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Xara X

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PCQ Bureau
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Xara X

Price:. $149 for online purchase, $164 for offline purchase



Features: New Shadow effects pressure sensitive brush strokes, export to Flash, rollover and navigation.


Pros: Fast, responsive tool, handles vectors bitmaps well, clean and uncluttered interface


Cons: No version for Mac; doesn’t handle text very well, not meant for professional printing


Contact: Xara 


E-mail: danielle@xara.com


Online purchase: www.xara.com 


Offline purchase: See www.xara.com/ordering/offline.asp
for details






The nifty intuitive graphics program, CorelXara, is now reborn as Xara X. Originally Xara Studio from Xara, it has ended a marketing relationship with Corel and a somewhat unnecessary association with CorelDraw. 

Xara is a vector illustration package but is meant more specifically for Web designers. It was originally, and is still today, an incredibly easy tool to use. Its much-admired interface still has a clean, roomy look, uncluttered by extruding toolbars and dialog boxes. The toolbars are, in fact, action-sensitive–relevant icons and

information boxes appear as you click to use a function. This package is so quick at redrawing and its tools so easy to use–usually just a matter of a click or a drag-n-drop–that it turns out to be great for beginners at design. Although theoretically usable for print graphics, the resolution and pre- cision generated by Xara are more appropriate for screen viewing rather than printing. Other than Web graphics or graphics for multimedia, it can be used to create excellent presentation templates complete with special graphics effects.

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Xara is an excellent vectorizer though it handles bitmaps as well. Old fans will find a few cool additions to the collection of tools. With version X, Xara finally has soft shadows of its own, with contrast, angle, and the degree of softness and even color being adjustable. A slider control lets you feather objects too. There’s a bevel tool with a healthy range of options in bevel styles–rounded, chiseled, pointed, ruffled, or framed. And again, the size, contrast, elevation, and lighting are all adjustable. You can even apply multiple bevel effects if you convert the graphic to an editable shape after each effect. The Mould and Blend tools are now accompanied by a Contour tool. There’s also a Button tool, which is probably one of the quickest ways of creating buttons, rollovers and other navigation elements for Web pages, including the generation of the HTML and JavaScript that you need. Xara X had an upper limit bug with buttons but there’s now a patch you can download from

www.xara.com to fix that and a few other glitches. Frame-by-frame animation is also possible. 

If you’ve used CorelXara, you’ll remember the true transparency and the multi-stage graduated colored fill effects that the package had. These are much the same, but combined with the other tools, offer more design potential. Combining tools in Xara can in fact lead to an endless exploration of special effects to graphics, including to bitmaps. The package also has a speedy bitmap tracer.

Because of the sheer ease and speed with which it responds, this package is a pleasure to use. It has a lot of high-end

hidden features but is, nevertheless, not really appropriate for experienced and professional print-oriented designers as the primary tool to work with. There isn’t even a version for the Mac, which is what most professional designers like to use. It

doesn’t handle text particularly well. While you can apply effects to text, more than a line or two will be cumbersome in this package. There’s a great collection of very good clipart and an extensive font arsenal. 

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Xara’s makers plan to distribute the package online for $149. You can download a trial version of Xara X (or even the older CorelXara) from

www.xara.com. You’ll also find other downloads here: Xara Webstyler, a template-based utility for creating Web graphics like buttons, banners, backgrounds, etc; Xara3D for stylized 3D text, buttons and other elements; and a few other goodies like the Xara Cube screensaver. If you buy Xara X, you get these  extras as trial versions on a set of two CDs, in addition to the complete Xara X. 

Enhancements to Xara X have concentrated on Web development, and while Xara X is best for Web designers, it’s still a little behind sophisticated Web graphics programs, including Macromedia Fireworks. 

Mala Bhargava for PCQ Labs

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What’s good

GoLive has more under its hood than the average user will ever use. But with that power, it hasn't gone power-mad. The features are all easily accessible, and they don't intrude into your consciousness until you need them. A much-improved browser-based help guide lets you find step-by-step advice for particular tasks quickly. But you'll need that help less and less, because GoLive's consistency reinforces what you already know. 

GoLive has excellent site management features, with a single interface, the Site window, handling all site features. The Files tab has all files and folders used in a site, exactly mirroring the contents of the local hard drive's organization. Files can be dragged in and out of this tab, new folders can be created, and objects or items can be moved up or down levels. 

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Templates created by GoLive are reusable. Double-click a Stationery file and GoLive offers to create a new page with the template elements. Drag a Component from the Objects palette onto a page, and it copies the HTML while making a reference to the source. Changing the source updates every instance throughout the site. These two features help create an assembly line for crafting sites and later updating them. Making a Component out of a navigation bar allows changes in the navigation with a few clicks and a Save. 

External URLs and embedded e-mail addresses (using the ‘mailto:’ resource locator, to be technical) share the External tab of the site window, while colors applied as attributes and font sets invoked via the Font tag have respective Colors and Font Sets tabs.

