And now we have the full set for 2014.
Maybe seeing the features released in the other Xara family of programs had killed the excitement for this version of DPX10, but I'm upgrading all the same.
Thanks Xara
Rich
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And now we have the full set for 2014.
Maybe seeing the features released in the other Xara family of programs had killed the excitement for this version of DPX10, but I'm upgrading all the same.
Thanks Xara
Rich
Yes, the waiting is over, Designer Pro X10 has arrived. You can find a summary of What’s New on the Xara site as usual, http://www.xara.com/designer-pro/whats-new/, more detailed info in our release notes @ http://xaragroup.magix.net/designer-pro/notes/ and there’s Gary Priester’s First Look on the Xara Xone @ http://xaraxone.magix.net/XDPX10/page-1.htm. nb this is so hot off the press that some of the pages on our site might not have updated yet.
The main new things:
• New shadow & highlight controls in the photo Enhance tool for fixing areas of your photo in deep shadow or bright light, without altering the brightness of the rest of the photo
• A brand new Color Select option, also in the Photo Enhance tool, a much faster & more intuitive way of enhancing based on colors
• 32 bit plug-ins now work with the 64 bit version of Pro
• The PhotoLooks plug-in from Red Giant will be bundled with all copies of v10
• A new top level Insert menu for quick & easy addition of various useful things to your document, including some new things like Font Awesome symbols
• A responsive web design feature. Create variants for different devices, exported as a single HTML file, the best variant for each device is automatically displayed (for those of you interested in the technology, it uses CSS media queries to determine which variant to display). It’s a genuinely WYSIWYG solution that gives you control over how your site will appear on any device – and of course there’s no coding required. You can see an example at http://xaragroup.magix.net/vue2/
• Supersites. A new way to create eye-catching mini-sites, either single page scrolling sites or with transition effects. The best way to explain this is to point you to a few examples: here's a Supersite with transitions http://xaragroup.magix.net/menu1/, the same design as a scrolling Supersite http://xaragroup.magix.net/menu3 and another Supersite with transitions http://xaragroup.magix.net/islands1 (big photo warning on this one)
• New & fast flicker free page transition effects for presentations and Supersites
• 11 new web themes, plus new photo slider and social media widgets
• Smart Shapes, a new & easy way to create some of the most commonly required drawn shapes
• An Online Content Catalog for better browsing of themes, widgets, Smart Shapes, graphic templates etc
• A Scale to Fit option, very handy for presentations (there are some other presentation enhancements too) and in some cases Supersites
There are short introductory offers for owners of Pro X9 and on crossgrades from Photo & Graphic Designer, Web Designer Premium and Page & Layout Designer. There’s a Fotolia offer during the launch period too.
Didn't I buy this recently, or a year ago. The icon on the task bar certainly looks like the one that been there at least a year. Its a drawing programme, have we stopped bothering with that side of things now?
Xara, or majik, is certainly making a lot less of what should be a great product than it could. Smartshapes! I've always been able to edit a shape by clicking on a control point and editing it. Making it slightly easier for the 'drawing programme' challenged isn't an upgrade, in fact its a bit of an insult to regular users. By all means have an easy option, or Photo Graphic Designer as we call it, but let the PRO version develop or simply have people wonder off to adobe.
This might be the first time I don't upgrade, after all what am I missing, the money I spend aside.
I probably will not upgrade this go 'round, either. I wrote this in an email to someone a few minutes ago.
I'll throw the money at the upgrade for my font editor that was also just released. I'll use this money I had set aside for...anything, but likely it'll be for a couple font families I have wanted but didn't have a specific job I could use them on immediately.Quote:
Gotta love the New, the Exciting, the Whatever "enhancements."
It's not like we all really need a lot of new drawing tools, bug fixes, or enhancements to actual drawing stuff. So just a little addition of new combined with some improvements would go a long way to me as it simply says "we've done something with drawing tools now shut up and purchase." And I likely would. I don't need the new plug-ins as I have more than I'll ever use anyway.
Pity, really. Inside I want to support Xara, but I have come to the point software vendors have to also "support" me. I began using XDP with version 6, so not so long ago. If Xara wants my money, they need to earn it. I have to add value to my customers, else they will not be repeat customers.
I really want to support Xara but this will be the second year in a row I won't upgrade. There is virtually nothing new for anyone using the product for graphic design and certainly I can't see anything that justifies the extra expense.
It's a shame but I guess the company has to make a decision about which direction they are to take and it looks very much like the 'Photo Shop' editor route.
Hey-ho, such is life :)
Disappointment :( Almost nothing from the Dear Xara section, so it seems just noone cares about that
I think the problem with releasing Designer Pro last is none of the features are new, though they were with the release of Web Designer 10.
The new variants/responsive websites coupled with the depth of features and control makes Designer great for what I do. I appreciate the fact that I can edit photos, work on print products, do illustration, and create and edit web pages all in one program.
