Xara releases the source

Xara Xtreme is yet another drawing and image composition tool for the Windows platform. A few months ago, Xara announced that it would branch out and make this application available for Mac OS and Linux platforms as well. Even better, it would be released under the GNU GPL. The result, it was said, would be a top-quality drawing tool for the free software community.

The first part of that promise has now been fulfilled: the source code is now available for the project now known as Xara LX. This version of Xara, it turns out, is a GTK+ application by way of wxWidgets. It comes with plenty of warnings: many of the features are not yet ported, and the whole thing can be somewhat unstable. But, the tool is now out there for people to play with.

Your editor has a hard time resisting an invitation like that. The unstable Xara LX build ran nicely, and it was easy to put together a simple drawing with features like transparency and blending. It was also not particularly hard to make the whole thing crash. But, suitable warnings had been given; this tool is not being provided for production use at this time. For an example of what can be done by users who know what they are doing, see this screenshots page.

Once it stabilizes, the Linux community should have another nice drawing package in its toolbox. Linux may not yet be poised to displace proprietary packages from the systems used by professional artists, but things are clearly headed in the right direction. With tools like the Gimp, Inkscape, Krita, and, now, Xara LX, we are getting closer to the day when there is no need to use those other, proprietary platforms even for the most demanding graphical tasks.

---

(Log in to post comments)