Xara :: File Format Viewer For Mac

I am a software developer. I've spent a lot of time in the last few years building crazy GUIs for a simulation product. I had previously discovered Xara Xtreme for doing software design illustrations and other documentation, so I decided to try using it for making icons and graphics for GUIs. We had some pretty old graphics in our system from 15 years ago, so the bar was pretty low. I was able to teach myself some basic techniques and I think I did a fair job at tremendously improving our graphics. We have artists, but they are generally doing 3D models for the simulator, not GUI graphics.

Anyway, I was very impressed with what even a motivated but untrained programmer could do with Xara. Constantly having to export bitmaps was a bit of a pain, though. What I really wanted was to be able to draw the graphics I had designed in Xara directly in my software, and I wanted to do it on the mac.

There was many a stumbling block, but I managed to be able to draw all of the geometry correctly and I have also implemented solid and linear fills. No shadows, contours, bitmaps, molds, text, effects, etc. I got frustrated with Quartz because it could not render every fill case. I also got frustrated with the Xara spec that was obviously out of date and had many omissions in it.

My initial goal was to write a card game that used vector graphic cards in Xara format. My renderer can actually draw everything I need for decent looking but basic card designs, but I wanted to round out the feature set a bit more and support more effects like edge feathering, more fills, shadows, text, etc. I did one drawing of a court card from a pack of Bicycle Cards, and then I did some research on playing card artwork and bought a pretty old deck of cards with some of the original designs that modern cards are based on. I did one drawing from that deck as well. As I understand it, as long as I don't copy the back, the Ace of Spades, or the Joker designs I'm ok from a copyright perspective. These cards are so old they are probably beyond copyright anyway. Furthermore, the printing techniques back then were so imprecise that my end result is more of an interpretation of the original than a copy.