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Who's in the corner?
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August 22, 2004 |
Random thought:
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Supersonic Art: Xara X1In October 1947, Chuck Yeager flew an experimental airplane called the X1 at mach 1.1, making it the first aircraft to fly faster than the speed of sound. I don't know if Xara's marketing team chose "X1" as the designation for their latest graphics program for that reason. Regardless, it's appropriate because Xara X1 is all about speed.
Xara has an unusual user interface. It's completely unlike Corel's interface. Completely unlike Adobe Photoshop or Illustrator. Unlike Macromedia Fireworks or Freehand. That's good. Or maybe it's bad. The Photoshop, Illustrator, Fireworks, Freehand, Draw, or Photo-Paint user who buys a copy of Xara X1 will be confused by the way X1 works. That's the situation I've been in when I've tried to use Xara (whether it was [Corel] Xara 2, Xara X or Xara X1). Despite my enthusiasm for other Xara applications, I was never able to quite get my mind around the company's main application. Xara movie-mania to the rescue
My response: Wow! Wow! Wow! Wow! Wow! And so on. I am immensely impressed by the capabilities of Xara X1 and by the company's attempts to explain those capabilities. Besides that, Xara has enticed an acquaintance of mine, designer Gary Priester (or also see Gary's webiste), to write a series of "how-to" articles (more than 100 so far) that show what Xara software can do in capable hands. I've had Xara X1 on my computer for at least 30 days and probably more like 45 (or maybe 60) and finally had the time to give it a serious look. The first thing the program did, when I tried to open it, was tell me that new movies were available and offer to download them. I told the program to do that and I now have about 75 movies that range in length from 30 seconds to several minutes, each describing and illustrating a specific Xara feature. That's in addition to Gary's 100+ lessons on Xara's webiste.
Xara is best known for its ability to create and export website graphics, but it also can create graphics in CMYK colorspace. Unlike applications such as Corel Draw, Xara X1 doesn't seem to have the ability to display CMYK colors. Because of this, many colors display far too bright than they should. One of my clients uses a dark blue (CMYK 100-69-0-0) but Xara's display of this color is a light blue that's almost pure cyan. If there's anything Xara needs to improve, it's the representation of CMYK colors.
But that may not be important because most people who use Xara use it to create website graphics. In that case, WYSIWYG. More or less. There's a difference in gamma between Windows computers and Macs. I own a Mac and a Windows PC, so I see the difference. In general, though, the difference is unimportant. Does it seem to you that CMYK-RGB and Windows-Mac differences make this a lot more complicated than it should be? Well, forget about it. All of it. If you're creating images for the Web, Xara is a very cool application. As I said before, Wow! Wow! Wow! Wow! Wow!
This is a little rainbow bevel that I created in about 30 seconds with Xara X1. Note the "floor" shadow that makes the text look like it's sitting on the floor. There is no other application that makes effects like this so easy, except for Xara's specialized applications like MenuMaker and Webstyle. It's difficult to explain on a radio show (or display on a website like this one) exactly what Xara X1 can do, how quickly it works, and how easy it is to learn once you decide to stop thinking of it as a Corel application, an Adobe application, or a Macromedia application. Xara's developers aren't afraid to do things the way nobody else does them.
Xara X1 is priced at $180 or $190 if you don't own a previous version. If you do own a previous version, the upgrade price could be as little as $40. For more information, visit the Xara webiste. Does this belong on Entertainment Tonight?Back in the old days when we had to walk to school (up hill, in the snow, against the winds, carrying our sibling) in bare feet, music concerts cost $10. Sometimes as much as $20. (Adjusted for inflation, that would be maybe $20 to $40 today.) The musicians walked out and played or sang. The more advanced groups brought their own sound gear and a guy who ran a small audio console. Today, many performers can't do live what's on their CDs because what they did in the studio was then adjusted, tweaked, enhanced, modified, added to, and subtracted from by a legion of technicians and engineers. Today, most performers must travel with a truck full of electronics and a legion of technicians and engineers. This allows them to sound -- on stage -- they way they sound on CD. Except when something goes wrong. Estefan Enterprises (and Clear Channel Entertainment) had to cancel Gloria Estefan's August 9th performance at the American Airlines Center in Dallas. Was Gloria sick? No. The computer was sick. The computer that's responsible for all the special effects had crashed and apparently there was no backup machine. Have a backup. If you're a performer, take along an extra backup machine. For want of a computer that could have been carried along in the truck, the performance was lost. How much money had to be refunded all for want of a computer that might have cost as much as (let's be very generous here) $5000. That's equivalent to 100 of the cheapest tickets for the performance (assuming there were tickets for as little as $50.) How dumb. I was talking with a product manager from Adobe a couple of months ago as he showed me around Adobe's campus in Seattle. He told me that when his division of Adobe moved from California to Washington several years ago, the two sets of servers were loaded onto two different trucks and those two trucks made the journey by different routes. Why? Because Adobe understood that the real value of the company -- all the intellectual property -- was in those two trucks. That's not the entire story, I'm sure. Adobe doubtless had at least one -- and probably several -- copies of the source code files in other locations. The point is this: Computers are easy to replace. Data is not. The value of your computer is the information that's on it, not the hardware. What are you doing to ensure the safety of the data? Mac OS X basics: Quick, easy, & colorfulOsborne has some new books in a series called "QuickSteps" and this is a series that should prove popular for two reasons:
