Just Released: Xara Designer Pro X10

Xara Designer Pro X10 has just been released on xara.com. 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 - but the main things are;

• 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!