But I have to agree with csehz, there do not appear to be many wish list features that made it into this release. I've been getting into book design and I was hoping to see more type handling features.
That's the rub, isn't it? There could have been new features unique to XDP. Heck, I would have settled for fixing long-standing issues and an update to PDF output. Any improvement on actual drawing stuff? Would have been nice but not quite necessary to squeak a hundred bucks out of me personally.
Edit...OK. I would also have wanted improvements in existing features. Like being able to set a line to the outside and inside in addition to splitting the object.
Use a real application that's intended for layout work.
Any word on P&LD? Dead horse? Pointless (well, duh)?
Bought DPX10 today, as an upgrade from DPX 8, in tribute to Gary P's truly excellent writeup. You know, when I sold cars in '93-'94 and had trouble closing a sale to some high-tech guy, my sales manager just laughed and told me to start faxing the product manual. "Bury them in facts and figures!" he yelled. And it worked. Just like Gary's article worked on me today. You just keep going on about every possible little thing, until you've added enough value that the buyer, overwhelmed, caves in. See Kate Moir's feature list, above.
But is this just 'perfuming the pig'? I'm not sure. There IS a lot in this program, and the upgrade price is low enough. I'm interested in the vertically-scrolling Supersite thing, and maybe, at some point in the future, using the P&LD features to make a brochure or two. Still a few clients out there banging on the door once in a while.
So thanks for the writeup, Gary. You made a sale today. Though probably the last one, over the 15 years I've used Xara. Not because I don't like the software, but I'm 70 now, and all the extra crap like Photolooks just doesn't ring the bell anymore. So this will be it, and to Xara -- thanks for the ride. It's been fun.
EDIT -- I'd like to think that, over the last year, they made a lot of 'under the hood' changes, to ensure stability of all these disparate elements now brought together. And a fascinating thing -- this smorgasbord runs quite well on my little Acer netbook. More than fast enough. I guess when you start out, years ago, with really elegant software -- it still shines through the add-on bloatware.
Nothing new? Well. Maybe the really new feature is the sum total of all this stuff -- something for everybody, but not enough of anything to satisfy anybody. If this program were a car: think the new Maserati Ghibli S Q4. Pasting the name of their most famous road rocket onto a, well, upscale familymobile. But hey, it's got a blingy dashboard, so the business-boy drivers can drive that Nurburgring dream, while stuck in traffic on the freeway... just as new DPX10 users can fantasize about the wondrous and compelling scrapbooks they'll be publishing soon to the Magix cloud.
Thanks Jon - I have two years on you. :)
Mike - Support for spot colors in bitmaps/PDF would have made my day. And true grayscale support. My primary use for Photoshop CS5.5 is to change image modes to Grayscale and CMYK.
I am confident that a .5 version at halfway through the yearly cycle that just addressed current features shortcomings, such as grayscale and spot color support for bitmaps/PDF and updates to just the current features would sell a heck of a lot more programs and sell a lot more upgrades. There is so much already in this application that could be tweaked, or updated. Bitmap Trace is a feature that has been around forever and just takes up space because it takes too much fiddling to get it to work properly.
Well Ladies & Gentlemen I think we can all agree that as Xara users we're all totally under-impressed.
It really is time for Xara to admit that it's abandoned all aspects of being a vector drawing program and has no intention of developing this part of the software further, despite multiple request by users, release after release, to do so.
Yep, greyscale...forgot about that. Which goes hand in hand with recoloring using a Pantone color, really.
And...a vast improvement to the paragraph style "system" would almost compel me to upgrade. Model dialogs that are too small to be practical would be good. Make it more like a real layout application. Stuff it into a resizable gallery and have the properties immediately accessible. As it is, it's more like an after thought.
Ah well. I would complain if I were hung with a new rope, too.
If the near disaster that Corel's release of X7 is/was didn't happen, I would recommend it to others. At least they do updates, bug fixes and improvements during a (longer) release cycle.
Mike
As far as I can tell this is the only new pro only feature.
"32 bit plug-ins now work with the 64 bit version of Pro"
Eric
shit... it was a good ten years; but now: goodbye...
First time, since V3.2, I'm not going to upgrade.
Maybe an Xpert can tell me what improvements, in version 10, can help me to draw better or easier?
Rik, It's not about drawing anymore. It's about pasting and arranging a bunch of canned photos and shapes into a pleasing, and perhaps meaningful, collage. This can be very creative. Why, in your next DPX10 scrapbook, I'll bet you can get that photo of your baby to cry, when moused over by Grandma.
This is not new. In 1997, we stayed at a motel in Santa Barbara, where the owner let me drive his Model T, and his wife showed my wife a web page for their dog Shorty, with a picture that would bark when clicked, so that other dogs in the family, in other cities, could respond. I saw the future that day. Xara, it seems, is moving into the '90s now. Getting with the program, after all these years.
