draw do besides the basic? I don't see anything particularly special about OpenOffice Draw when I open it up, maybe I'm missing something?

As for what Xara X can do, I went to the linked website and found the following screenshots:
http://www.xaraxtreme.org/img/screenshots/screensh ot1_thumb.jpg
http://www.xaraxtreme.org/about/screenshot3.jpg
http://www.xaraxtreme.org/img/screenshots/screensh ot4_thumb.jpg
http://www.xaraxtreme.org/about/screenshot6.jpg

Re:What does this really give us?

[t35t0r]

watch the video and you'll see what it does that other linux/win/mac apps do not

Great News For Me and Hopefully You Too

[jodo]

I have used xara for years. I maintain an old windows machine just for xara. It is an outstanding drawing and for me a one page or smaller layout program. Great for print ads and web graphics work.

It does not compete with The Gimp.

The windows version is very easy to use. Hope the linux version uses the same interfaces.

Woohoo!!! Gets me excited about linux again.

take a look at this video

[t35t0r]

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!!

Re:take a look at this video

[t35t0r]

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!!

Re:take a look at this video

[arose]

Needs torrent.

Re:easiest-to-use

[datajack]

Of course it does, it means I don't have to suffer with any kludgey environment re-implementations like Wine, or interrupt everything I was doing and find another machine to boot another OS to run the app.

Whats with the bitching?

[Anonymous Coward]

I know this is /. but come on.
This company is giving up there main product to gpl oss.
If you actually bothered to look at the gallery or even the demo, you would see its actually a pretty damn fine product, I hope it does well,, we need a vector art package.

Re:Whats with the bitching?

[dangitman]

Well, I don't haver anything about Xara. My problem with the slashdot article, and the company's website, is that both reek of press-releases and marketdroid-speak. It would be nice if slashdot, or Xara would just cut to the chase, and tell us what the software is all about. I don't care for all the hubris of "world's best graphics program" from slashdot, nor the "you've never seen such an easy program!" dumbed-down shit from Xara's website.

That, and it uses the word "Xtreme."

Re:Whats with the bitching?

[Anonymous Coward]

The news got up most ppl's noses because the story was posted in a highly inarticulate fashion. What they perhaps meant was that together with the aid of the community of developers, the future of this particular software is unbounded.

I feel a bit jaded visiting Slashdot these days. It's patently obvious what the story submitter was trying to say (and worse still I believe this type of 'troll' is perpetuated by the /. editors), so many yobs take what should be good news for this community to shreds in small minded bigotry towards the style of the message rather than the comment. I've had enough - I won't be visiting anymore.

Re:Whats with the bitching?

[dangitman]

Wow, Anonymous Coward just quit slashdot forever. This is good news!

Re:Whats with the bitching?

[JohnMJR]

Xara X, X1, Xtreme are all different versions of the same product. The easiest to learn and use vector drawing tool. I am not associated with Xara Ltd. in any way, besides being a real fan of the software. The UI is sparce and the few tools versatile. Artwork that takes days to create in other vector drawing packages is whipped out in no time flat with xara. Here are a few of the artworks created using xara... http://www.talkgraphics.com/showthread.php?t=13929 &page=7&pp=10&highlight=valery http://www.talkgraphics.com/showthread.php?t=1725& highlight=lady http://www.talkgraphics.com/showthread.php?t=3027& page=2&pp=10&highlight=knightedduke http://www.xaraxone.com/html/featured_art_2005.htm l

Really F*cking good

[WasterDave]

All I see is bitching, whining and moaning from a people who've never used it. My SO uses Xara X damn near constantly and loves it. She was up the learning curve like a mountain goat. There's good documentation, the /real/ thing ships with a CD full of video tutorials, a whole bunch of things work like they ought to - so much so that since we're so accustomed to things not working properly you initially discount the possibility of whatever you're trying to do actually working.

And it's FAST! Xara was initially written in the mid 90's and the system specs included "pentium processor recommended" so it goes without saying that it goes like a rocket on modern hardware. We're running it on a P3-933 and, just, whoosh.

This is a good piece of kit. Probably the best thing I can advise is finding a windows box and playing with the downloadable demo. Be happy. Get involved in porting it. Fuck Adobe.

Dave

Re:Really F*cking good

[Anonymous Coward]

Too right! It saddens me to see all the fucking idiot whingers. I've tried every vector graphics program on Linux and they're all utter crap (well, OOo draw is OK). Xara X is what I miss most on Windows and it wouldn't work on Wine so this is a brilliant announcement! I just hope Xara thought this through properly.

Re:Really F*cking good

[Blakey Rat]

Yeah, but the problem is that I use my Mac for graphics stuff. There's a Windows and a Linux version, but where's the OS X version? (It seems goofy to port to Linux first, even though there's a bigger market for OS X.)

Re:Really F*cking good

[Anonymous Coward]

All I see is bitching, whining and moaning from a people who've never used it.

So true! It's really a shame. A company makes a gift (GPL) and every second post sees something negative in it. What happened to slashdot recently?

Re:Really F*cking good

[Anonymous Coward]

I have been meaning to ask this for awhile, but what is a whinger?

Re:Really F*cking good

[dancpsu]

Apparantly they are hoping someone will port the GPL version to OS X. (Probably shortly before they create a non-GPL commercial version for the mac)

Re:Really F*cking good

[Anonymous Coward]

Sorry can't spell

Re:Really F*cking good

[Anonymous Coward]

It is probably better to target Linux if they want to attract open source developers to assist in the port. It isn't fully ported to Linux yet. The Linux demo doesn't do much beyond opening and displaying existing files.

Re:Really F*cking good

[danharan]

So, you're on /. and claim to have an SO and then you compare her to a mountain goat.

A shame dude, your story was almost credible until that point.

A mountain goat! sheesh

Re:Really F*cking good

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, she has a beard...

Re:Really F*cking good

[gomoX]

You can't do that. Whoever did the work keeps the copyright and chooses whether this can be done or not, not the company.

Re:Really F*cking good

[Anonymous Coward]

Quite contrary! Having a SO that is a mountain goat makes it all extremely likely!

Slashdotters and their reading comprehension! Sheesh ;)

Re:Really F*cking good

[burnetd]

Read the FAQ, they ar keeping control of what goes in the 'official' Xara rather than the GPL version and will make a deal with the author to use the code in a closed source version. If they can't make a deal the code will not go in the closed source version.

Re:Really F*cking good

[bogomipz]

So, the almost credible story you mention would be this:
All I see is bitching, whining and moaning from a people who've never used it.

Yeah, a real shame that fine story went down the drain.

Re:What about Linux?

[Anonymous Coward]

" Linux is *not* user friendly, and until it is linux will stay with >1% marketshare." Looks like somebody reversed a sign: Perhaps you meant "" ("greater than").

Reverse FUD?

[Squawker]

Is this premature announcement of intent just an attempt to demotivate commercial companies from investing in competitive development? Wake me up when it gets beyond vaporware.

Re:Another second rate product runs to Linux...

[Anonymous Coward]

Why is it that MS astroturfers on /. mod all criticism of Windows as Flamebait,
but almost never defend Windows verbally? I've just read two legitimate
criticisms of Windows in this discussion -- both were modded as Flamebait,
and neither one had a single counter-argument posted.

I suppose this question will get modded as Flamebait too, but the
knee-jerk "anyone who criticises Windows is flat-out wrong"-response is
IMHO responsible in itself for many of the glaring shortcomings of
the OS.

