Open Source Xara Xtreme

Some­one alluded to this on a mail­ing list I’m a mem­ber of (Roy Schestowitz, on lyx-users), and, being the day before an exam and all, I couldn’t help but check it out. I remem­ber play­ing with Xara tools back in the day of bun­dled garbage on com­puter mag­a­zine CDs (that was also my first brush with a full ver­sion of Flash, at ver­sion 3, but that’s another story. I’d played with Future­S­plash some­time before then, too.) — it looks as though it’s come a long way.

I’ve used Sodipodi on Linux to do some use­ful things, but haven’t had a chance to play around with Inkscape yet… though it looks sim­i­lar, maybe even a fork? Def­i­nitely on the to-do list. Any­way, the folks at Xara want peo­ple to spread the word they’ve got a cool GPL’d app com­ing for the Linux desk­top (Mac OS too), and I think it’s a great thing for the Open Source com­mu­nity, which is why I’m pimp­ing it here.

There’s a ver­sion on their xaraxtreme.org site that is func­tional already, though it only views files at present… edit­ing func­tion­al­ity is… pre­sum­ably some way off.

I think if some­one offered Pan­tone swatches for sale with a good qual­ity open-source app, I’d go for it. Their busi­ness model seems solid enough after they’ve got it off the ground, but only time will tell. One hopes they stay around, because this appears to be a far bet­ter con­tri­bu­tion than Corel’s abortive attempts to launch a graph­ics app on the Linux desk­top (closed source, of course — Photo-PAINT 9, if I recall cor­rectly. It was a RAM-guzzling beast that I may have even enjoyed at the time — circa 2000 — had it not been for the fact that I was try­ing to run it on a middle-of-the-road Pen­tium (1) with 32MB of RAM) before their silent acqui­es­cence was pur­chased by Microsoft.

If noth­ing else, it’ll stir up the space a lit­tle bit and hope­fully the men­tion of open source will get otherwise-complacent Adobe inno­vat­ing again in the Mac space… or, alter­na­tively, it could go the other way and they might just ditch that plat­form alto­gether in favour of Win­dows, though I doubt it.

*Lis­tens as cre­atives the world over unite and raise arms in an unprece­dented rev­o­lu­tion against a soft­ware com­pany. Hey, it could happen.*