The Design tab contains the most powerful and extensive of the new features: A prototyping tool that allows a designer to easily ‘sketch’ out new sites or sections of existing sites by combining templates, links, and layout tools. Pages and sections can be dragged in, and link relationships can be added (to be placed into real links on the finished pages later).

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The Design tab allows any site to contain multiple designs in progress, and each design can have elements that are separately linked to different areas of an existing site. A simple staging approach allows you to check designs into your existing site, or to recall them if there are problems. This whole structure offers a way to test ideas out quickly and easily, as GoLive tracks all the relationships, rewriting pages and links as you submit and recall designs.

GoLive includes various new site management features including WebDAV (Web-based Distributed Authoring and Versioning). Nowadays such collaborative working is becoming the norm for large sites. For these advanced, multi-author sites it’s also becoming common to tailor not just templates and library items but the program itself. WebDAV is a technology for exchanging and synchronizing files, much like FTP but with substantially more power or, conversely speaking, much like CVS (Concurrent Versioning System) but with substantially less power.

WebDAV works over HTTP. It integrates with Apache and other Web servers, allowing the system administrator to add it as an extra. It supports file locking and shared locks so that several people can work on a website at once while knowing precisely who has which files checked out. It also allows better two-way synchronization so that newer files from the server can be downloaded at the same time that local files can be uploaded. This is one of the best features the software offers.

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GoLive includes a JavaScript-based SDK (Software Development Kit) complete with interpreter and debugger. The idea is to encourage third-party developers to introduce advanced functionality while letting workgroups take control of features such as custom palettes. The SDK is certainly a step in the right direction but it’s by no means as simple as Dreamweaver’s in-built macro recording.

The software also offers a Clean Up Site tool that carries out a number of housekeeping tasks. It can delete any files in the site that aren't referenced from any link descending from the home page or navigational hierarchy; and it can copy files from elsewhere on your local hard drive or network that are referenced by pages but not contained in the site's content folder. 

The Export feature offers three options for copying your site to a new folder. Export also offers ‘stripping’ features that can pull out GoLive-specific HTML, as well as extra white space and comments. 

And what’s not

GoLive lets you plan and build your site before going live, but links must still be handled manually. The software has plenty of options for building and applying Cascading Style Sheets and JavaScript, but it hasn't yet gone that extra mile to provide a full implementation of CSS; nor does it have debugging and programming tools for JavaScript. 

GoLive doesn’t let you use the site design to create automatic navigation links and rollovers in the way that NetObjects Fusion does. Initially this looks possible with the New Pages command which lets you specify automatic links to parent, child or sibling pages. Unfortunately these links aren’t actual but rather ‘pending’. In other words, you will be reminded to add them manually.

GoLive’s use of the Layout grid is great for non-coders and those for whom the visual impact of the page is more crucial than its download time, but there’s no reason why it shouldn’t offer good direct table handling too. Some features, such as the ability to sort by rows or columns, are impressive but generally the table handling still isn’t either as interactive or as easily controlled as it should be. GoLive still seems to see tables as an occasional add-on rather than the fundamental basis of a clean HTML layout.

Support for advanced media and dynamic data is important, but by far the most important capability for a Web authoring package is its HTML control. GoLive’s HTML editing is left to two alternative views–HTML Source and HTML Outline–in the Page window. Both of these provide powerful editing environments with advanced features such as code checking against browser profiles, color coding with URL and media file highlighting and so on.

Compared to Dreamweaver, however, with its roundtrip HTML, simultaneous page and code editing and its quick tag selection and editing, control is underpowered and awkward. Dream- weaver’s Tag Selector manages to fit the same functionality into the Page window’s status bar. More importantly, GoLive’s palette’s behavior is strange. For example it looks like you should be able to instantly select the link that the cursor is in and quickly copy it within the Source Code palette; bizarrely though everything is selected apart from the crucial surrounding tags!

Dreamweaver retains its coding edge, but there is one area of HTML functionality in which GoLive does move ahead. In the past, its Find and Replace was limited, but now the feature is fully HTML-aware. Using the new Element tab in particular opens up the ability to search for particular tags or tag attributes, with GoLive intelligently prompting you with all available options. With the Actions option you can then set whether the tag, its attributes or its content is changed. As parameters can be saved and reused, this means that you can automate common searches such as for IMG tags without ALT attributes.

Is GoLive 5 for you? It all depends. If you only dabble occasionally with website design and want lots of help putting pages together, then Microsoft FrontPage may be a better choice for you. For those who need the power of GoLive 5 or Macromedia Dreamweaver, which package will prove the best choice may depend largely on workflow preference. With Dreamweaver, you first figure out what you want and then fill in values; in contrast, GoLive allows you to drop in placeholders that can accommodate any kind of object anywhere, and then leave you to figure out the value later. 

All in all, most people updating websites on a day-to-day basis should find plenty to love in GoLive 5. It's focused on their needs. 

Swati Sani for PCQ Labs

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