Windows fucking sucks.

exaggeration--yours

[idlake]

All tools add value to the Linux desktop, but if it's not user-friendly none of that matters.

That's just not true. There are a lot of powerful tools that are not "user-friendly", but they are exactly the sort of thing that professionals use for their work (e.g., "Photoshop"). Usability is only one of many factors determining the importance and the popularity of an application.

But let's keep things in perspective -- although Xara is quite "neat", it's not going to attract legions of people to Linux all of a sudden.

But the more apps there are, the more believable Linux becomes as a desktop platform.

Re:exaggeration--yours

[EternityInterface]

There are a lot of powerful tools that are not "user-friendly", but they are exactly the sort of thing that professionals use for their work (e.g., "Photoshop")

Something easy Adobe could add, but what I've seen commercial software doesn't want to add is costumizability. Although I have many bad things to say about Gimp, there you can costumize the toolbar. Might seem like a small thing, but I only need 8 tools, in PS I have to hunt around and also click and hold to show the other tool hidden (it's basically the same since PS1 - compatible with 640x480).

Re:exaggeration--yours

[Blakey Rat]

Except Photoshop is for pros. Photoshop Elements is much easier to use for casual/home users, and it's cheaper to boot. Then there's Apple's iPhoto, even easier to use than Photoshop Elements, although not nearly as powerful.

What is the Linux equivilant to Photoshop Elements? Or iPhoto?

Re:exaggeration--yours

[codemachine]

Possibly LPhoto from Linspire, though I have not used it, so I can't say.

Likely there are a lot of little utility programs that would work. But many distros just ship Gimp for the task, which will work if you know what your'e doing, but is very similar to iPhoto or Elements.

Re:exaggeration--yours

[jaseparlo]

[Gimp] is very similar to iPhoto or Elements.

Not really. iPhoto is so simple your grandma can use it. Gimp's interface takes a lot of getting used to, it's another great example of where open source falls down - it's all run by geeks and programmers. Where are the interface experts, usability consultants, test groups etc? One thing commercial softwaredoes have that open source generally doesn't, is wholeness and polish. Geeks write features when they need them, and get used to the interface on the way. Nobody turns around and says "Hey you know what? the behaviour of the windows in Gimp is painful. How come if I click a tool on the toolbar, I have to click back in the job window before I can use the tool? And why do they clutter up my taskbar like that?"

As far as function goes, you can't compare it to Photoshop elements either. The pixel wrangling is so much smoother in Photoshop, the tools are so much more mature and cooperative. Gimp looked ok up against Photoshop 4, but whereas Photoshop is now up to version umm...8 I think, with matured tools and interface improvements, the latest version of Gimp looks like and feels like a point release of the same version we had 6 years ago. Photoshop Elements doesn't have the feature set of full photoshop, but it does have the maturity and polish

No disrespect to the Gimp developers intended - you do what you can with the people and time available, and they've done well. But people like to roll it out as an example of why Open Source 'has the apps' too, and it's really a good example of why Open Source apps just don't compare for normal users.

Re:exaggeration--yours

[bshellenberg]

Possibly this: http://www.kanzelsberger.com/

Re:exaggeration--yours

[Dh2000]

No, the developers of Gimp did not experience this horrible thing, the horrible Default Window Manger functionality of Microsoft Windows. A window manager with no Focus-on-Mouse-Over, and a taskbar that didn't properly ignore Gimp's dialog boxes.

  Gimp was not created for Windows, it was created for X-Windows. That the port to win32 wasn't perfectly implemented to work with Windows' quirks is not related to the original quite decent design.

  That's why they didn't turn around and say "Hey you know what? the behaviour of the windows in Gimp is painful. How come if I click a tool on the toolbar, I have to click back in the job window before I can use the tool? And why do they clutter up my taskbar like that?"

  Because, they didn't have those problems. They had a decent Windowmanager, and a decent taskbar replacement.

  Without the slightest doubt, Photoshop is *not* for normal users, either.. just look at the pocket-industry of photoshop educational videos, photoshop tricks, tips, manuals, and secret methods. Normal users don't need that stuff. They just crop photos, and print. Artists/Professionals/Hobbyists do need that stuff, 'cause Photoshop and the Gimp, like most decent applications are complex and *Gasp* not exactly like every other application.

Re:exaggeration--yours

[Dwonis]

Yes. To all Windows users: when you're criticizing Win32 ports of non-Windows software, please mention that the problem you are experiencing is with the Win32 port.

Re:exaggeration--yours

[dangitman]

but they are exactly the sort of thing that professionals use for their work (e.g., "Photoshop").

WTF? photoshop is popular in part because it is one of the most usable products on the planet. You can be a beginner or an expert, and it is still easy to use. Contrast that with most graphics programs, where even the ones aimed at "beginners" or "consumers" are harder to use than Photoshop. I don't know how the average person is supposed to make sense of the insane graphics editing software that comes for free with many digital cameras.

Re:exaggeration--yours

[dangitman]

Normal users don't need that stuff. They just crop photos, and print. Artists/Professionals/Hobbyists do need that stuff, 'cause Photoshop and the Gimp, like most decent applications are complex and *Gasp* not exactly like every other application.

Exactly. And cropping and printing is much simpler in photoshop than many applications. The crop tool is right there in the second row of the tool palette! It's much harder to find the crop tool in some "amateur" programs. Normal users don't need the "advanced tricks" to use Photoshop. But I haven't seen very many beginner users have trouble using the basics of Photoshop. Unlike many programs, the icons are well designed, and people get the idea of what a tool is, without really having to learn anything about the software. I've introduced hundreds of people to Photoshop, and most find it intuitive and easy.

Re:exaggeration--yours

[Grab]

A window manager with no Focus-on-Mouse-Over

Many people consider this to be a good thing - I know I do. It does depend on personal preferences, but I know if I've got three editor open and I'm typing, I want text to keep going to the one I last selected, even if I happen to knock my mouse while I'm putting my coffee cup down.

More to the point, this is optional in Linux too, depending on your WM. If any software author says "I require WM XYZ for my software to work effectively and it'll be hamstrung on anything else", then I can point you out an author who doesn't give a shit about making something for other people to use.

and a taskbar that didn't properly ignore Gimp's dialog boxes.

This is 100% a fault of the coder, and not a fault of the Windows taskbar. This is not a difficult thing to implement, you just have to do it right.

Yes, Gimp was ported from X-Windows. These flaws indicate that the port is only at a beta stage - it works, but it's not ready for the big-time yet. Another application that isn't ready for the mass-market "Linux-on-the-desktop" aim.

But even allowing for the flaws in the port, the user interface for Gimp simply is not intuitive in the same way that commercial Windows drawing packages are.

Grab.

Re:exaggeration--yours

[killjoe]

"Where are the interface experts, usability consultants, test groups etc?"

Like you they are sitting at the sidelines insulting people who are actually doing work. Interface experts and usability consultants and people like you have no intention of every helping out any open source project. Instead they feel that the only way open source can advance is to continually insult open source developers and berate their products. The thing is even when other people work their asses off to give you something for free it will not stop your ungrateful fucks from bitching and moaning. You guys will always bitch and moan no matter what.

Why don't you quit your bitching and help out. Read a couple of books on usability and go lend a hand to somebody, it might make you feel better then pulling a nelson.

Re:exaggeration--yours

[cafard]

photoshop is popular in part because it is one of the most usable products on the planet.

And in a much bigger part because it is one of the most pirated products on the planet. How many of those 'average persons' would accept the price tag if getting it for free was not an option? Hey, i love my Citroen, but if i could get a Ferrari for free, i wouldn't have too many remorses...

