Product Reviews

Creative PC projects are rarely limited to one medium. If you're producing a website, you'll often need to edit photos and design buttons as well as creating HTML pages; video-editing projects often call on image and audio editing skills too. As such, a complete suite of creative software makes a lot of sense. The various modules should share a common interface that makes them easier to learn, and buying them together will work out better value. Not everyone can afford a professional option such as Adobe's Creative Suite, but Magix hopes to fill the gap.

Star of the show is Xtreme Graphic Designer, a modified version of Xara Xtreme 3 (Magix bought Xara, a British software company, earlier this year). This excellent vector drawing software is ideal for graphics such as buttons and logos, created with a combination of line drawing and colour or texture fills. Handles on the lines make it easy to generate elegant curves in ways that aren't practical when working with bitmaps.

Designer genes

Like the best vector drawing software, such as Adobe Illustrator and CorelDRAW, Xtreme Graphic Designer has plenty of additional features, including drop shadows, bevels and the ability to morph from one graphic to another. However, unlike its more expensive rivals, it presents its features in a way that won't be intimidating for new users. Previews are incredibly quick to redraw, and update continuously rather than after you've finished adjusting a setting. For example, dragging the mouse to specify the start and end point of a gradient fill (fading from one colour to another) shows the result

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as soon as you begin to drag rather than after you release the button. This highly responsive interface makes the software a pleasure to use.

Xtreme Graphic Designer is undoubtedly an excellent program, but a few key features are missing compared to Xara Xtreme 3 (available for $79 from www.xara.com). Magix's version can't export as Flash, which would be an excellent choice for incorporating vector graphic in websites. The omission of Xara's PDF export and advanced text functions makes Xtreme Graphic Designer less suitable for desktop publishing.

The rest of the suite is mostly disappointing. Xtreme Photo Designer 7 is an image editor that attempts to cater for both beginners and advanced users with a range of simple task-oriented functions and powerful effects. Sadly, we found it to be extremely awkward to use, and its handling of layers utterly baffling.

For simple photo tweaks, the photo manager module is a better bet. An Optimise button reveals easy fixes for common problems such as colour casts and red eye. It's easy to straighten photos by drawing what should be a horizontal line across them, but resizing is more convoluted. The media organising features are even more confusing, with too many irrelevant buttons cluttering the interface and making the more useful functions tricky to find. Sorting photos by date proved fairly fruitless. The software can organise and play audio and video files, but after double-clicking an MP3 to play it, it took us ages to find the Stop button in a hidden side panel.

Movie madness

Xtreme Movies on CD & DVD handles video-related tasks, but far from being a creative tool it simply takes video clips from a range of sources and puts them onto disc. Basic video editing tools are included, but it's not possible to export to anything except DVD, which makes it a no-go for most creative projects. Xtreme Photo & Videoshow Deluxe generates animated slideshows and burns them to CD or DVD in a range of formats. It's straightforward and effective if you're willing to gloss over some of its more confusing options, but it's so similar to Xtreme Movies on CD & DVD that we can't understand why Magix hasn't integrated the two.