Review: Serif Enters U.S. Market With X2 Suite

Adobe and Corel are about to get some competition from the other side of the Atlantic. UK-based Serif Ltd is making its four products of its X2 desktop publishing and Web development suite available in the US retail market. Serif signed deals with Ingram Micro, Tech Data and Navarre to distribute the products between $79.99 and $99.99.

So what's unique about the Serif X2 suite? Reviewers were able to learn three of the four tools in a couple of hours. Throughout the suite, Serif simplified the navigation of each product so that users had most features visible and readily available in a toolbox on the left side and tabs on the right. Serif placed any special features for each tool above the workspace.

The X2 suite caters to small business owners that can't afford to pay for customization or are not satisfied with template-based sites offered by ISPs. To attract novice users, the X2 suite includes phenomenal How-To styled tutorials that include shortcuts to features so that users can get immediate results. What's more, the tutorials actually step users through a product and teach them to do it manually.

PhotoPlus X2 supports many effects that are available in the pricier rival Adobe PhotoShop CS3. The in memory renderer slider tool happens to be a favorite one for reviewers. The slider tool -- which can add layers and effects to an image in a single, easy sweep of the mouse -- resides below the workspace pane and it is available on most effects.

Clicking on the "Instant Artists" button, for instance, converts photos into paintings instantly. PhotoPlus comes with 12 painting techniques that can be applied to any photo. Each technique comes with options to adjust newly-created painting. All of the options are intuitive so even novice users will understand any changes they make. More importantly, output from all of the special effects is adjustable with the slider tool.

Serif has gotten a lot of mileage out of its WebPlus tool over the last few years. The product has been bundled as part of productivity tools that come with custom PCs.

WebPlus is a good beginner's Web editor. Like Dreamweaver and FrontPage, WebPlus uses templates to help users quickly build sites. But instead of having plain vanilla templates, the tool walks users through a multi-step process in the How-To tutorial. The steps were intuitive and the layouts of the tools and features were impressive. Users don't need to know anything about HTML to build a multi-page site.

All of the objects on template pages are interchangeable. Users are left to spend more time with the images and graphics than with the underlying code. This is a great beginners' Web editor. Novice users can even create Flash animations.

Serif has recently entered U.S. retail and reseller channels, and executives say they've recently begun relationships with Tech Data and Ingram Micro, among others.

The Bottom Line: While the Test Center likes the technology, its price point and its position as a new alternative, Serif just needs a little more time in the U.S. distribution channel to establish its reliability with VARs.