Re:exaggeration--yours

[pigreco314]

>Where are the interface experts, usability consultants, test groups etc?

Hopefully here?.

Re:exaggeration--yours

[civilizedINTENSITY]

You don't make since when you seemingly agree that the win32 port isn't the Linux program, then go on to suggest (tongue in cheek?) that the beta-ness of the windows port implies that the program isn't ready on Linux. That is like saying that a Phd who has a single semester of a foreign language is "another person not ready to speak in public in their mother tongue". Or maybe I've been trolled.

Re:exaggeration--yours

[golgotha007]

But even allowing for the flaws in the port, the user interface for Gimp simply is not intuitive in the same way that commercial Windows drawing packages are.

I could be wrong here, but I think there's a price difference as well. You might have a decent argument if Photoshop cost $400 and Gimp cost $250.

Therefore, your argument, while very much valid, is valueless. Sorry.

Re:exaggeration--yours

[fbjon]

Where are these focus-on-mouseover window managers you speak of? The default behaviour these days is to have this turned off. And frankly, it makes sense. Focus-on-mouseover would be nice in Gimp, but not in the rest of the system.

Re:exaggeration--yours

[dangitman]

How many of those 'average persons' would accept the price tag if getting it for free was not an option?

Well, I don't know, but that question is entirely irrelevant to the issue of how usable Photoshop is. On the cost, most of the people I have introduced, are university students who have access to a legal site license from their campus. Whether they buy Photoshop after they graduate or not, is another matter.

Re:exaggeration--yours

[idlake]

WTF? photoshop is popular in part because it is one of the most usable products on the planet.

Photoshop is popular because it was the first photo editing application for Windows and Microsoft (uncharacteristically) hasn't competed with them yet.

You can be a beginner or an expert, and it is still easy to use.

And you established this incredible fact how exactly?

Re:exaggeration--yours

[idlake]

Gimp, CinePaint, and friends are the equivalent of PhotoShop in the open source world. The space of applications like iPhoto--browsing and simple correction--is covered by programs like Nautilus, Konqueror, F-Spot, Kimdaba, GQView, and many others.

Gimp's interface takes a lot of getting used to

Gimp's interface is a pretty standard Gnome application, with a few floating toolbars. I suppose one should eventually make those toolbars dockable, just so that people like you stop complaining, but there is nothing wrong with the interface.

But people like to roll it out as an example of why Open Source 'has the apps' too, and it's really a good example of why Open Source apps just don't compare for normal users.

Only in your uninformed world view. In real life, open source covers those needs better: something like KDE or Gnome is far better integrated and consistent than any solution for Windows I have seen, and pretty much the equivalent of iPhoto.

Re:exaggeration--yours

[dangitman]

Photoshop is popular because it was the first photo editing application for Windows and Microsoft (uncharacteristically) hasn't competed with them yet.

For starters, I don't think this is even true. Photoshop was surely not the first phot editing application for Windows. It gained its success on the Mac, and tranformed the publishing and photographic industries. Secondly, what makes you think microsoft could possibly compete with Photoshop? They have very little experience in professional imaging. Microsoft does have image editing software, but it sucks.

And you established this incredible fact how exactly?

By observing hundreds of users over more than a decade. Most of them had little computer experience, and just wanted to edit photos. Very few had any difficulties.

Re:exaggeration--yours

[codemachine]

Damn, I should proofread more. I meant to say that Gimp is capable of doing the same tasks, but is *NOT* similar to iPhoto or Elements interface-wise.

Whereas one assumes LPhoto would borrow a lot from the iPhoto interface.

Re:exaggeration--yours

[idlake]

Secondly, what makes you think microsoft could possibly compete with Photoshop? They have very little experience in professional imaging.

Microsoft doesn't have a lot of experience in the market, that's true; but when has that ever stopped them? In terms of technology and user interfaces, I guarantee you that Microsoft has more and smarter people than Adobe.

By observing hundreds of users over more than a decade. Most of them had little computer experience, and just wanted to edit photos. Very few had any difficulties.

Go look up "observer bias".

Re:exaggeration--yours

[Grab]

IIRC, Gimp assumes a certain mouse-over selection behaviour from your WM to work. Since that selection behaviour is optional in Linux, that means that the flaws in the Win32 port will also be present in Linux, no?

Grab.

Good?

[mpapet]

Yeah, the hyperbole goes way over the top.

If you broke desktop publishing into two groups like consumer/SOHO and Professional, it would be a really good consumer product assuming -all- of the applications features make it into the linux version.

It will be interesting to see how much gets pulled from the OSS version.

On the higher end side of desktop publishing in Linux, you've got a handful of good applications.
-Gimp (please refrain from "It's not PS!")
It's the best on Linux and generally really good for many things.

-Scribus
Very good DTP application. See Gimp comments and substitute Illustrator.

-Inkscape/Sodipodi
Very nice drawing applications.

-Quanta+/Bluefish
Nice HTML editors. Good project management features. See Gimp comments and substitute Dreamweaver. I'd be interested to hear some preferences between these two as I don't exhaust the features of Quanta+.

For big documents creation with a GUI, there's Lyx.

Re:Good?

[TheAwfulTruth]

But you said it yourself, then changed your mind half way through.

GIMP and those other applications you mention are at /best/ only Consumer/SOHO, VERY SOHO. They are NOT "On the higher end side of desktop publishing in Linux". Though maybe is seems that way because that is where the line stops and you are not really familiar with the better quality products on Windows and Mac.

Virtually all OSS Linux software falls into that category, and as such is pretty nice. Offering ok features for the low end user at an unbeatable price.

Then there are the truly professional Linux software packages for niche markets which are VERY expensive and not much use to the average person at all...

What is decidedly missing in the Linux software lineup is the middle level. The Applications (Like Photoshop) that are truly professional level but are actually affordable by the prosumer user types. Hey, if you can afford to spend 2 grand on a top end computer and another grand on a decent monitor and 2-3 grand on prosumer level photographic gear, then $599 for Photoshop is nothing.

Where is the Photoshop level graphics package for Linux that costs a few hundred bucks and delivers everything Photoshop does? I know... ask Adobe!

Such level of applications really does require some level of commercialization, something that is very hard to do on Linux for various reasons (obviously). It'll probably happen sooner or later, but after 10 years of waiting... we are still waiting. Meanwhile, most of that level of work is being done on Windows and Mac, simply because that is where the real apps are that the bulk of pro level people need.

Your list of software was nice, but honestly, only for the home user/office tinkerer...

Re:Good?

[Anonymous Coward]

GIMP and those other applications you mention are at /best/ only Consumer/SOHO, VERY SOHO. They are NOT "On the higher end side of desktop publishing in Linux". Though maybe is seems that way because that is where the line stops and you are not really familiar with the better quality products on Windows and Mac.

IF you think that things like Photoshop is the 'Higher End' of what is aviable for Mac or Windows.... Then I don't think you've experianced high end much yourself.

Now get ready... think "custom applications" and "in house development" and "User interfaces that would make a goat cry".

I remember fondly the day that I was talking to a retired (medical reasons) owner of a publishing company. I asked her why Quark (this was before OS X version of Quark was released) was so popular since it so obviously sucked and it was ass to get running properly in classic mode on the 30 or so Macs that I was responsable for. Why weren't people using stuff like Indesign?

She said basicly "Have you ever had to use those big German presses?" and talked about the years of custom software built around using Quark as part of the proccess.

