This is one of the best bits of software news I’ve heard in a while - and pretty much entirely unexpected. Xara Xtreme is going open source with Linux and Mac versions licensed under the GPL.

If you haven’t heard of Xara it’s one of the finest vector drawing programs ever. Its roots are in a product called Artworks which ran on Acorn RISC OS machines. The first version of Xara I owned ran snappily on a 486, did real time anti-aliasing and basically knocked spots off anything else. My venerable copy of Xara X is the main reason I boot up a Windows machine these days.

Xara (the company) started out as Computer Concepts and they produced the first piece of software I ever bought - the WordWise wordprocessor for the BBC Micro. Legend has it that Charles Moir wrote it at his mum’s kitchen table. About fifteen years ago my company and Computer Concepts briefly collaborated on a hardware product and, frankly, I can’t wait to have the chance to work with these guys again - they’re an excellent company who have been producing top quality software for twenty five years.

I’m rambling now… Just so excited that not only will I be able to run Xara on my Mac and Linux boxes - I’ll probably be able to help get it there.

I picked up a Velleman K8055 USB I/O card the other day and was a bit disappointed that the only software that came with it was a closed source Win32 DLL and a simple control panel for the board. So I don’t have to boot into Windows to play with it I’ve produced a Mac OS X application that talks to the board. Here’s what the board looks like:

And here’s what the app looks like:

Thrilling stuff eh? Anyway you can download the source here: K8055-src-0.1.tar.gz or if you prefer you can get the application built on OS 10.4 (but believed compatible with Panther and maybe Jaguar) here: K8055.dmg. I’m going to move it to Sourceforge once the project registration is approved.

It doesn’t actually do very much at the moment - you can turn the outputs on and off and see the inputs change state. Next I’ll add Applescript support so you’ll be able to write simple scripts to control it and respond to events. I’m also thinking of producing a GPL (or LGPL) library that exposes the same API as the Velleman DLL but works on Windows, Mac OS and Linux. In the mean time if you want to write a Mac application that talks to a K8055 just rip the necessary code out source archive.

Update: The project has now moved to SourceForge. You can find it here: http://sourceforge.net/projects/k8055mac/. The initial release that’s there is the same as the release here.