Dramatic letters, interesting people and the battle of the tracers.

As the dust settles after the launch of Xara Xtreme, Gary produces his first tutorial using Xtreme. A Dramatic Letter shows how he created a hand addressed envelop with a stamp, post office cancellation and postal code barcode. Visit the November Tutorial for step by step instructions.

The November Featured Artist Gallery is devoted to The 2005 People Show. 18 talented artists exhibit a diverse selection of portraits from cartoons to fantasy and photorealism. If ever you needed convincing about Xara Xtreme's versatility, you will find the proof here.

The recent release of Adobe Illustrator CS2 introduced a new feature that has created waves of hype and interest. The feature in question is the Live Trace, which can be used to convert bitmaps and other raster images into vector shape compilations. Many Xara users may realize that this sounds remarkably similar to the Bitmap Tracer that Xara has offered for the last decade. Xhris provides a useful comparison between the different methods in this month's Guest Tutorial.

The first reviews of Xara Xtreme - hot off the press

“Like its predecessors, Xara Xtreme is billed as ‘the world's fastest drawing program’, and it's easy to believe. Compared with rivals the program is amazingly responsive, and it actually takes a few minutes to get used to the fact that you don't have to wait after you make a change or finish dragging an object around. Even the auto-trace function finishes before you realise it's started.” November 2005

“A powerful graphics and photo-editing tool that's easy to get to grips with and flexible enough for simple web graphics or more detailed designs. Xara Xtreme provides just about everything you'll need for creating and editing graphics, whether bitmap or vector.” January 2006