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

[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.

[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!