Product Name: Xara Xtreme 4
Company: Xara
Street Price: $89 US
Discounts: Owners of other Xara products or previous versions can obtain substantial discounts on purchase.
The reviewer has given this software a rating of 5 out of 5 stars!
My favorite commercial illustration program continues to be Xara’s Xtreme. All of my favorite tools for layering control, gradients, transparencies, and bevels remain with some improvements here and there. The function of some of the tools and toolbars in themselves had changed a bit, which did take some adjustment. CMYK separation exports are also is gone in this version, but still available in the Pro version. Again, not huge issues for someone like me whose work focus is now more on the field of web development than graphic design. Pro retails for $249, but owners of other Xara products can usually obtain a discount.
A major addition in this version is the inclusion of 3D extrudes tools. There is a totally revolutionized photo-handling tool, which is really going to give Adobe the run for their money. I loaded into Xtreme a very high-resolution photo (12 megapixels) and was able to observe real-time alterations to the image such as brightness and level adjustments, rotation, and cropping. (The most common tasks someone does on photo images.) Photoshop can do these tasks, of course, but waiting for the change to be visible takes 10 to 15 seconds depending on speed of the machine’s processor and memory. The rendering engine within Xtreme continues to be the fastest one around, with the result being reduced design time. An even better aspect of how Xtreme functions is in how the original image file itself is not changed. This, coupled with Xtreme’s almost unlimited ‘undo’ cycle to revert something back to a previous state, allows for more ‘what if’ creative freedom.
One improvement that quickly caught my eye was the revamped font tool. The Live Preview function built into this alters the selected text object on the fly as you scroll down the list of any fonts you have installed. I expect this change alone will be timesaving, as I had to ‘mouse’ my way through my list of installed fonts testing and checking as I go.
The upgrade that interested me the most, however, was the new integrated WYSIWYG web page layout tool. Creating templates, themes, or skins for web programs (content management systems or CMS) has been my primary usage of Xtreme for some time. The notes for this upgrade promised improved CSS code generation with appropriately applied positioning. Included within the clipart section are a few design suggestions for pages in single, two, three, and gallery layouts containing sample text and graphics. When doing such work, my intent is to follow existing web standards for code established by the W3C (International organization controlling standards for web code).
To test these improvements, I opened the three-column Serenity page from within the clipart section. After exporting the graphics and code to a web page, the design looked exactly as it had while within Xtreme; a fixed-width three column layout. This rendered perfectly within IE7, FireFox 3, and Opera 7.5. Validating the code generated did produce some minor markup (HTML, XHTML) errors but nothing significant. The CSS passed without a single error. Overall, huge improvements in web page code generation from the previous Xtreme version I tested!
Knowing some may complain that I am ignoring the importance of accessibility compliance let me address that matter. Analysis of this kind focuses far more on the code for content itself, rather than on that used to define the look of a page. Xtreme’s does follow the best practices method of separating presentational markup from that of content, which should make the task of ensuring compliance with accessibility guidelines or regulations easier.
Before I close this review, I cannot pass up mentioning SVG (scalable vector graphics) support within Xtreme. This open source image format has been in development by W3C since 1999. However, it did not get a lot of attention within the web development community until mobile technologies (cell phones, PDA devices, etc.) began incorporating support for it. Although Xara began including support for SVG with the release of v3.2 of Xtreme, it is still impossible to export sliced images to this format. Like many other users of Xara, as documented through the Talkgraphics forum, I hope to see increased support for this format.
In summary, those looking for a high-quality commercial graphic design product need look no further than Xara’s Xtreme. The product’s performance and rich feature set makes it a standout for producing output optimized for the web, with – hopefully – greater support for SVG yet to come. Movie tutorials included with the product help on features get new users up and running quickly. New detailed how-to guides appear each month on XaraXone written by experts in how to duplicate featured projects.
© 2008 Irene M. Kraus. Ms. Kraus is a writer, graphic artist and web developer with Design Works Internet in addition to being the President and Webmaster for Computer Erie Bay User Group (CEBUG) based in Erie County, Ohio. 
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 Unported License.
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