Feature: Xara Xtreme for Linux has been announced and core-code beta delivered
Motivation: Xara has open sourced the code for Xara Xtreme on Linux

As our review of Xara Xtreme points out this is the leading code for doing photo composition work where users combine vector and bitmap graphics in Front Cover caliber designs. The attraction of Xara Xtreme is threefold:
1)a fast graphics engine renders huge 20-50MB bitmaps with complex vectors very quickly;
2)all of the basic graphic manipulations are live, easy-to-use drag and drop operations;
3)integration of vector with bitmap plus transparency, anti-aliasing and plugins is powerful. And the price is right too - less than $100 for bitmap plus vector graphics with speedy processing power that Adobe, Corel, Ulead and others could only wish for.

The screenshot above shows the Windows version of Xara Xtreme in which a bitmap background is combined with several vector elements. This in turn, with Live Effects, would allow the application of Eye Candy's Adobe plugin or Flaming Pear's Aetherize plugin to groups of layers. This is the original program.

What Xara has done is rewritten Xara in 32 and 64 bit versions for Linux using the GCC compiler. Xara has open sourced that code and made it available here. Switching from Microsoft's MFC framework to the WXWidgets has produced a starting module for Xara Xtreme that does the following basic operations:

1)Reads and writes XAR files allowing manipulation of XAR images;
2)Proof of concept of Xara underlying data structures for speed of operations in Linux;
3)Specifically implemented core operations for:
   a)a graphic object can be selected, moved, deleted , panned and zoomed with speed;
   b)graphic objects can be grouped, ungrouped, moved, and duplicated;
   c)an undo, redo system has been put in place.
Now Xara is inviting the open source community to help participate in the process of completing the port to Linux. Xara Xtreme - Linux is available under a GPL license. The party to contact at Xara is here and the source code can be found here.

It would appear that this is an opportunity to get on board a very high caliber graphics development project for developers in the graphics world. Xara appears to be taking a page from MySQL, JBoss, and other opensourcers and is making a move to become the dominate Vector+Bitmap open source development team to compliment the GIMP bitmap project. I suspect a few graduate level university courses in graphics programming will find this project to be of interest - as would a few interlopers from perhaps Corel or Adobe.

Xara is so good, we will follow this open sourcing endeavor with interest and report back to photofinishers on how it progresses.