Chris Dickman (bio)

I was recently reminded by how reliant we have become on Adobe applications while editing an interview on Graphics.com with veteran Photoshop plugin developer Harald Heim. I've known Harald for almost a decade and have watched his one-man shop for plugins evolve from creating freeware for Windows users to his current line of well-received commercial cross-platform photo correction tools. Harald is quite right when he states that, "Plugins bring a lot of variety to the image editing business. The people who work for the big companies can't think of everything, so it helps a lot to get new creative input into the market." Harald can afford to price his products competively by remaining focussed on what he does best—staying small and creating new Windows plugins. "I don't have any motivation to dive into Mac programming, so I hired a company to do it for me. Concentrating only on the Windows versions gives me more time to develop new products."

With the recent arrival of the public beta of Photoshop CS3, all eyes in the graphics and design world turned as one to focus on the latest iteration of what has become an irreplaceable tool for visual creatives. While this was to be expected, the timing was less than ideal for one small British developer of graphics applications, which had released its flagship Xara Xtreme product in a Pro version just days earlier and was trying to get as much attention for it as possible. It was another reminder of the concentration of power in the domain of graphics and publishing applications, and of how difficult it is for any but the largest, most established developers to provide real alternatives. After all, even Microsoft is working overtime to get a toehold for its Expression line of Web creation and graphics tools.

I last covered Xara when the firm released an Open Source version of its Xara illustration application, which was another novel twist in what has been a long history. I won't rehash that here, but Xara's namesake Windows vector drawing program has been around almost as long as Illustrator. While there's no arguing that Xara is a fast, powerful, modestly-priced tool for creating illustrations, with many innovations and "firsts" to its name, as a standalone Windows application from a small English developer it has remained in the shadow of Illustrator. The result has been that over the years Xara Corp. has repositioned it several times in an attempt to broaden its market share.

When it comes to Xara, the first person to turn to for the lowdown is Gary Priester, a longtime devotee with 35 years of experience as an advertising art director and graphic designer. Gary is the man behind the XaraXone, which provides tutorials, tips and tricks, a forum and artist profiles for the Xara community. The recently-released Pro version is the latest iteration of this ongoing repositioning, adding many features that were missing from the earlier version, Xara Xtreme. Xtreme was an attempt to expand the user base by offering it at a very affordable price, but at the expense of leaving out a number of professional-level features. I asked Gary for his thoughts on the new Pro version.

"Xara Xtreme Pro is a great leap forward for Xara users, adding many features that were missing from the lighter version—Xara Xtreme—such as PANTONE color libraries, CMYK color separation previews and imagesetting tools. These are back in Pro, which has been greatly beefed up for publishing design as well as providing Flash animation capabilities for Web designers who prefer to use Xara's superior drawing tools. It continues to be, in my opinion, the best illustration application with the most well-thought-out set of intuitive interactive tools in the industry."

Output has always been the cross that Windows users have had to bear in a Mac-centric service bureau world, to the point that Corel Corp. at one point created a Mac version of its CorelDRAW illustration app simply to facilitate service bureau output (not a winning strategy, as it turned out). The rise of PDF has made this less of an issue and Pro lets users tune their PDF documents to meet the demands of the pre-press and printing industry. Gary points that "Pro now also automatically converts Xara RGB documents into CMYK PDF/X documents, including all transparency, bevels and soft shadows, which in Xara Xtreme had been treated as RGB objects, causing PDF files to fail the Adobe PDF/X validation tests."

While Gary sees Xara from the perspective of an illustration application, the Pro release was notable for its inclusion of both Flash creation and page layout capabilities. When I asked Xara CEO Charles Moir about this, he pointed out that there was a historical precedent in the firm's early Xara Studio product: "The original goal of Xara Studio when first released was that it combined the full power of our Quark-competing DTP package called Impression and the full capabilities of Artworks, our graphics software. We just never got around to the DTP side but now we're starting to add more of that. Are we going to continue to add DTP capabilities? Yes. Because I think they are a basic part of graphic design/document design. We like the idea simply because we produce things like brochures that do combine a lot of graphics and text, and are multi-page. And I really do believe it's nuts to have to use two separate programs to do this and constantly switch between them."

When it comes to the new Flash authoring capabilities, Charles is just as emphatic: "I get a very clear and consistent message that people hate Flash authoring tools. They were weird from the day Flash was FutureSplash and they've not got much better. Secondly, Adobe's Flash authoring application is now incredibly expensive—in fact a complete rip off in my opinion (as is Illustrator, InDesign, Photoshop and QuarkXPress—there is no justification in charging that sort of money and selling that sort of volume). We're certainly not claiming we're a substitute for Flash Professional 8 for serious professional animators—they need and should use that package. Xara's Flash feature is an answer to that 90% of graphic designers that a) simply can't face the pain of learning Flash, b) can't afford or justify the cost of Flash Professional just to create some simple Flash banners c) do want something that much simpler and cost effective (but on the other hand much more flexible than simple-Template based Flash tools)."

The latest spin on Xara indicates how tricky it is to not only hold onto your existing customer base but grow it, since there's always the risk that the hardcore illustrators who have long been the program's mainstay will turn a cold shoulder to Flash and page layout functionality. But when you're small, you have to keep pitching to stay in the game. While Xara isn't for everyone, it does enough things very well that if you create graphics in a Windows environment, the trial version is well worth putting through its paces. Hopefully there will always be a place for smaller developers in the world of graphics and publishing.

Chris Dickman
Graphics.com