​Xara recently announced that it planned to make its flagship product Xara Xtreme available as open-source under GPL license. At the Libre Graphics meeting in Lyon on 18th March, Xara announced that, after the last few months of readying the source code, it has now made the first release of the majority of the Xara LX source code for public download.

• All source code compiles under GCC and has been made 32-bit and 64-bit compatible.
• The framework, based on WXWidgets, replacing the Windows MFC framework is largely done and works very well.
• It loads and renders Xar files and demonstrates the speed and quality of the Xara rendering.
• Working tools and functions include:
  • Select an object, scale, and drag it on the page. Delete, group, ungroup, duplicate objects. Undo and redo work.
  • Zoom and pan tools work with a really slick Windows update
  • Xara is making its subversion server public so that anyone can now download the source code and compile.

Commenting on Xara's goals, Mark Shuttleworth, founder of Ubuntu Linux and the second space tourist, says: "The announcement by the Xara team positions them well for the growing wave of momentum behind free and open source software. In each market sector, there is emerging a dominant open source application to challenge the existing dominant proprietary application. I wish the Xara team every success in their efforts to ensure that Xara becomes the leading open source graphics application, and to craft a strong community and business around that work."

Xara is inviting contributors to help progress the Linux port. "Xara has done all the ground-work and we hope that we can find contributors who can spare some time to help bring, what we believe, will be the most advanced graphics tool, to the Linux platform," says CEO Charles Moir. "We hope and intend this product to be a flagship Linux application, bringing graphics capabilities that more than compete with the best available on Windows and the Mac to the Linux platform. We hope development progress will accelerate now that we've made code available under GPL."

Demo movie

If you want to see what Xara Xtreme can do, there are demo movies available in various formats here

Demo download

You can find more details here

Source code download

Editors

For further details please contact: Nova Fisher, Communications Director, [email protected] [email protected]

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About Xara Group Ltd Xara has been at the cutting edge of software design since 1981, specializing in creative design and publishing solutions, with award winning titles from the era of the BBC Micro right up to and including the latest cloud based, online services. Innovations have included technology firsts such as the first real time anti-aliasing & transparency controls, and spell check as you type. Xara Cloud is the latest venture, the culmination of decades in software design for the publishing industry. You can find more information about the latest updates on the website of our official worldwide reseller magix.com.

About MAGIX MAGIX has been a leading international provider of high-quality software, online services and digital content for multimedia communications since 1993. The MAGIX product range is targeted towards both laymen and professionals alike, going beyond the PC platform to include seamlessly integrated online and mobile applications. MAGIX operates internationally from branches in the USA, Canada, the UK, France, Italy and the Netherlands.