Xara are pleased to announce they are co-sponsoring the first graphics conference focussed solely on open-source (free) graphics products, The Libre Graphics Meeting to be held in Lyon, France from 17th to 19th March, 2006
This meeting is open to everyone and free to attend. Confirmed delegates include many companies and developers as well as the press.
Xara will be demonstrating progress on Xara LX, the open-source version of Xara Xtreme, the world's fastest vector graphics software. Neil Howe, Xara's CTO will be giving a demonstration in the theatre on Saturday at 11am and Xara will have a major presence where people can meet some of the developers and support team.
Charles Moir the founder and CEO of Xara said "We announced the intention of making Xara Xtreme open source a few months ago, which generated a great deal interest and support from the open-source community. Since that time we've been working on the port of the codebase to Linux (at a million lines of code, this is not a small project). Progress was initially slow but has accelerated greatly in the last few weeks and we are really happy with the results so far. At the meeting, we will to be making some important announcements."
"Our goal is to create the fastest, most slick, easiest to use, general purpose graphics program available. And for this to be open-source (GPL) and available for Linux and Mac platforms. We're well on the way to doing that"
For further information on Xara's open source software see www.xaraxtreme.orgFor further details please contact: Nova Fisher, Communications Director, nova@xara.com
If you want to see what Xara Xtreme can do, there are demo movies available in various formats here http://www.xaralx.org/about
The current (and constantly changing) state of the Xara LX Linux version is available here: http://www.xaraxtreme.org/download/
See the Xara Xtreme website at http://www.xara.com/products/xtreme/
Or the Xara Open Source website at http://www.xaraxtreme.org
Xara has been developing low-cost mass-market software since the early years of the Microcomputer era, in 1981. It has focused mostly on publishing related software products, starting from Wordwise, a hugely popular Word Processor in the '80s, to desktop publishing software (Impression) and graphics products in the '90s for the Acorn RISC computer. Xara's first Windows product, Xara Studio was quickly snapped up and marketed by Corel in the late '90s. The rights were acquired back from Corel and it has since evolved into Xara X and the most recent Xara Xtreme.
Xara has particularly strong technology and innovation history. It pioneered many of the graphics technologies and techniques used by industry today. It was the first to introduce vector anti-aliasing, the first with vector transparency and graduated transparency, the first vector feathering. Many of its User Interface techniques have been adopted by the industry. The graphics engine that is at the core of Xara Xtreme still remains the world's most powerful.
The technologies used to create Xara Xtreme have been developed by Xara over the years and incorporates many pioneering features. It has been modelled on the successful Xara X¹ (sold for $179) as used by many professional graphics and illustration artists but has been significantly re-engineered to open it up to third-party plug-in developers.
