Review: Xara X

Xara, the English company that previously created such quality products as Webster, Webstyle, and Xara3D, has, with the release of X, perhaps come up with its best product yet.

Those familiar with Webster will find Xara X to be quite similar, except that it offers many features that had prevented Webster from being an outstanding product rather than a good one.

Does that mean X is outstanding? Yes. The reason for the high praise is not only the options it offers, but the speed and ease with which it gets the job done, the quality of output, and its versatility.

From a drawing standpoint, X offers such features as pressure sensitive brushes, soft shadows, real-time anti-aliasing and transparency for vector and bitmap graphics, bevels, contours, gradient fills, and feathering. Most of these can be applied with no more than a couple of mouse clicks.

From a photo standpoint, X offers bitmap tracing and enhancement filters. Some of those filters are included, others can be made within the program, and still others can be imported from external creators. X's Web site lists known filters that will (including Kai's Power Tools 5) or will not work (Alien Skin Eye Candy 3.0 or 3.1) with the program.

X enables users to make rollover buttons, image maps, and animations from within the program — it generates the HTML and JavaScript coding needed. Graphics are optimized and can be exported to Flash and all major Web-compatible extensions.

While artistic talent does not come with the program, it is made such that those lacking those abilities can still produce professional looking results with relative ease.

The details:

• Users can create a standalone button or design a fully functional interactive navigation bar. Make one button and duplicate it as often as needed, change the type on the face, and assign an appearance for each state (normal, selected, pressed).
• Files created in X can be exported in Macromedia Flash's .swf format, then imported into a Flash movie. It remains scalable so that it can be changed within Flash.
• Making image maps is a snap. Create the drawing, select a section and assign a URL to it, then export it and the accompanying HTML the program creates to make your interactive map.
• Image slicing is another great feature. Should users require a large image for their Web site, slicing it into several pieces can enable it to load quicker. Additionally, a URL can be assigned to particular pieces, converting into an image map, too.
• Animation is easy, using .gifs to create these one frame at a time. Using X's frame gallery, each frame of animated .gifs can be controlled individually, including transparency.
• Linked stretching is another benefit offered in the program. Make a button link, and the button will stretch so that the type can be applied as needed, rather than have to be squeezed into a set size.

Beyond that, the program offers several galleries from which users may choose even more options, either from the Xara site online or from the program's CD. The image on the right is an example of what can be done to a simple line from within the "Line Gallery."

Drawings and text can be resized simply by dragging a corner marker. They can also be flipped horizontally or vertically, change colors, corners rounded, borders resized, or reshaped or moulded all at the click of a button. Once the drawing is generally reshaped, users can select nodes to fine-tune the reshaping.

X is definitely a program worthy of consideration for any Web developer. All of the features it offers can be found elsewhere, but the bottom line is that X has most of them and they work better here than in other places.