Then she refered to photoshop and illistrator (by name) and the like as "those damn mickey-mouse programs"

The Gimp is what it is. It's a high quality application for 8bit per channel editing of images generally geared for computer/web illistrations. It's not a uber-full photo editor, but it gets the job done. It has python scripting support, which is probably much more usefull then you think it is. Nice things like lots of filters, lots of brushes. Much stuff aviable from non-gimp sources. Things like that.

It's a image editor. If you need high color resolution for certain operations you can use Cinepaint/Glasgow with it's 32bit per channel color editing capabilities. Not 32bit like truecolor 32bit, but 32bit like 128bit RGB color... which is something that Photoshop can't touch.

Although it's more aimed for the 'high end' movie editing market. 35mm motion film that's been ditigalized sort of thing.

Think: "arrows and drawn special effects in the 2nd two movies of the Lord of the Rings movies".

Now think: "was done on GNU/Linux on KDE desktop using Cinepaint"

Now you get the idea.

If you want a paint program, gimp sucks. Gimp is nice for editing, not so nice for image creation.

You want to paint check out "Krita"
http://www.koffice.org/krita/

Designed to make painting easier. Supports 16bit per channel if you like to get boners thinking about that sort of thing (just kidding!!! I am just trying to be a bit silly).

It'll end up part of the Koffice suite. Fucking-a Koffice suite kicks MS Office's ass, thank you very fucking much.
(and this is coming from a Gnome guy). When you take price into account.

If you realy realy need 16bit per channel color then I suppose you could use Krita for editing photographs... just like a nerd can justify stealing copies of photoshop and not make themselves feel guilty or stupid about it.

Now if your going to tell me that all this stuff sucks... you can suck eggs. Seriously.

It is what it is. It's usefull.

Think about it:
You can make as many copies as you want. You can use it professionally. You can use it for school. You can give it to your mom. You can install it on every computer in your entire fucking town.

It's FREE software. Not just shareware bullshit.

I got.. Gimp (raster editor), Krita (raster painter), Cinepaint/Glasgow (movie image editor), Cinelerra (NLE and compositing program with professional aspects such as render farm support and support for Floating Point RGB (better then YUV! But it can do YUV if you want.), Blender (Full animation and 3d modiling suite), Wing3d (low polygon modeler editor/creator), Scribus (desktop publishing application of fairly high quality with a eye on modern PDF-based workflow), Inkscape (SVG image editor)

Re:What about Linux?

[Anonymous Coward]

Always the same post:

• Comment 1
• Comment 2
• Comment 3
• Comment 4
• Comment 5
• Comment 6

The guy is called ClintJCL: one of his posts. You can find the same post in his blog, but he says, that he just copied it from /..

This is Big.

[SpamJunkie]

I'm a designer and I've used Xara quite a bit. It is a very, very good piece of software. In terms of ease of use and speed it kills all the big boys like Illustrator and CorelDraw. In fact this is the software that Corel owned/distributed at one time as CorelXara. Then they pillaged it for features and set it on its way. It has fantastic transparency abilities and some cool bitmap-like effects such as realtime blurs. It also has some decent bitmap abilities built-in. I know most designers won't know anything about it and the open source community won't either, so please trust me when I say this is a fantastic development. I hope to take a swing at the code, with any luck creating a mac version. Sweet.

Deneba Canvas?

[joetheappleguy]

Other than the fact that it will be open sourced this Xara looks like a big rip-off of Deneba Canvas.

Haven't seen any features in it that Canvas hasn't had for the last 4 + years. (Other than maybe the ability to work reliably, which kept me off of Canvas )

Re:Deneba Canvas?

[Anonymous Coward]

Err, Xara for Windows is pretty much identical to ArtWorks for RISC OS which was around 15 years ago, apart from the better anti-aliasing and the transparency, which have been around for 10 years. http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bild:RiscOSArtworksTe chWriter.png

Re:Deneba Canvas?

[GooseKirk]

Canvas and Xara are similar, but Xara's been around for a lot longer. I don't think it's fair to say either has ripped off the other. Maybe that's just my personal prejudice... I like Canvas, but I love Xara.

Re:Deneba Canvas?

[Tim Browse]

I'm not sure if it's the same Canvas, but there was a vector drawing app called Canvas that was around when we wrote Xara. It was horribly slow and primitive in many ways though. I only ran it a few times, and most every time it prompted laughter when I did. We looked at a lot of other drawing programs at the time, for performance and usability comparisons. In terms of performance, Xara tended to wipe the floor with everything else, so that wasn't usually a problem. But we felt it was sensible to check the competition, and ensure we were better. Most programs had some nice ideas though. For instance, I think it was Freehand that inspired the pervasive drag and drop of colours in Xara. Then again, it would have been hard not to improve on the infamous Colour Tool in Artworks... :-)

As I say, I don't know if Deneba Canvas is the same program. It seems aimed at a similar task, so maybe it is. IIRC, the Canvas I tried was a Mac program that was ported to the PC. Er, possibly. It did look really ropey though. For some reason I remember a lot of the sample documents were of boats. Schematics of yachts, that sort of thing. Or maybe I'm hallucinating again.

In any case, I'm against the open-sourcing of Xara, as it means people will be able to see the mucky code I wrote for the EPS filters :-)

Re:Deneba Canvas?

[md04]

Xara came out of a product for the archimedes.

( It was really arm code at the core run through macros to create x86 code for the PC version )

Re:Deneba Canvas?

[GooseKirk]

Yeah, that's the same program.

It got better.

I've really only played around with it a little bit, but it seems pretty good. They now offer scientific and GIS versions, which is WAY freaking cool (I'd swoon if Xara did that, but on the other hand, I know Xara doesn't have the resources to dump into such niche markets).

Xara's still significantly better, but if I couldn't have Xara, I'd probably use Canvas.

Re:Deneba Canvas?

[Anonymous Coward]

Nope. It was written in C++, from scratch, and shared nothing with the original Artworks code base, apart from a few algorithms (all reimplmented in C++, or, for the fast stuff, recoded in assembler).

Not exaggerated at all!

[Blakey Rat]

Xara Xtreme on Linux will not only bring a leading-edge graphic tool to the platform, but with community assistance, has the potential to become the world's most powerful, easiest-to-use and simply the world's best graphics program. If they get this right it could bring the Linux desktop into whole sectors of the market that is has not been able to address before.

Also it cures baldness.

Re:Not exaggerated at all!

[HardCase]

Also it cures baldness.

Thank god! I'm almost out of my hair in a can.

This is EXCELLENT news, and here's why

[GooseKirk]

I've been using Xara for nearly 10 years. It is a phenomenal piece of software. It's fast, stable, and it gives you the tools you need with a clean, intuitive interface and without a bunch of crap in your way. Give an untrained person a choice between the nightmare of Illustrator and Xara, and it's no competition at all. Corel and Xara are closer, but last time I checked, Corel was way over-bloated and buggy. Fireworks is probably closer yet, but while its interface isn't as FUBAR'd as Illustrator's, it's still too idiosyncratic.

Xara is the best general-purpose vector graphics software out there. It's the easiest to learn how to use, and it really is a pleasure to work with. This is the right move for Xara, and I think it's great news for Linux. As we get new, regular users transitioning to Linux desktops, hopefully Xara will be included with some of the best distros... it should be an exciting and significant feature for a decent percentage of users. Even people who just want to make a flyer for their garage sale will find Xara cool and fun.

