Xara Designer Pro+ 24 Released.

[Egg Bramhill]

As it say's on the tin. Not seen any posts about it on TG so I thought I'd give the heads-up.

[Initiostar]

Well spotted Egg, it is real and installable

[Acorn]

XPro+ Release Notes: http://releasenotes.xara.hosting/des...Anchor:58JVBtb.
Just reading them now.

Acorn

[gwpriester]

So basically any drawing or print publishing improvements are not going to happen.

In all fairness, I get it. The interest/focus is in website design. And if this is profitable for Xara, I'm good with that. A company has to do what is most profitable.

I will continue to use Designer Pro+ for my stereograms because the current set of tools suits my needs.

But for photo editing, and print publishing, I will use Affinity.

[Chris M]

When I think of courageous people, I think:

Rosa Parks, who refused to give up her seat and triggered an end to segregation of public transport.
Edward Snowden, who knew he would face the death penalty, but exposed (yet more) government corruption.
Greta Thunberg, who, at a very young age, berated world leaders for failing future generations.
The guy at Xara, who rotated a square by 45° and announced it as a new tool.

[Acorn]

Who else releases a major version change without advertising it all around?
Even the New Web Content (09 May 2024) is marginalised. Not even suggesting to having a look in the What's New section of Xara Elements.

The Embed feature is going to be a mess.

No sensible designer will want to 'embed' a thousand JPEGs or even 10 MPEGs into a Xara XAR file when it takes long enough for a modest file size to open in the application.
Now backups will taken an eternity and occupy a large amount of storage. A slow backup hits your capability to work on your designs.
Publishing may now stick at 'Preparing to export document'.
Slow, slow, slow & Big, big, big.

It requires an option Embed/External to allow designers to choose.

The mess of the extra shape tools is that the 3-, 4-, 5- & 6-sided shapes do not lock at any default angle.
What was wrong with the QuickShape > Polygon, Starred/Edged, Curved/Sharp, Sides approach?
In this 'Smart transform' clone, where is the guidance to change the number of sides, stellation, or curved corners? You have introduced another disconnect.
Where is my 61-point star icon? Oh, I forget, you chose to only allow the drop down of 3 to 10 without explaining you can also input up to 99.
Watch out for a 3-sided star and 7- through 10- buttons for regular and star shapes; 20 QuickShape icons in total.
It has added nothing.

I have tried to get the backslash colour picker to do anything!
Eventually, I found the Customise keyshortcuts has a new entry - Colour Picker Hotkey with no set Keypress.
When I added backslash, it worked.

As https://caniuse.com/avif indicates that all major browsers readily support AVIF, when will the Xara HTML render export AVIFs pure and simple?

Acorn

[Daniel]

XPro+ Release Notes: http://releasenotes.xara.hosting/des...Anchor:58JVBtb.

Still no HEIC import

Has anyone ever encountered an AVIF file? We can now import those, but I've never seen one or heard of the format. I think it was added because it's royalty-free, rather than because it was useful - I don't believe that more people want to be able to import AVIF images than have asked for HEIC!

[Acorn]

Still no HEIC import
Has anyone ever encountered an AVIF file? We can now import those, but I've never seen one or heard of the format. I think it was added because it's royalty-free, rather than because it was useful - I don't believe that more people want to be able to import AVIF images than have asked for HEIC!

Daniel, the caniuse.com website states:

A modern image format based on the HEVC video format. HEIC generally has better compression than WebP, JPEG, PNG and GIF. It is hard for browsers to support HEIC because it is complex and expensive to license. AVIF and JPEG XL provide free licenses and are designed to supersede HEIC.

A complete flip to your take on the matter.

Currently https://caniuse.com/?search=heic shows only Safari is capable of HEIC.

It took Xara a long time to incorporate WebP so this development is to be lauded.

Acorn

P.S. I still want Export AVIF too and can see a strong case for it to totally replace WebP, JPEG and PNG in its HTML Filter.

[Daniel]

A complete flip to your take on the matter.

Currently https://caniuse.com/?search=heic shows only Safari is capable of HEIC.

Still a PITA that iPhones take photos in HEIC format, and Xara can't import them without either the iPhone or Affinity Photo processing them first. It feels like having to partially chew food for some immature offspring every time!

When I last requested it from Xara Support, they replied "I'm on it, lets see if we can get HEIC support into the product. Are you taking a lot images on iPhone for business?... to be fair, we have a lot of real estate customers and it's coming up with them too. For social media posts, etc; "

I thought that the fabled realestate users would finally have come good for us, but alas, not yet.

Does anyone fancy contacting Xara Support and saying that they use Web Blocks* and the only thing they think they're missing is an HEIC import filter?!

(* like the majority here... longtime Xara user, previously a pro webdev, no idea what a Web Block is.)

[Daniel]

I guessed as much...

I think it (AVIF) was added because it's royalty-free, rather than because it was useful

So we have our answer...

Daniel, the caniuse.com website states: HEIC ... is ... expensive to license

Affinity Photo can licence it in software that costs peanuts for a perpetual licence, but Xara has made the choice not to, even in the subscription products.