Designer Pro X11 has arrived at last! You will already know about most of the new features from the Web Designer and Photo & Graphic Designer 11 announcements. But nevertheless I’ll repeat the highlights:

Web Features
• Stickies – objects that stick in place as the page scrolls
• Stretchy background images that fill the browser width
• New animation effects available on mouseover, on click or on reveal
• Still in beta but definitely worth a try: Xara Online Designer (formerly cloud.xara) introduces collaborative online editing of your sites from anywhere and on any device

We have a couple of demo sites @ http://www.xara.com/web-designer-examples/site1/ and http://www.xara.com/web-designer-examples/site2/ (both now included as templates in Designer Pro 11) and for that matter the Xara Online Designer release notes @ http://kovemi.xara.hosting/XOLDesigner-Intro/ are a good demo of Stickies.

Graphic Design, Illustration & Text
• A big step forwards for the Brush Tool, with new Art Brushes and enhanced Scatter Brushes
• New industry standard blend / transparency modes
• Lots of new & improved text features including abbreviation expansion and some you won’t have seen in Web Designer or Photo & Graphic Designer such as auto-hyphenation and greater flexibility with embedded graphics
• An extension of the Shape Editor Tool (Liquify Tools)
• Share & Sync your files via Dropbox or Google Drive

You can find more information on our website @ http://www.xara.com/designer-pro/whats-new/ and detailed info in the release notes @ http://xaragroup.magix.net/Pro11releasenotes/ plus don’t miss Gary Priester’s traditional First Look at http://xaragroup.magix.net/XDP11

Also I’d like to mention again that the Liquify Tools and latest SmartShapes (don’t miss the new spiral) are the first quite simple examples of what can be created with our new plugin technology, for which we intend to publish an API so that third parties can add features, tools and SmartShapes. The API isn’t ready to be released yet, but if you’re a JavaScript developer and this sounds interesting, send us a ticket via support.xara.com to register your interest and we’ll keep you posted.