On a personal note, Xara is the main reason why I still haven't switched to a Linux desktop for myself. I can't live without my Xara... now it looks like I'll finally be able to switch! Tonight, I will literally go out and toast to Xara. This is the best news I've had in months.

Re:This is EXCELLENT news, and here's why

[euxneks]

Try http://www.inkscape.org/... It's free, open-source, and can produce some phenomenal results.

Re:This is EXCELLENT news, and here's why

[jilbert]

I agree 100%. Xara X is the only reason I keep a copy of Windows.

Re:This is EXCELLENT news, and here's why

[GooseKirk]

I can think of a few more reasons to keep Windows around, though. Here's some of my other favorite programs. This is just a little preliminary Googling, so if anyone knows better definitively, please chime in.

- SketchUp 3D software, one of the grooviest things you'll ever see your computer do, apparently nonfunctional under WINE. Although those guys are so cool, I bet they're already working on a Linux version.

- Final Draft screenwriting software apparently works under WINE, so I guess that's covered.

- Vegas Video apparently nonfunctional under WINE.

Xcellent..

[Transmogrify_UK]

I've used Xara X on and off for a number of years. Fantastic vector image program. I only moved over to Illustrator after discovering the Xara .AI/.EPS output filter didn't work 100% with some applications and there were a few other little niggles. This might have been fixed since then but otherwise it's fantastic application and porting it to Linux is a brilliant move.

Once a decent/user friendly bitmap editing application is available for linux, then I might be able to move over fully.

Re:Xcellent..

[zuschlag]

I second this. I have used Xara since its original days as Artworks on my RISC OS computer and it is simply *the* best 2D vector graphics application I have come across. I've since moved on to the Mac platform and would love to see a Mac version of Xara, especially since Xara is one of the two reasons why I need to keep a VirtualPC installation on my Mac (the other one being MS Access but I don't expect MS to open source that :) ).

/Jesper

It's Modded down because...

[Anonymous Coward]

It's modded down because it's a fucking TROLL POST YOU STUPID FUCK not because it's 'anti-Linux'.

Gimp users sigh in relief...twice in one week!

[Hosiah]

Now, Photoshop robots will have *TWO* Open-Source programs to bitch about!!! Yes, Gimp can now expect half the Photozealots to switch their flames from Gimp to how much they hate Xara for not being Photoshop. Welcome to the *deep inside*, Xara, and you can share my bread crust, but not my bunk.

Re:Gimp users sigh in relief...twice in one week!

[Qbertino]

Wrong.

Now Slashdotters will not only have a "full Photoshop replacement" to rave about, but also the "viable open source alternative to Illustrator".

Re:Gimp users sigh in relief...twice in one week!

[Hosiah]

"full Photoshop replacement"

*snork* You say what you want to, pal, it's YOUR hide!

Re:Another second rate product runs to Linux...

[Anonymous Coward]

You mispelled linuxsucks.org

Xara and Inkscape

[bbyakk]

If you read their FAQ, they are more than aware of the existence of Inkscape. They give credit to Inkscape for "features that Xara does not have" and a higher rate of development. In fact, they say that the ultimate goal is a single merged vector editor combining the best in Xara and Inkscape. And as an Inkscape developer, this is something I'd like to see as well.

It remains to be seen how exactly this merger will proceed, who will be on the giving side and who on the receiving side. Whichever way it goes, however, their goal is the same as mine: to create the best vector editor in the world. So I guess this means Xara and Inkscape are bound to be friends overall, even though an element of competition will be present as well.

For an overview of how Inkscape and Xara compare, read this:

http://wiki.inkscape.org/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?Xara_X

Re:Another second rate product runs to Linux...

[Hosiah]

It was probably an Ubuntu or Debian user...the rest of us are more laid back...

RIf they do it under the GPL-Cooks.

[Anonymous Coward]

"Also, in practical terms, Inkscape's like the Linux kernel; due to the number of individual copyright holders we couldn't relicense if we wanted to, so it's simply not possible for much Inkscape code to make it into Xara-commercial, even if it made it into Xara-GPL."

Funny how a technical group can tell you what patch goes with what code base, but can't relicense because "there's too many" to keep track of.

Re:RIf they do it under the GPL-Cooks.

[Anonymous Coward]

You not only have to keep track of the patch.

You have to keep track of the contributor.

You have to keep *current* contact information for that contributor.

And that contributor has to give permission for the relicense.

For every single patch.

Re:RIf they do it under the GPL-Cooks.

[MenTaLguY]

Like the other poster said, the problem isn't keeping track of the patches, but being able to find current contact information for all the contributors (which we don't have), successfully contacting them (for many long-running projects, some might be dead), and assuming you make it that far, getting them to unanimously agree to the relicensing (I already know some wouldn't).

People problem, not a technical one.

copy more from FreeHand (was Re:Deneba Canvas?)

[WillAdams]

Xara is a tool I've often wished that I liked when I tried it. Can't recall the last time I tried a demo or a copy from a magazine disk, but the following things from FreeHand I'm not finding equivalents to in my quest for a replacement for FreeHand and Altsys Virtuoso:

  - snap to document-setup-page (AI in particular doesn't do this, and it irritates me a lot and wastes a lot of time when trying to get art set to a standard size for a job)

  - ability to place bezier curve points, and move just placed points and constrain and control off-curve points with a single tool

  - easy deletion of nodes on a bezier path

  - quick selection of stacked objects (Freehand allows one to Control-click through a stack, AI makes one use a contextual menu or the layer palette, or if it's only a two-deep stack and you want the bottom, select both, then deselect the top)

  - easy expansion of a selection (in FreeHand just tap the tilde key (`) and a sub-selected path's selection is expanded to the compleat object)

  - sensible alignment of objects (AI in particular has bizarre rules for this --- so bizarre there's a plug-in to address this)

  - ability to align sub-selected bezier on-curve points to objects while not altering any other points in an object (AI can't do this)

  - use PostScript code for strokes and fills --- especially nice for doing dimension lines (Canvas has this built in though, while there're plug-ins for AI)

  - graphic find and replace

  - OpenType and Unicode support and a decent Type palette (Adobe Illustrator CS and CS2 really shine on this front. The nifty opensource program Cenon (http://www.cenon.info/ does quite nicely in its Mac OS X incarnation using Apple Advanced Typography). See http://members.aol.com/willadams/gnustep/type/inde x.html for a discussion of this sort of thing.

William

Re:Another second rate product runs to Linux...

[dbIII]

Why is it that people on /. mod all criticism of Linux as Flamebait, but almost never defend Linux verbally?

Because it's no longer 1994 so most of the criticism that misses the point entirely has been addressed before. The parody of linux expressed above may look to some as criticism of linux but to me it looks like the writer is expessing the opinion "technical people are dorks", so it isn't worth reponding to that, while it is worth responding to the more civil quention from popo.

New criticism a bit more rooted in reality is a different story, and any "linux isn't ready for the desktop" statement is at least five years or maybe even ten years out of date (win3.11 was ready for the desktop remember). Linux on the desktop is not good enough for XYZ makes more sense than some blanket statement that was proved wrong by a lot of people years ago.

Re:yeah... what about it?

[Anonymous Coward]

8=======D

You YUM this, fucking faggot.

Re: Custom tool groupings

[fyngyrz]

...what I've seen commercial software doesn't want to add is costumizability(sic).

We make commercial graphics software and we provide for (one or more) custom tool sets and have for years. You can set up "operations caddies" of any organization (4x8, 16x5 etc) and drag tools in and out of them at any time, save them, load them, etc.

