[XaraXtreme-dev] Xara LX 0.5 Release

["Neil Howe" <NeilH@xxxxxxxx>]

Xara are pleased to announce a milestone target has been achieved with
the release of Xara Xtreme LX version 0.5. You can download it from
www.xaraxtreme.org/download.

There has been substantial progress since the previous 0.4 stable
release. All tools now work, as do most menu options and some of the
galleries. We recently passed build number 1000, representing more than
1000 patches, submissions and fixes to the Subversion code repository.

The most important changes are that you can now save designs and export
them as bitmaps, so Xara LX is now a functional, useful design tool!

Here's a list of features enabled since the 0.4 release:-

* New Autopackage installer. Xara LX now appears in the Applications
menu
* Save
* Bitmap export (JPG, PNG)
* Bitmap import (JPG, PNG)
* Bitmap Gallery
* Colour Gallery
* Layer Gallery and operational layer system
* A choice of document templates
* Guidelines, guide snap and magnetic object snap
* Simple colour editor
* Ability to set the font in the text tool
* Status line & progress bar
* Many new menu items e.g. convert lines to shapes
* Clipviews
* Improved combo boxes, drop down menus, buttons and sliders
* Improved toolbars
* New plug-in system for import/export filters (documentation and
example filter code for this will appear on our web site soon)
* Options dialog (and most options now operational)
* Freehand tool smoothing
* Many other features. 
* Many bugfixes
* Full comprehensive Help now integrated

There are still a number of areas of the program that need work before
we'll reach the 1.0 milestone, which will be the first official
'finished' version of Xara LX. Despite the current 0.5 version number,
we estimate we're much more than half way there now! See this page of
the web site for details http://www.xaraxtreme.org/content/view/122/34/

A great many thanks to those who have given their time to help the
project. But we could always use more. Now that the program is useful,
we hope people will start to use it in anger and that more developers
will want to help us drive this forward to become what we hope will be
the greatest graphics program to exist on Linux. Visit
www.xaraxtreme.org/developers/ for more information for developers.

Thanks and Regards,

The Xara Team