Labs

Xara has been through quite a few changes during its life, but this brand new release could be the most significant. We tested a late beta version, but the finished product should be available by the time you read this. It's a unique and remarkable drawing program, but perhaps the most exciting feature is on the outside of the box. Having realised that Xara has the potential to appeal to a much wider pool of users, its makers have slashed the price in half.

Like its predecessors, Xara Xtreme is billed as "the world's fastest drawing program", and it's easy to believe. Compared with rivals the program is amazingly responsive, and it actually takes a few minutes to get used to the fact that you don't have to wait after you make a change or finish dragging an object around. Even the auto-trace function finishes before you realise it's started.

General drawing and manipulation tools are well covered, and bezier editing is less clumsy here than it is in CorelDraw. A few more preset shapes would be useful, but you can do more with polygons by tweaking their stellation and offset interactively to produce petal and pinwheel effects. Transparency is supported using a variation on the lens method adopted by all the programs except Illustrator, and both this and the excellent range of multi-point gradient fills are applied interactively by dragging across an object. Similarly, you can apply a soft shadow to an object simply by dragging away from it with the Shadow tool, which can also generate realistic 'floor' shadows, as if the selected shape were sitting on a horizontal surface. Another clever trick is linked to stretching, which extends one object to match another. For example, when you add text to a web button, the button can grow automatically to accommodate it.

Xara is now compatible with Photoshop plug-ins, which you can apply to objects as raster effects. Quite a few will be supplied, including half a dozen of the legendary Alien Skin effects and selections from Mehdi, Redfield and Xero, and you can add your own from the vast number available elsewhere.

Although

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you can work only on a single page, this can be set up as a double-page spread. You can export to PDF, and Xara even supports the CMYK TIFF format for graphics used in DTP projects. A consequence of the price drop, however, is that the prepress features previously included, such as separation previews, have been taken out. These are likely to return in a premium version later.

As in DrawPlus, documents can be set up for animation, which means they have frames rather than layers; the results can be exported as Flash or animated GIF. You can add hyperlinks to objects and create image maps, and there's even a dedicated tool for making navigation bars, complete with rollovers.

Unlike DrawPlus, Xara is cleverly designed to help you keep track of colours within your artwork and adjust them globally when required. It's easy to create named colours, apply them to objects and then edit the preset to change all the objects at once. You can also link sets of colours so that altering one changes the rest. This is smarter than the Tint facility in other programs.

What's missing, however, is an object attributes palette, which would enable you to inspect and edit all aspects of an object's appearance and save them for later use. You can copy the basic attributes of one object to another, but there's no direct way of reproducing its total appearance. This in turn means there's no palette of instant effects to play with, which would have made the program seem even more accessible.

On the other hand, there are Gallery palettes featuring colours, textures, clip art and more. These are packed with thousands of ready-made items, and you can add more simply by clicking a Get... button that downloads a selection of whatever new content is available online from Xara.

Xara Xtreme comes with Picture Editor, a photo enhancement module that launches when you double-click any image you've imported. This provides basic corrections such as cropping, red-eye removal, brightness, contrast and saturation, plus an interesting bump map (emboss) filter and access to whatever Photoshop plug-ins are installed. It's very neatly presented, and more advanced features are promised for the future.

At this price, Xara Xtreme is almost an obligatory buy even for users with only a passing interest in drawing software. Unless you have a specific reason to choose a more advanced package, it's an excellent way into vector graphics and includes some useful bitmap tools. The company's enthusiasm, together with Xara's thriving community of power users and add-on developers, should help to ensure that anything the program can't do now, it will be able to soon.