Xara Designer Pro X10 Released

[planetsquid]

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

[katemoir]

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.

[planetsquid]

32 bit plug-ins now work with the 64 bit version of Pro

*Aborts download of 32bit version and downloads 64bit*

[masque]

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?

[mwenz]

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?

Yes.

[masque]

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.

[Fred C]

...more detailed info in our release notes @ http://xaragroup.magix.net/designer-pro/notes/

incorrect link

[katemoir]

Oh. Sorry about that, I thought the Release Notes always redirected to the new ones! Try http://www.xara.com/designer-pro/notes

[katemoir]

I’m sorry many of you sound disappointed. We concede there was not a lot for our illustration users in v9 & 10, but our priorities were different because there were some issues – such as RWD or fixing 32 bit plugins - which simply had to be attended to, and these were big development commitments (RWD amazingly so, as it turned out). There were not the same glaring fix-or-die weaknesses in vector features. Plenty of suggestions, yes, but no consensus on ‘must haves’. We understand that means that many illustrators will understandably decide not to upgrade this time, and we have to live with that.

For v11 we are considering illustration again. You might not all value SmartShapes but one of the reasons we added this feature is that we could use that vector technology for future features that might be more interesting to you. I can’t give you any commitments at this stage, no final decisions have been made for v11, but I can definitely say that we have no policy to drop illustration.

One more thing I’d add; TG has a concentrated core of illustration users which doesn’t quite reflect our total audience. That means you maybe don’t get the sense that I do, sitting here, that similar numbers of owners are making equally impassioned pleas for us to add new web, page layout and photo features. Our surveys suggest that a typical Pro owners uses all of them – we have after all promoted it as a one-stop graphic design solution for many years! Plus we have a new project in the works too, directly related to and hopefully guaranteeing the long term future of Camelot (the engine that drives the whole Designer suite) which has been taking our resources for over a year. All of this we try to balance, at least over the life of several upgrade cycles. Nothing has been abandoned (but we are throwing more people at it!)

[csehz]

Thanks for your comment Kate, I appreciate it as probably not easy the coming out after so depressed feedbacks. Your details take at least the things into more understandable context.

A little bit better also for my spirit because finally upgraded as always.. But after starting the XDPX10 to investigate the newer functions, just still was sitting and not believing that really I bought it? SmartShapes and those insert Font Awesome Symbols?

But reading you so maybe there is hope and good luck for those developments then