It's used just as you imagine; you can set up a specialized caddy for image repair work, one for special effects, one for ray tracing, one for landscape generation, one for painting, one for animation... I'd say that it is one of the features I use most.

We had to do this, as our complete toolbar has so many operations on it you can get lost even if you're an expert, and just as the parent describes, when you're doing one thing, you're not going to need a lot of specialized tools. Caddies just make sense. Does a mechanic drag every tool out for every job? Of course not.

skin saving

[Anonymous Coward]

Open Source is getting to close by open the source might stop the development of the other projects. Ie openoffice kill most of it competion.

Even at worst could become just a support company.

slashdot invaded with msft shills/zealots?

[walterbyrd]

If you think the news is no big deal, that's fine. But, why are so many posters here enraged?

I'm noticing this trend on slashdot more and more. Some good news for Linux is announced (often no BFD). And many posters here are screaming about how Linux is so inferior to msft.

Frankly, I don't care what desktop you use. I don't care if you don't like Linux. But, it seems strange to me that this sort of news would make so many posters so angry.

Re:slashdot invaded with msft shills/zealots?

[dangitman]

Some good news for Linux is announced (often no BFD). And many posters here are screaming about how Linux is so inferior to msft.

Well, I certainly don't believe Linux is inferior. I have also read most of the posts up until yours, and I don't see single comment yet on MSFT being superior to Linux.

Frankly, I don't care what desktop you use. I don't care if you don't like Linux. But, it seems strange to me that this sort of news would make so many posters so angry.

I don't care what desktop or graphics program you use, either. I'm not angry. I just can't understand why the article had to use the over-the-top propaganda of "world's best graphics program" or the company has to use marketing gimmicks like "Xtreme." I'd like to see some company take graphics seriously. Adobe used to, it was the domain of the smart innovator in graphics, when Knoll was at the controls. these days, Adobe indulges in a lot of the stupid "lifestyle" marketing that is demonstrated by this slashdot article, and the Xara website.

Please, software companies, cut the bullshit. If you make a graphics program, talk about graphics. I don't really give a shit about "lifestyle marketing" or the politics of Open Source. I just want the most effective tools to create graphics.

Xara might be the best graphics program in the world, for all I know, but I find the marketing offensive, and just want answers. Indeed, Xara's marketing is not quite as obnoxious as Quark's, and probably not even as obnoxious as Adobe's. But I already use Adobe, I was convinced before they went all corporate-wanker-marketing. If I was a new customer to Adobe, I would also be turned off by their marketing zeal, just as I am by Xara's.

Re:slashdot invaded with msft shills/zealots?

[Anonymous Coward]

It's because you're reading slashdot from a work machine. Try reading slashdot from home instead ;)

Xara Linux so far......

[Anonymous Coward]

Is only a gui with buttons that do not yet work...all it does is open some examples. If they intend to sell it as a Linux ap they would be better off if they went the MS route and released a full shareware version with a cripple on the import or save function... either that or a suicide date on the bin. Good looking png buttons though, I think I will use them as some of my music notation app widgets, save me alot of time drawing them up!

Why would only Linux benefit?

[Tpenta]

I'm interested to see the spin here as Linux being the big beneficiary of this announcement. Surely, if the code is released, then pretty much anyone who has a use for it benefits as it canM then be built for their platform. Regardless of which variant of linux, bsd or unix anyone's partcular platform is. Tp.

Clap! clap! clap! clap! clap!..... MOD UP ^^

[BinLadenMyHero]

You're right.

But the grandparent does have a point about the fact that free hackers make software (primarily) for themselves. (Vim is way more easy for me than any other fancy editor, but I do realise that it's not the best for everyone.) If more people use it, great!, but it's not the goal. The goal is the software per se (a tool, a game, whatever, for him to use). The software companies' goal, on the other hand, is to have more people using it, so the interface must be geared towards the general luser.

Xara X is GREAT!

[Dan Ferguson]

I have used Xara since the first version came out and it is excellent. Very intuitive and easy to use. if you haven't sat down and used it I encourage you to try. Now it is my primary program and I use the others on the side.

Is Xara Xtreme...

[Alias777]

...too Xtreme for an E?

Intriguing graph

[mattr]

I'm intrigued by the graph that compares the speed of XaraCDraw to that of GDI+ and Cairo 1.0.

Maybe this rendering engine would be useful for the desktop or other programs, spun off on its own? I always loved SGI Irix's vector based desktop with that awesome vertically oriented scroll wheel widget that would scale all icons on the desktop.

Re:Exaggeration? - The Reverse Is True Too

[Anonymous Coward]

"It's been painful because after watching a Window-savvy person struggle with Linux I began to understand why Linux hasn't really kicked-in on the desktop yet."

The reverse is true too. I experience nothing but frustration at work using Windows. But when I get my hands on my OSS boxes I'm not frustrated anymore.

it's a very limited demo

[subtropolis]

It only opens files, allows to zoom, pan, change views, etc. The tools are not functional in the demo yet. This isn't the open source release. It's not done yet. Just a proof of concept, to show that the rendering engine works.

as your sig says, support open source software!

[Phil Urich]

I hope someone manages to port it onto OS X too.

Tsk tsk. And then your sig says "Support open source software." But you're sellin' out to the man!

Actually, no, to be serious here: what exactly is it that makes it important for it to be ported to OS X? Is the interface in OS X so important to you, or is it that you're already doing everything in OS X so it'd be a pain to have to start up a second OS for a single app? Or other reasons?

I mainly ask 'cause most of my Mac-using friends often make the biggest argument for their cult ;) by pointing out all the cool apps for the OS (perhaps normally the argument made is over interface, but my own personal preferences lead me to despise the setup on Macs; nothing I don't claim is merely my own aethetics, but it's useful since it seems to counteract most of whatever they keep putting in my Kool-Aid!). So with this potential app as a Linux one, where does that stand as to desire for having it on OS X? (err, please don't misread my tone, people, I may not be Steve Jobs' #1 fan but neither am I meaning any of this at all as apple-bashing or anything of the sort, it just brings up an opportunity for explanation, and I figure on slashdot there's gonna be at least SOMEONE who'll give a good in-depth explanation as to why people would be so happy for this to be ported).

After all, any port is going to be at least a semi-step behind the development of the purebred Open Source original, so why the hassle? (I can think of some reasons, but I'll leave the question dangling anyways)

I didn't realize Cairo was so crappy....

[10Ghz]

Take a look at the Performance-section. Could Cairo use bits and pieces of Xara-renderer? Or could we replace Cairo with Xara's implementation? Propably not, due to licencing....

Re:I didn't realize Cairo was so crappy....

[jilbert]

I seem to remember that the important bits of the Xara-renderer are hand crafted in assembler.

Very good news

[whisperingwind]

When I switched to Linux, Xara was the only app I missed. I am delighted to hear a Linux version is available. It really is very good indeed -- very powerful, flexible and easy to learn. I tried a few alternative vector drawing apps for Linux but the ones I found were dreadful.

Xara company info

[Ed Avis]

For those that are interested in such things, Xara is in fact the old Computer Concepts. I still have a Wordwise 16K ROM chip sitting around somewhere. When will they release the source for that?

First open source project then: color management

[Anonymous Coward]

Having worked for 14 years with Acorn Risc Os software like Risc Os Draw, ArtWorks I + II, Ovation, Publisher and for 4 years with spin-offs like Ovation Pro and Xara X on PCs, I am sure that the GUI etc of Xara will be appreciated on other platforms. What has not been available on all the Risc Os software and the spin-offs is ICC color management. That Linux etc isn't much better on that aspect isn't an excuse. With the new very advanced CM announced for M$ Vistia it becomes even more urgent. So the first work that has to be done is ICC color management added to Xara or preferably incorporated in Linux. Argyll being the best engine for both but if that's too far fetched Little CMS can be chosen as well.

