Open Source Xara Xtreme
19 Oct 2005Someone 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.*