Xara Designer Pro+ 24 Released.

[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

[gwpriester]

The guy at Xara, who rotated a square by 45° and announced it as a new tool.

Ha ha.

Is there a parallel support unniverse aside from TalkGraphics? Xara has added all these new web design-related features and yet there is not a whole lot of posts here related to these new features.

TG seems to be mainly populated with older users with older issues. And sometimes whole days pass without a new comment.

Just my observations.

[Jonopen]

Is there a parallel support unniverse aside from TalkGraphics? Xara has added all these new web design-related features and yet there is not a whole lot of posts here related to these new features.

I've often wondered the same question.

Out of curiosity I had a look at some of Xara's social media channels (Facebook/Instagram/Linkedin/Youtube) and there was nothing on there about the new release.

The last posts were all about three months old except for Instagram which I think was Aug 2021 (143 weeks ago).

It remains a mystery!

[IanB]

Ha ha.

Is there a parallel support unniverse aside from TalkGraphics? Xara has added all these new web design-related features and yet there is not a whole lot of posts here related to these new features.

TG seems to be mainly populated with older users with older issues. And sometimes whole days pass without a new comment.

Just my observations.

Yes, I'm an older user with older issues! I've used Xara products since Artworks and use Designer Pro+ to create documents and maintain websites. Since I subscribed to Pro+ I don't think I have knowingly used any of the new features - I've no idea what BLOCKS are about, for example. I'm seriously wondering if I could go back to a previous version and save a lot of money. Though I would like to support Xara, they need to keep in touch with their user-base and take note of comments from the extremely knowledgeable (that excludes me) long-time users that we all benefit from in this forum.

[bwood]

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.

Acorn

Certainly agree on the embed feature. They’re still working on the ftp upload feature set at least for me. I can’t use it.
They’re really going all in with blocks. As mentioned on another thread regular and advanced folks are thinking in terms of blocks v3 or 4. Blocks have to be completely malleable for me, and make the phone variant Independant. Again, blocks for first time users are plug n’ play, set and forget. Understandably blocks are for a new audience.

[Egg Bramhill]

I've no idea what BLOCKS are about ......

I'm with Ian re blocks.

[Acorn]

I'm with Ian re blocks.

Egg, in a nutshell (not an acorn's I hope):

Think of a Web Block (WB) as a page-wide container:

Each WB immediately shares with a 480px Variant.
Each WB has Autofit to Page > Width

• Good
  
  • The WB always fits the page width.
  
  
• Bad
  
  • You cannot fit WBs side-by-side.
  • The autofit is not perfect so you are always chasing your tail from one view to another.

Each WB has Push set and hidden away as a menu option.

• Good
  
  • The WB (and contents) can be moved as a whole <-- Green container controls
  
  
• Bad
  
  • The Variant WB is forced into the same stack order, leaving no opportunity for designer variation.

You cannot knife and fork into a WB or create one.

• Bad
  
  • There are still Arrange menu options that are always visible but unavailable.

There are two types of WB.

• Bad
  
  • You don't know which until you you discover --> a FlexGroup <-- has a Purple edging.

Think of a FlexGroup (FG) like a text line for shapes instead of words; a column layout that doesn’t explicitly declare the number columns, just automatically creates them based on the shapes' widths - too wide and things wrap onto the next row.

The power of either WB is the means to drop something new into it or drag one out.

• Bad
  
  • Hard to control the merging of WBs and FGs. Their separation is not simple.

Xara is gaining a bit more functionality with each version delivery. The WB had a BlockBackground and has also now gained a VideoBackground. So WBs are becoming miniature stacks or layers.

The concept is simple and powerful.
The implementation is ropey. Object selection and alignment is chuggy and too much relies on yet more menu options.

Rescue the FG from a WB and copy into a normal website and you can decouple from variant sharing.
Add back Autofit and Push and you get a lot of the WB functionality back.
Put FGs into a Table and you get the means to have WGs side-by-side and gain row and column shifting.
The downside is things become dramatically nested and so getting to a shape is a chore.

Acorn

[Egg Bramhill]

Thanks for the detailed explanation Acorn. From this I think I'll keep to my current practice of avoiding blocks. Sounds like a good simple idea that transforms into a load of work instead. I'll wait until I stop seeing endless threads re block issues.