Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #10681 in Software
• Brand: Xara
• Model: 5060049214115
• Platforms: Windows 98, Windows 2000, Windows NT, Windows 95, Windows Me

Amazon.co.uk Review
While most drawing and illustration programs are frustrating for those people who can't draw, Xara X is different. Of course, if you're handy with a pencil you'll always have an advantage, but the program provides plenty of clever tools and shortcuts to help those who can barely draw a straight line (let alone a smoothly curved one) to produce startling, professional-level graphics.

As well as freehand drawing, Xara X has lots of good pre-drawn shapes which you can adapt in hundreds of different ways. Let's take a circle, for example. You can draw it out using the circle tool, fill it with a colour or texture, change the thickness of the outside line, add a bevel (useful for turning objects into 3D Web buttons) a light source to cast reflections over the surface of the circle, and a shadow and some transparency so that the circle fades from a solid shape into a see-through one. Draw a square next to it and click the blend tool and Xara X will morph one shape into the other automatically. Draw a wavy line underneath and you can type text along the line, add colour, texture and a shadow to the text, then drag the line into a different shape and watch the text move with it.

Xara X has a wide range of brush and pencil types for drawing, and with clever use of layers and transparencies you can produce photo-real illustrations (there are hundreds of examples of drawings like this on the second CD); the way you can edit simple objects, enhancing them with texture, colour and transparency is extraordinary and the program can also create animated GIFs and rollover bars for Web sites, complete with all the necessary HTML and JavaScript. It's also worth pointing out that Xara X produces vector drawings that won't lose their sharpness no matter how big or how small you use them.

This is a deep program, easy enough for the beginner to pick up and produce good results with straight away but powerful enough to satisfy a serious graphic artist.--Rob Beattie

Manufacturer's Description
XARA X is an advanced graphic illustration package for Windows, that offers unrivalled speed and a user interface which other developers have tried to imitate, but never matched. Producing illustrations is quick and easy using the sophisticated drawing tools, but many of the advanced features which Xara pioneered - such as transparency and real-time anti-aliasing - can be applied to both vector and bitmap images.

Add to this new features, such as pressure sensitive brush stroking and automated shadows, bevels and contours, multi-stage graduated fills and feathering - and you have a tool which is both highly creative and very productive.

Xara X can produce compact, highly optimized graphics, making it an ideal choice for creating web graphics, and with this in mind, the web tools have been strengthened further. Creating rollover buttons - along with the necessary HTML and JavaScript - is simple and straightforward. You can also export to Flash and Xara X seamlessly integrates with Macromedia's Dreamweaver web design product.

Customer Reviews

Easy, Powerful and Intuitive
Most software will try and tell you it is easy to use, powerful, and intuitive.
Xara is, in my opinion (having been a dedicated user since version 1.5), the ONLY graphics package that can genuinely make all three claims. It is very "un-clunky", without the multitude of modes and menus that the likes of Adobe and Macromedia are prone to: in Xara, if you want to manipulate an object, you switch to the select tool, select the object, and drag, resize, flip, change colour, change line width, etc, etc to your heart's content. All manoeuvres are like this ... as I said, Easy, Powerful, and Intuitive!

Most Flawless Program Ever Written?
I have been using Xara X along with many other applications in 3D, CAD & commercial graphics - both Mac and PC, and there is nothing as fast, nothing as memory efficient, nothing so versatile as Xara X.
I have even been using it for creating 3D style visuals in 2D that would have taken 10x longer in 3D with a similar result.
Anyone knowledgable I have demonstrated this program for has bought it. I have printed Xara Files up to 40 ft wide with perfect quality to small scale work like websites - just with this program and have found a plethora of other uses for it.
If you are not impressed by this simple, enjoyable, astonishingly powerful application - you don't know your apples from your oranges.

Xara, I wouldn't be without it
I have been using Xara since the beta version and as a professional designer I have all the other industry standard packages. My problem with them is why if I can do the same thing in Xara in a fraction of the time would I bother trawling through multiple levels of menus to use them. Creativity doesn't need to be slowed down or made hard work, we can teach a school kid on work experience to use it in a day. In the end it's a drawing package, its not bogged down trying to be a page layout suite, at what it is it's the best