Not just designers that find Gimp hard to grok

[nietsch]

Gimp has a lot of features, some of them i like, some that I may have never tried out yet. I don't do windows or Photoshop, so I cannot compare to that.
But the Gimp certainly has made me scream at it. I never seem to be able to figure out how a certain feature works (the stuff with pasting and layers for instance). I am no useability expert either, but I am sure that if you get the user in a state of sreaming, there is something seriously wrong with the software.
There are two ways to fix that problem; the easy way and tha hard way. The easy way is just dismissing evey complaint about it as caused by an unwillingness to learn the interface (stupid user excuse).
The hard way is to actually listen, analyse and do something about the problem. But that requires hard work (not neccesarily the coding part, finding the problems in the UI may be much more work).

The moral of this story: pointing fingers at photoshop or the user will not make UI issues disappear, so please don't do that.

Re:Not just designers that find Gimp hard to grok

[Anonymous Coward]

Good post - the guts to admit that you can't figure out some things on yet another example of supposedly "just as good" "free" software and expose yourself to the "stupid user" accusation is to be commended. If I am trying to figure out something, anything, I want a _book_, not an endless series of "help screens" where its impossible to get back to thing you just viewed 30 seconds ago, or yesterday, because you can't find it. A book is easy - you can turn a corner of a page, write down the page number, or if you've referred to a page often enough, the book will open to that page automatically. I have occasion to go to the data representation page of Borland C++ Builder quite often, and it always takes about 3 minutes of searching to find it, and the process is so lengthy I can never remember the sequence when I finally do find it. IOW, help files suck. Gimmie a text document and I'll search it.

Re:Not just designers that find Gimp hard to grok

[Hosiah]

pointing fingers at photoshop or the user will not make UI issues disappear, so please don't do that.

My reply in length: THERE IS NOTHING WRONG WITH THE GIMP INTERFACE. What YOU, the frustrated user need to do, is go find some documentation on it http://gug.sunsite.dk/docs/Grokking-the-GIMP-v1.0/ and perhaps join a forum or two http://gug.sunsite.dk/. If you don't see the howto or doc that addresses your problem, you need to ask about it in the forum. If the feature you ask for isn't there, ask if there's a script-fu extension that does that. If there isn't, well, somebody's just gonna have to write one, aren't they? Either learn script-fu and write it yourself, or patiently wait for somebody else to do it. Remember, in the open-source world, unless you're pretty wierd and your needs are that narrow, somebody else has already solved the problem which you are trying to solve.

My reply in brief: What the hell exists in the universe that is any kind of complicated at all that teaches itself to you? When pianos have interfaces that allow you to sit down your first time and play a concerto without your knowing anything about music at all, when a camera is invented with an interface that makes you look like a glamourous fashion model in every frame without your having to even bother combing your hair, when a stove is invented whose interface is designed so that we can all cook like Emeril Lagasse even if all we've ever done before is microwave burrittos, then we'll justify criticisms of Gimp's interface, thank you very much. As my sig says from time to time: "Stealth Bombers are more difficult to operate than tricycles BECAUSE THEY CAN FLY!"

Re:Not just designers that find Gimp hard to grok

[Anonymous Coward]

This "blame the user" thing _still_ won't fly, no matter how often its repeated. There's a reason that Microsoft can get away with charging big bucks for things like Office - the documentation and user interface is _much_ better than your average "free software" product.

I'll pay for it, and take much less time getting to know it, rather than download it and spend extra weeks or months that I wouldn't have to spend. While not rich, I still have a helluva lot more money than time, and can acquire even more money, but no extra time. Plus, I don't _like_ to struggle with something - I just wanna use it as quickly and well as I can. This points toward the commercial products that have an interest in pleasing the users. The "free" stuff mostly has an interest in pleasing their developers.

And of course "Things Microsoft" work a lot alike. Keep buying Microsoft and your learning curve is smaller than if you by Microsoft this and Borland that and maybe Adobe for something else. The different companies tend to do things differently that adds to the learning curve, but nowhere nearly as dramatically as applications not built under a corporate directive at all.

"Free" software ain't free, if you put a dollar value on the learning curve.

Re:Not just designers that find Gimp hard to grok

[Hosiah]

Plus, I don't _like_ to struggle with something - I just wanna use it as quickly and well as I can.

With that attitude, how'd you get potty-trained? Staying in diapers would have had a *much* shallower learning curve than that complicated business with the toilet. And you could always keep buying bigger diapers - after all, you have _much_ more money than you have time!

Re:Not just designers that find Gimp hard to grok

[nietsch]

Oh thank you so much. This is so helpfull i am ashamed that I dared to suggest the gimp has problems. Your comments really made them all disappear.
I guess that a gimp user has to have your intelligence to be able to use it. Since you are so fucking zmart, you have just ruled out 94 out of 100 people.

In my world that just means you failed. If you need to go read documentation just to understand the userinterface, then the interface has missed it's goal.

Re:Not just designers that find Gimp hard to grok

[Hosiah]

If you need to go read documentation just to understand the userinterface, then the interface has missed it's goal.

Luser! Back to the AOL slum with you! You just bragged in public about never reading a manual for the sake of remaining ignorant for the rest of your life. Next!

Re:Not just designers that find Gimp hard to grok

[nietsch]

Ah I see that is how you react to people disagreeing with you? Or where you just waiting for an opportunity to dispense your very intellectual judgements?

Please take your own advise to heart, but dont put words in my mouth that I did not say.

This is great!

[dpensa]

I think that going open source for Xara Xtreme is great. It is a great vector program. Like many before said, it's fast, powerfull and yet simple. Just look samples at their site. I'm no designer, I use it occassionaly. But my broter use it since first version came out (then known as CorelXARA), and won't let it hands of that program.

So, I know that with Xara you can do amazing things. And I'm not saying that just because my brother use it, but it's really great program with so much possibilities.

<brag>
For those who don't belive it, just look movie part 2 from xaraxtreme.org and those icons/symbols are drawn by my brother (for one full vector iconset). :)
</brag>

Just download and see it for yourself. I'd like to give you opportunity to play/experiment with same symbols/icons in Xara as in above mentioned movie, but since this is my first post on Slashdot I'm not sure if it's ok to put URLs in comments.

I hope that Xara and open source community would live long and prosper.

*I* Swear by Xara X its f**ing excellent

[NigelJohnstone]

I've used it for year, its one of the best vector drawing applications available, easily the match for Illustrator.

You guys don't know how major this is, it used to be called Corel Xara, Corel bought the distribution rights to stop it killing Corel draw, then failed to market it.

I use it for splash screens, for ten second knockups for presentations, for creating logos, animated GIFs the lot.

Freehand users -- salvation???

[ChrisZermatt]

Haven't seen any comments from Freehand users here...

I made the switch from (a basically unusable) Adobe Illustrator 88 to Freehand 3.0 way back in the dawn of mainstream computer graphics time. In the mid-nineties, Freehand rocked and Illustrator lagged behind. Then Freehand got sucked up by Macromedia, and went from being a clean, slick drawing app, to a buggy piece of UI bloated shit.