Philosophically? I guess it doesn't matter much, as what we call creativity is judged by the final result, what you see on that screen, on on that printed page. And whether you made the art yourself, with all those painfully acquired skills -- or just bolted together a lot of very good clipart -- well, the viewer doesn't know or care how you got there. And your employer only cares about how long it took you to produce, and whether he can fob the result off on that client. And whether he can get Mayank Patel in Ahmedabad to bang out that brochure instead of you... see http://designers.designcrowd.com/graphics/india
It's an interesting new century.
Very disappointing.
It has been 3 months since the release of Web Designer 10 Premium so I was expecting a lot of new, useful Pro-type features. I don't know what happened in those 3 months but it doesn't look like much.
This doesn't feel like a major release to me. I think it should be Xara Designer Pro X9.5, or whatever.
IMHO, Xara seems to have lost their way. They have gone from outstanding to mediocre in terms of product direction and progression.
But it's not too late - yet. They could still turn this around if they really want to, before they lose their loyal customer base.
I hope they do.
I bought the upgrade, but I can't find Photolooks in the Live Effect tool. Does anybody know where I can find it?
Terry - You have to use the Help > Download Content Installer
Turn it around, or lose their loyal customer base? ;))Quote:
But it's not too late - yet. They could still turn this around if they really want to, before they lose their loyal customer base.
I hope they do.
Oh well, life moves on, as has been noted it was a good ride and my current Xara software does a pretty good job with my limited skills; but I do try and create everything by my own hands and not the clip and cut and paste method...
Anyway my first medium is paper, pencil and paint and Xara nor anyone else can help me with that - and only old age can take it away...:D
Couldn't agree more Steve.Quote:
They have gone from outstanding to mediocre in terms of product direction and progression.
I can remember being at a exhibition in London when Charles Moir introduced the companies first vector drawing program ported across from CC's Artworks to the PC. It blew my socks off! I can't remember if it was there or on a website which showed how fast Xara could render a classic "Red Barn" (?) drawing compared to Coral Draw. Xara was lightening fast, CD was watching paint dry.
I don't expect the same speed difference today in the now mature graphics field but I do expect Xara to keep up with the vector developments being offered by other vendors. Unfortunately this isn't the case.
I have to say that I still upgraded though, as it saves me having to keep switching between XWD10 Premium and XDPX9 (which was getting really tiresome). I'm hoping 2015's XDP upgrade will be more substantial and that 2014 won't be the last year I upgrade.
Maybe Xara will listen to the feedback and release some minor updates before then with additional, much needed functionality. A guy can dream can't he? :)
Move along, folks...nothing to see here.
Bob.
I decided to upgrade for the responsive web design feature which, for me, was worth the £79 upgrade price.
I've had to move away from using XDP for even simple static websites as clients require them to be responsive. For these simple sites I can now move back from coding responsive WordPress themes to XDP which saves me time and therefore money. I'll make back the £79 in less then 2 weeks. If I didn't use the web features of XDP then this would have been the first year where I stuck with the older version.
But yes, I am disappointed there was nothing more exciting on the 'drawing' side of XDP. How much effort does it take to bundle a third-party plugin? Hopefully Xara will see their upgrade sales dwindle and start adding features that existing users actually want.
Rich
Those new features would've been great in the 1990s: print & static web
As an HTML5 web developer, what I'm missing is good SVG support. I don't really want to, but - for today's use cases - I may have to: switch to Illustrator
Why did we fill in that wishlist? Since four years we asked for several features and none of them were added.
For us there's no need to upgrade.
Time to look at Inkscape, Illustrator or CorelDraw. Such a pity for I had the same experience with Xara Studio wen it was released 20 years ago. And I still keep it running as a portable program on a USB stick just to draw something at a clients PC.
Considering all the negative responses and my disappointment I wasn't inclined to react at all But still I do for I'd love to hear from Kate Moir what they think the direction of the program will be. Or any one else from within Gaddesden Place
I've decided to buy a new battery for my portable drill and a couple of new shirts.
Come on folks there is no need to feel hurt. Just look at the threads here when you hit What's New most days, 2/3 are web questions. Now if you were a small software company what would you do, pander to a small but loyal group of sketchers or keep the people who are buying your software?
Oh well, nothing in there for me. Still no vector drawing improvements/enhancements so upgrading is useless for me. Guess I share some of the sentiments in here: looks more like it's a dumb down version regarding the drawing tools.
Anyway: a question for v10-owners: is the output dpi still limited to 300dpi or can I set it higher - or infinite ;) ? can someone check it out?
Fred - you can type in whatever DPI you want for output.
if you mean export dpi Fred, you can type in a higher value, I regularly use 600dpi - always been able to do that AFAIK