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A lot is accomplished with various flavors of drag-and-drop, such as the somewhat obvious color changes (drop a color onto an object to change its fill color). It take a little longer to discover the multiple ways the program uses drag-and-drop, such as an icon change when you drop a color on an object's outline or to adjust the shade of a bevel.
There's a lot you can do with a restrained hand on the mouse button, but I'm not sure I know how to keep from twiddling the knobs. The main features in Xara Xtreme include bevels, transparency, shadows, fills, blends, perspective changes (they call these moulds) -- and, of course, the creation of boxes, ellipses, lines, and freeland widgets and manipulation of digital photos. The tools are along the left side of the screen; two lines at the top of the screen present a context-sensitive menu of controls for the way those options operate. For example, the default choice for transparency is linear; one of the drop-down boxes at the top gives you many other ways for the transparency to be applied, such as elliptical or fractal clouds.
You might have thought you'd fix up that photo from the corporate shindig in a few minutes, but I can pretty well guarantee you'll have too much fun fiddling with it to go back to work on your mundane spreadsheet. (If all you want to do is fix up a photo, you can use Xara's standalone photo editor -- included with Xara Xtreme -- to fix red-eye and such. It's nice and simple, but the main application is much more engaging.)
| Text can be modified, twisted, and blended just like any other object. |
That tool list barely scratches the surface of what the software offers. If you need a feature, I dare say that it's in here somewhere. New in this version are Live Effects tools, which allow Adobe Photoshop and Xara plug-in effects to be applied to both vector graphics and photos, and a PDF export tool that promises to create "super-clean, very compact PDF files" with graduated color fills as well as flat- and graduated-transparency. I'm not enough of a graphics expert to judge these features, so I'll take their word for it.
I'm happy to do so, since I'm impressed by the many features I do understand -- not the least of which is this application's speed. My primary Windows computer is a business class laptop, not a speed demon purchased for high-end graphics work. Xara Xtreme had near-instant response for everything I threw at it.
All those features are a lot to take in, however. To help you get started, the program includes dozens of Camtasia movies -- most of which are about a minute long, though a few overview ones last a lot longer -- to demonstrate the use of each tool. They're certainly worth watching, because each feature has a lot more depth than is immediately apparent. ("Ah! That's how you feather an image to merge them more gracefully! I see how to do it now!")
| Powerful features give your good taste free reign. Assuming you have any, which clearly isn't the case for me. |
But the problem is: I needed to watch every video. I could do some basic fiddling around without paying attention to the documentation, but it didn't take long before I wanted to do something different. (How can I crop this photo so that the tree no longer appears to be growing out of her head?) The onboard training does have that information, and I'm sure I'd pick it up before long. If I spent a week using this software full-time, I would find Xara Xtreme incredibly easy to use. Right-clicking is more convenient than an obscure dialog box, after all.
But "easy to use" is not the same as "easy to learn," as this application demonstrates. I dare say that, if I picked up Xara Xtreme two months from now, I could fling together a few pieces of clipart for a business card. If I had even a modest bit more skill with graphics, I could create buttons for a web page. But if I wanted to use Xara Xtreme for the most casual use, I'd have to spend a few hours refreshing my knowledge, because not everything is obvious. For example, I found a way to tile a circle with a photo; but only a day later, I can't remember how.
That puts me in the awkward position of criticizing an application because it's too good at what it does. In reality, my difficulty with the software is a sort of enforced and frustrated laziness, because I know I'm never going to get good enough at using it to take advantage of what it offers, and my modest needs don't let me justify taking the time to become an expert. If my boss dropped a project on my desk that required I finish it -- graphics and all -- by the end of the day, I'm not certain that my Xara Xtreme expertise would let me finish it by the deadline.
On the other hand, if you expect to spend a significant part of your time creating or modifying business or creative graphics, Xara Xtreme is a fine choice. For those of us who want a tasteful Swiss Army knife, it may be too much to handle.
The Xara Group Ltd
Xara Xtreme
CD Only: $79 US
Retail Box Version (includes Xara Xone tutorials and PDF manual): $89 US
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Esther Schindler has been writing about technology professionally since 1992, and her byline has appeared in dozens of IT publications. She's optimized compilers, owned a computer store, taught corporate training classes, moderated online communities, run computer user groups, and, in her spare time, written a few books. You can reach her at [email protected].Related Sites: Digital Producer , Digital Media Designer , Test Site , IT Business Net , ProductivityApps (IBN)
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