I've spent thousands of hours working in Freehand over the last 12 or so years, but its current state and looming demise at the hands of Adobe (I like Photoshop, but not much else from Adobe), means that I've been looking around for a solid replacement for Freehand -- dreading having to move to Illustrator, as I find it fairly twisted as well as very expensive (wonder what upgrade path Adobe will offer me from Ill 88 to Ill CS2?? : ) I've also tried apps like Inkscape (nice start, but still quite a ways to go). CorelDraw falls into that crappy Windows software category for me (sorry to any CD lovers here!)

I'm definately going to check out Xara. Fingers crossed.

In/export is really important -- like other posters have mentioned, there are lots of good tools out there, for different tasks!

Another area I don't see a lot of mention about is printing. If a graphic designer's service bureau doesn't support an app, then I don't see much chance of them switching (I don't do that much print work anymore, so its not as big an issue for me).

Let's hope that Xara will become a credible alternative to Illustrator. I for one am hoping like hell that they (or someone else) make it.

My mind boggles.

[WWWWolf]

I didn't reply to this last night. I had to go to sleep and see if I had been dreaming. It's day already and the article is still here, so I guess I'm not dreaming.

Okay, so I don't know anything about specific features of Xara X, but from what I've understood, it's a widely sold package with a lot of those cool "pro" features.

All I can say is... wow. To me, this is definitely in league of Netscape / StarOffice / Blender opensourcing. I expect that in a year after this is out, we have one killer OSS vector package, or two killer packages if these news that they're cooperating with Inkscape are true. (I was about to ask about how hot their SVG support is. Apparently not very excellent at the moment, if they're sponsoring an SVG converter project.) This is definitely a great day for OSS graphics!

Why?

[slashflood]

Here is the answer. Read the FAQ, it is very insightful.

Opening the door to other platforms

[ACORN_USER]

And the beauty here is that with the sources available, it is not just a linux version which is being made available, but they've also created the opportunity for the community to port Xara to multiple platforms.

So, I for one will bill busy trying to get it to build on my Acorn A4. Memories.. :)

Xara X blows Inkscape away

[Anonymous Coward]

Try them both, you'll see how much better XaraX is after you've used it a week. It's seriously better than Inkscape and a lot easier to use than illustrator.

It won't cost you an ARM and a leg

[ACORN_USER]

The Acorn spirt lives on. A great piece of a software can now have its source branched and ported to multiple platforms. For non-m$ products, this kind of life span is a sign of software quality. More choice is always a good thing. Hats off!

Re:Mountain Goat

[Anonymous Coward]

having an SO was actually less credible than having one looking like a mountain goat

Don't miss the FAQ

[dolmen.fr]

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.

Licensing

[ShieldW0lf]

I notice that they are planning on setting up something similar to what Project Mayo did and what MySQL does. In the FAQ they mention that they intend on requiring contributions to their code tree to revert ownership to them so they can sell it closed source.

How does Inkscape compare on this licensing issue? Considering that Inkscape works now, while Xara X is non-free on windows, non-functional on any other operating system and will require that you allow them to sell your code contributions closed source, is there really any reason to contribute to it as a project rather than just cannibilizing it and improving Inkscape?

Re:Licensing

[Anonymous Coward]

How does Inkscape compare on this licensing issue?

Inkscape is regular GPL.

Considering that Inkscape works now, while Xara X is non-free on windows, non-functional on any other operating system and will require that you allow them to sell your code contributions closed source, is there really any reason to contribute to it as a project rather than just cannibilizing it and improving Inkscape?

Reason one: the open source Xara is based on wxWidgets, while Inkscape uses GTK+. What does this mean? It means that Inkscape will never have native look-and-feel on the Mac, while Xara can get it trivially. So for Apple users, there's no contest.

Reason two: different goals. Inkscape's developers may want it to develop into a general-purpose editor, but right now it's optimised heavily towards screen work with the SVG format. That's good, by the way: SVG is the future both for the web and for the desktop. However, the end result is that Inkscape is not so useful for print work at the moment. Xara is a much more general-purpose package that is good for print work.

An imperfect analogy would be to compare Abiword with OpenOffice.org. Both exist, both have users that love them. OOo, like Xara, has a paid-for version and a corporate backer, and does a lot more than just word-processing; Abiword, like Inkscape, concentrates on doing just one thing and doing it very well. And both projects survive quite happily.

I don't see why this should turn out any differently.

Mac OS X and Linux in graphic design

[grouchofan]

Some of the commentary here is a definite match for some research and writing I've been doing on my blog.

For a while now I've been comparing OS X 10.4 and Linux from the perspective of whether a Macintosh-oriented designer could make a successful switch to Linux.

I've looked at the availability of applications, compared a few to one another, and dug in to both operating systems a bit as well. I've learned to appreciate Linux a lot more than I did before and Mac OS X differently than I did before. While the research is still underway, there's quite a lot to read at my site on the subject if you're curious. The main articles you'll want to see are here:

Introduction to the OS X vs. Linux series

Inkscape vs. FreeHand

Review of Scribus 1.2.1

How OS X on x86 is great for Linux

Linux Equivalents to Mac Design Software

There are some other related articles out there, too, but these are the main ones. I figure the flames are going to head my way for writing these articles, but the point isn't to say that OS X or Linux is "better" - rather to examine their differences and similarities and try to answer the question "If there was a reason to switch, how would it go?"

I should point out that my OS of choice until the late 1990s was Macintosh. Since then it's been Windows XP, mostly because I'm a gamer and that's where my favorite games are (I don't care for console gaming). But more recently, I've really begun to appreciate Linux and OSS and actually do use Linux on a machine at home somewhat regularly. I wouldn't say any of the three is any "better" than the others. All have strengths and weaknesses.

So this post and my articles above aren't meant to criticize anyone for their OS choice, but merely an attempt to inspire serious, objective thought about Linux and OS X.

Born Learners Thrive on Frustration

[Hosiah]

As follow-up: Don't feel like the Lone Ranger, everybody, if you're reduced to screaming and pounding on the keyboard at some point in acquiring a new skill. We've all been there. If you think Gimp's tough to learn, have a swing at Blender. You have to study the docs on Blender for about two weeks, as a theologian pores over Dead Sea scrolls, before you produce your first coherent image. But Blender can do everything from simple polygons to Poser-quality mesh models to animations to 3D games.

I went through the same frustrations, over Gimp and Blender and POVray, over C++ and Lisp and Python, over HTML and XML and RSS, etc. Currently, I'm gnawing the keyboard over cURL and automated web form posting in the context of creating automated web agents that do nifty stuff for me - mainly because I left web programming for last. Frustration, that period of beginning when you strike out on your own and hardly know what question to ask, let alone the answers, is a part of learning, whether your subject is graphics design, doing your own taxes, or perfecting techniques from the Kama Sutra. It's a part of life. The thing to do is, take a deep breath and say to yourself, "This tool wouldn't exist if somebody, somewhere, didn't find it useful; now all I have to do is figure out *what* the hell they were thinking, and it'll be useful to me, too."

Re:Born Learners Thrive on Frustration

[nietsch]

Bull. The moment you are screaming is when all hope of learning is lost. I learned a lot in university, but never have I come in a state of anger because I did not understand the topic. Software that has a gentle learning curve will never make the user scream at it in frustration.

Re:Born Learners Thrive on Frustration

[Hosiah]

Oh, go sit on your gentle learning curve!

tgif

[gatzke]

I like tgif better judging by the linux demo.

Maybe I didn't play with xara enough to get up the learning curve, but tgif does most everything I ever would want, and the interface is more intuitive. Tgif is GPL and produces great eps files.