I know I said two reasons. Choose any two of the reasons I've noted and you'll have a successful series of books. Add more and you have what should be a guaranteed success. I've been looking at the Quick Steps book on Mac OS X Panther. After the book sat on my review shelf for a month or more, I picked it up one evening and started reading. In two evenings, I "finished" the book. No, I didn't read every word, but I did look at every page. When I ran across a topic that interested me, I read it. Despite having owned a Mac for several years, some aspects of the operating system are still puzzling and I found several answers that I'd never been able to resolve. These books aren't designed as reference books for experts, or at least that's my impression. I'll need to obtain copies of some of the books that deal with subjects where I have more knowledge (Windows XP, for example, or PowerPoint or Photoshop) to be sure. I suspect that I would find little or no new information about Windows XP, PowerPoint, or Photoshop). But I'm not the target audience for these books. The target audience is people who may be a bit intimidated by their computers but who are willing to try to learn. These books are likely to create an "Oh! I can do that!" response from readers. The pictures, illustrations, and accompanying explanations are just enough to turn a frustrated computer user into a happy computer user. Complaints?On the back cover of the Panther book, there is a screen capture that appears to have been converted to JPG format -- and not very well, at that. The image is a mess of artifacts (look for halos of ink around all of the words in the screen capture). The problem doesn't occur inside the book and this is all I could find to complain about.
For more information, visit the QuickSteps page at Osborne. Nerdly NewsWindows XP SP2 released to manufacturingWe'll soon start seeing service pack 2 for Windows XP. My advice continues to be to wait a bit just to see if it breaks anything unexpected. SP2 includes a firewall, but it's really only half a firewall. You'll still do better with Zone Alarm or one of the other third-party firewall applications. Now's a good time to learn everything you can about SP2 because you will want to install it in a few weeks. The learning process should include reading everything Microsoft has made available as well as visiting websites of your important applications to see if there's an SP2 patch that you need to download. Some security experts claim to have discovered security problems in SP2 even though Microsoft has been uncommonly careful about releasing this patch. XP Home users and network administrators can now obtain SP2 from Microsoft's website. SP2 for XP Pro won't be available until near the end of August. Patches? What patches?Even if you have all current security patches in place, you're not safe. This isn't really news, but the concept was underscored Thursday when a new version of the Download.Ject attack appeared. It can sail right through existing patches. The latest version seems to do what earlier versions did: Install an application that allows "someone" to gain access to the machine. The victim receives an e-mail message or instant message with a link to a website that delivers the malicious code. Advice: Beware. The IM WormIf you're an Instant Messenger user, watch out for worms. A variant of the worm that spread from infected Microsoft Web servers in June is now being used to spread infections via IM from infected websites in Russia, Uruguay, and the US. PivX Solutions of California claims to have intercepted code that looks a lot like some malware that was involved in large attacks in June. Bogus IM messages are designed to entice receivers to visit the infected sites. When they do, their machine is infected. Let us know what you think about this program! Write to: |
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Xara is a British company that licensed its flagship program to Corel several years ago. Corel "borrowed" several of Xara's interactive features for Draw, but didn't do a very good job of marketing Xara. Some of the more skeptical observers considered Corel's approach to be designed more to kill Xara than to promote it, but Xara survived and has been in charge of its own destiny since the end of the "marketing" agreement with Corel. ("Fnargle" is meaningless.)
Xara has provided "movies" to show how the program works and the number of movies hits a critical mass with X1. All of the program's primary functions are revealed in a way that even I can understand what's going on.
In other words: If I want to learn how to use Xara X1, I no longer have any excuses. The "sunset" image at the left took about 60 seconds to create and export. And this is while I'm still trying to figure out how the program works!
The graphic at the left uses Xara's bevel function and illustrates the tip of what is an exceptionally large iceberg from England. The capabilities and the power hidden in Xara's sparse menu structure is impressive. Xara has, in fact, taken Corel's "sparse menu" approach and replicated it in spades. By "sparse menu" I mean that the tool bar appears to contain only a few tools while it in fact is populated with a rich assortment of functions.
The nearby graphic is really ugly, but the ugliness isn't Xara's fault. The program just did what I told it to do. The main point is that Xara handles fills, outlines, transparency, and shadows interactively. There is no competing application that can do what Xara X1 does as quickly as X1 does it. 
