I was asked to review the latest release of Xara’s graphic design software, Xara Designer Pro 6. Since I’ve been a fan of the application for a while, I was happy to oblige. I ought to disclose that Xara sent me a free key.
You might not realise it, but Xara is one of the real grandaddies of software development, having been formed in the UK in 1981. Nowadays, the company is owned by the German Magic AG group, though they’re still based in Hemel Hempstead, north of London. Over the years, they’ve produced all sorts of stuff: they made Snake, Wordwise and Space Invaders for the BBC Micro, for example, and continued to support the Archimedes range of education-focused computers over the 90s.
Since 1994, however, they’ve been best-known for their Windows-based design software. It’s always had a couple of advantages over the ‘industry standard’ software tools, which remain as true now as they were 15 years ago:
- it’s really fast. That’s less of a concern nowadays, under most circumstances, but until recently, doing anything with high-res photos was a pain in the neck;
- mixing photos and vectors is really easy. While it’s predominantly a vector illustration package, it’s always been possible to edit photos in place, non-destructively;
- it’s really inexpensive. The basic version costs £69, with the pro version costing £249. Adobe and Quark might sell you a beermat for that sort of money.
So what’s new in this version? For me, three things in particular. The last version – Xara Xtreme – introduced web page design options: these are now much improved. Second, Photo-editing no longer requires separate applications for 90% of what most people want to do. Third, working with longer chunks of text is a lot more powerful. There’s dozens of other things – you can check the list on the site.
It also looks very smart indeed.
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