Are you the saviours of XARA

[Keith Tomlinson]

Sorry for the pretentious subject. I have been a long time user of
XARA, and even during the years when Corel tried to kill XARA, I have
never been as cynical and pessimistic as now. Whether it is the input
of MAGIX, their new masters, or perhaps the old school coders having
left but XARA 5.0 and 6.0 seem to be heading in the direction of
generic, toy, graphics crossover apps. a 'jack of all trades master of
none' the old XARA realtime performance is slowly disappearing, and
what do we gain, a trashy new skin and Web Templates.
Is this group going to follow the old school approach of efficient
coding or is it going to throw its lot in with the Bloat brigade that
represents modern application coders?. I ask merely for guidance as to
whether I should try to make a contribution to this group?, or not
waste yours and my time, Cheers Keith

[Paul LeBlanc aka Gemini]

Well, to be completely honest, what we are attempting as an end result
here,
is to port the Cairo rendering engine to XaraLX (which was/is the
Linux version of Xara)
This was a pet-project of Charles Moir back a few years ago, but
issues arose regarding
the code for the CDraw engine.
We have a member who has managed some great progress with work-arounds
to utilize the Cairo
libraries within XaraLX
This is a combination of Xara Lovers (for the Linux Platform) and
includes the founder of the Xarino
project as well.
Our goal, is to maintain the strictly vector end of Xara for this
project, not to load it with web-design properties.
The speed is still maintained when using Cairo, because it is a clean
entry.

In short, this is hopefully going to result in a Xara that you
remember for it's speed and features and all-around awesomeness!!!
Just it will be available under the Linux Platform and not Windows...

I feel sad for the directions Magix has taken the Xara development,
but I won;t comment much further on that. ;-]
You are more than welcome to join us in discussion, etc if you like,
and we'd be glad to have you

Cheers
Paul LeBlanc

[Tom Wright]

Hello,

whilst some of us have been short on time in the past, we are still making progress and of course performance is one of our primary concerns - I would rather clean up / further optimize the existing code rather than adding bloat.

As for competing with the Windows platform, I don't personally use it and at least for the moment think that porting would be slightly pointless (but of course if someone wants to, they are free to).

--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "The XaraLX Development Group" group.
To post to this group, send email to the-xaralx-dev...@googlegroups.com.
To unsubscribe from this group, send email to the-xaralx-developme...@googlegroups.com.

For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/the-xaralx-development-group?hl=en.

--
Thanks,
Tom Wright