New Update to the Online Designer (November 2017)

Hi Guys,

Thought it would be good to do a post on the latest post and some upcoming features also due to be released next week (ish) :)

Photo Effects
If you select a photo you can now apply some preset effects to your image, and adjust the effects also using the Adjustments tab. These options can be found under 'Photo Effects' when you select an image.

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To preview what it looks like on your image, simply hover over it with your mouse (touchscreen users will have to tap still to apply/view). We've also added Tint Strength and Hue to the adjustments menu, as well as an effect code that you can copy and paste into other images if you want to copy the exact settings over also.

Marquee Selection
You can now click and hold very briefly to activate the marquee selection tool and drag to select multiple objects. Currently what you can do with the selection is limited and we are working to improve this over the next few weeks!

Update history can be found here as always: http://content.ixara.com/news/

Sneak peak to what's coming up shortly
Due shortly in the next week or so.

Page resize and auto-fit content
We've introduced a new panel - page properties which allows to you quickly change page size, BUT (and what we've been working extensively on), the content will also scale to fit. If say you design to A4 and someone wants it on a US paper size, with one click it changes the page size and scales the content to fit on that page, or changing it from portrait to landscape. This option will be accessed by clicking on Documents > Page Properties.

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We're also working on text handling and improving that area greatly - allowing more control over what you can do with text.

Please let me know what you think about these features!

Cheers
Rob

Hi Rob this update is a great beginning.

I'll give my feed back in two sections first from the desktop version on my windows 10 pc

• photo effects the included presets work nicely and the adjustments are very good too but I have some custom built presets that I created in XDP and when i try to drop those onto the photo from an explorer window it says sending file then complete but nothing happens. I tried to add the preset using the add document but it caused a server error
• Marquee selection works great.no problems with that
• I had a look at and a play with the new simple web story template. I decided I wanted to try adding some bits and pieces from another document and I tried to add that document to the web story document my thinking was that then I could pick out the bits I wanted and delete the rest. however adding that document created and error and sent OD into a never ending circle of errors as it kept trying to reload that simple webstory document. I had to close dow OD by closing the browser tab and open it up again. Now I have a copy of the simple web story template stuck in my recent docs and any attempts at opening it so I can close it just start up the never ending circle of errors again. I will attach a copy of the document I tried to add to the webstory

Later tonight Ill give the updates a test on my Android tablet and let you know how that goes.

The upcoming page properties panel looks interesting, from your screenshot I think I saw a means of reordering pages? how is that going to work? as for text features will OD eventually support OT alternatives, swashes etc?

Another thought you have the option to export a pdf which could then be printed but what about an option to print directly from OD? Is that something we could see in the future?

Hi Angelize, many thanks for your feedback!

With regards to the server errors that you received, could you send me an email with what you were doing and if possible the files so we can reproduce the errors? The one about the web story sounds serious and I'll make sure it gets logged and looked into as soon as possible.

I'll have a look at seeing what the possibility is of having a section within that panel that includes custom preset filters :)

Good to hear about the marquee selection! We're currently working on it to improve what you can do with the selection.

You currently can already re-order pages by clicking and holding on a page, and then drag up and down to re-order. Also we've slightly improved that page panel so that now you can drag it out and in to resize the thumbnails. The new page properties window however allows you to resize the document you are working on quickly and easily. Think of it a little like the Utilities > Options > Page Options within the desktop version but in this case, if you do resize the page, all of your content will automatically fit to the size of the new page so hopefully minimise the amount of work you would have to do after.

As for text features, i'm not sure about OT alternatives and swashes. For now in the early stages we're implementing within the UI the ability to select from a number of Google fonts, to update styles, change the font size and generally improve the way you can add text into a document. Once we get these core set of functions implemented we can then start to work on adding more fancy stuff :)

Printing straight from the browser is very tricky - especially with the borders and information the browser puts around the printout. I'll have to check with the developers at how possible that would be, but most definitely something we'd like to see in the future! We want to eliminate the amount clicks it takes to do anything within the program.

Cheers!
Rob

Hi Rob thanks for your reply. e-mail sent :)

I have an issue on my Android tablet Samsung Galaxy note 8 Android version 4 Kit Kat

I can select a text frame, and I can place a text cursor in text and type but I can't hold and highlight text to type over it.

I do realize my tablet is getting older and it doesn't receive updates hence still being stuck with Kit Kat but I can hold and select text to highlight in other places on my tablet.

Just a quick notice to all that Release 35.1 is now out that includes the previously mentioned page resize now available in the Documents > Properties > Page Properties panel, and more bug fixes!

As always, latest updates can also be found here: http://content.ixara.com/news/

Many thanks
Rob