We've been working hard on the Xtreme front and the first results have just been launched in retail stores in Germany under the brand of our new parent company MAGIX. MAGIX Xtreme Photo & Graphic Designer will be rolling out across retail stores in the rest of the world in the coming 2 months (UK this week). Xara software in retail stores - AT LAST!

Very soon we will release Xara Xtreme 3.2 and Xara Xtreme Pro 3.2 adding the new features developed for the retail MAGIX Xtreme to a version designed for you, our Xara online customers. Xara Xtreme 3.2 will then be very similar in functionality to MAGIX Xtreme, both can be upgraded to Xtreme Pro.

3.2 is a bit later than we anticipated, we can only apologise for the delay, we're confident you will find it worth the wait. We hope to launch 3.2 in the week commencing 4th June, upgrades will start at $39 (free upgrades for any new owners since May 1st) during an introductory period. We will keep you posted...

New this month in the Outsider is the first in an occasional series of Featured MAGIX Products, starting with their mind bogglingly popular PhotoStory, for anyone who has ever wanted to watch their photos on TV.

Xara Xtreme has become renowned for its illustrations of cars and bikes. It's been a while since we have shown any, so we thought we'd show some outstanding examples of the genre.

Ron Duke is the master of this particular craft, having created more fantastic motors than any other. But he's not the only one.

So here's a collection of some examples that you might not have seen before.

View more


The Xara Xtreme Live Effect feature lets you use Photoshop plug-ins with vector graphics. What's more they remain completely live and editable. So these examples, produced with the squint effect from the Xenofex 2 plug-in collection, can be applied to any vector object or text and you can still edit the image - the shatter effect is automatically re-applied to the text (or shape) after you've edited.

The Xenofex 2 collection of 14 plug-ins is normally sold by Alien Skin for $129, but we've negotiated a discount for all Xara registered users, so you can purchase this for just $59!

Find out more
You are subscribed to the Xara Outsider newslist. To change this visit xara.com/news
Let us know if you have any suggestions on how we can improve the Outsider Newsletter. Contact us.

Visit the Xara graphics forums to discuss or find answers to your graphics needs. Our pick of top talk this month:


Rotating objects inside a ClipView:
Here�s a quick and simple way to rotate text or several objects inside a Clip View object. Click the clip view twice to enable rotate/skew mode (the bounding box handles will turn to arrows). Click very carefully in the keyhole icon in the center of the clip view. The cursor should be the arrow pointer and not the 4-way arrow. Now you can rotate the contents by dragging any of the outside rotation handles.


Which would be most valuable to you?


There are more and more clips/tutorials created by our users appearing on YouTube. Here are a couple that particularly stand out:
Icon in 4 minutes!
Here's a clip of a Russian user showing how he created a shopping cart icon for an online toilet paper shop using Xtreme. It sounds bizarre, but it's well worth a watch!
Shades, tints and using layers
Bob Hahn demonstrates how best to use Named Colors and layers to create hair.