We’ve just released an update to Xara Designer Pro and Web Designer. We’ve added support for some more advanced Open Type features and continued to improve tables, and we hope you’ll also find some great creative uses for some of the new SmartShapes and Layouts. You can find a summary of these and other new features on our website @ https://www.xara.com/designer-pro/whats-new/ and https://www.xara.com/web-designer/whats-new/ with full details in the Release Notes @ http://releasenotes.xara.hosting/designer-pro-x16/ and http://releasenotes.xara.hosting/web-designer-16/

If you have an active Update Service and you’re running v16.0 then you should shortly see 16.1 offered as an auto-update. If you’re still on v15 then you will need to re-download from https://www.xara.com/products/

If your Update Service has expired then you can renew your Update Service / upgrade in order to get this and other updates since your version (go to the Designer Pro page on magix.com and click Upgrade). Fyi in addition to the Open Type and table support mentioned above, in the last year we’ve also added text flow inside shapes (all 3 were top requests in the last TG poll), plus there have been some things that you didn’t request but we hope you’ll discover their great value - such as the ‘get color from photo’ feature, auto-fitting text and auto-resizing documents. To recap on what’s new, or if you think you’ve missed some of the releases, you can find a summary for v16 on the What’s New pages mentioned above, or older updates @ https://www.xara.com/designer-pro/whats-new/older/ or https://www.xara.com/web-designer/whats-new/older. We’ve also got a demo of some of the 16.0 features at http://previews.xara.hosting/ColorPalette/

And a quick note on Xara Cloud: We were proud to officially launch the product in 2018, release numerous updates (more than one product / content release a month), and grow the customer base. We have been pleasantly surprised about the use cases and overall usage of Xara Cloud by Xara Desktop customers. People are finding ways to be more productive, opportunities to work with their clients not possible before, and enjoying the combined flexibility of an offline/online solution. We don’t announce updates here but you can follow progress on https://docs.xara.com/latest-updates.

For both desktop and cloud the Xara team has defined another ambitious product roadmap for 2019. If we deliver even half of it, then it is going to be a good year for both. As many of you know, Xara has always been a hidden gem, so we plan to be more aggressive with spreading the Xara message in the market. We look forward to your continued positive support.

Kate Moir, Xara