Product Reviews

Xara isn't quite a household name like Corel or Adobe, but this British company has built a loyal following for its unique graphics software, and after 12 years in a highly competitive business it's clearly got something. That something is speed. Compared to other graphics programs, Xara is blisteringly fast.

Not that you'd guess it when the program first loads. The Xara interface has changed little over the years, and now looks rather old-fashioned. But what matters is how well it works, and thanks to features such as its context-sensitive property bar and focused docker windows, it's surprisingly streamlined and efficient in use.

The real key to Xara's productivity - and creativity - is its range of hands-on tools. In rival programs, advanced effects such as graduated transparencies, contours, blends, drop shadows and bevels are generally awkward to set up and sometimes slow to render. In Xara, you just drag on the object with the associated tool: the effect is immediately applied and updates in real time.

This latest release sees a number of significant additions and enhancements. First up is the new Photo tool. Though it's basically a vector drawing program (like CorelDRAW or Serif DrawPlus), Xara has always offered an image editing function as well. This has now been made fully interactive and brought into line with Xara's other effects. Select Clip mode and you can quickly crop images that you've incorporated into your artwork. Select Enhance mode and you can set

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brightness, contrast, saturation and sharpness, all in real time. There's red-eye removal and the ability to create panoramas from sets of photos, plus a range of new artistic, deformation and colour filters applied with the Plug-In tool. As with the Photo tool, these are non-destructive, meaning you can always edit or remove the effects later.

The other major addition is Extrude. Drag on any existing 2D shape and it springs to 3D life, rotating in space. Now drag on its edge and you can control the depth of its extrusion. Switch to the Property bar and you can choose between a range of bevel types and toggle the display of lights, which can be interactively repositioned, with the object's appearance updating in real time.

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Xara has even managed to extend its real time handling to text. Create and select some text with the Text tool, and if you hover over a typeface name in the Property bar's drop-down font list, the font previews on your artwork. Dragging the size slider interactively changes the text size. Also of note is 'liquid text'. As in a desktop publishing program, you can set an object in your layout (such as a picture) to repel text. As you move it around, the text runs around it while you watch.

Alongside these new tools, Xara Xtreme 4 adds a very important capability: support for multiple pages. This was previously limited to the high-end edition, Xara Xtreme Pro, at around three times the price. This makes DTP-style publications a possibility, though for advanced print capabilities, such as colour separation for commercial printing, you'll still need to upgrade to the Pro version.

On the other hand, if you're producing artwork for the web, Xara Xtreme offers all you need to produce high-impact graphics-intensive layouts. And version 4 builds on this with the ability to output entire pages and sites to XHTML and CSS.

This is a program that's both creatively rewarding and hugely enjoyable. When all this power can be had for under £50, it's clear that Xara Xtreme deserves to be better known.