Photo Design & Useability Enhancements Web Authoring / Web Publishing Other Minor Enhancements

Photo

Photo Magic Erase Tool

There is a new 'magic' erase feature, which can quickly and seamlessly erase unwanted objects from photos. Just draw around the feature or object you want removed, then one click on the 'magic erase' button and the object is automatically erased and replaced with an appropriate background texture sampled from other parts of the photo. This can often work better than any manual clone and can produce perfectly seamless object erasing.

See some examples

Photo Clipart

There's a new 'photo clipart' category in the Designs Gallery, handy for websites and for DTP work from brochures and adverts to posters and packaging. You can see some examples here.

Design & Useability Enhancements

Live copies

You can now create multiple ‘Live Copies’ of an object  - vector or photo - on a page or pages, and they all update when one is edited. It’s still possible to apply transformations such as skew, scale or rotate independently. A powerful feature and a great time saver (sometimes called ‘Live Clone’).

Edit inside groups and other composite objects

At last a really easy way of editing grouped objects and adding new objects into an existing group.  Double-click on a group or other composite object to edit it in a separate document window, simply click save when you’re done.

Improved page management

  • A new default Page & Layer Gallery ‘pages’ mode displays a narrow list of page thumbnails – for quick and easy page selection, access and management (a real time saver, especially in combination with the new fly-out galleries).
  • Designer initially displays an uncluttered single page view. Use the Page & Layer Gallery to quickly move to different pages, or switch to multi-page view by right clicking on the page and selecting the multi-page view option on the menu.

Non-axis aligned snapping

You can now also align to lines that are neither vertical or horizontal.

Tabbed document windows

Tabs at the top of the Designer window show at a glance all the currently open documents, which document you are currently viewing, the document type and whether there are unsaved changes. Switch documents by simply clicking on the document tab.

New paste operations

New paste operations bring much more flexibility to pasting operations, allowing Paste position, Paste size, Paste replacing selection (replaces the selected object with the copied object), Paste in current layer and Paste in place in current layer.

Cut, copy & paste of whole pages

You can now cut, copy and paste whole pages both within and between documents. This copies the page dimensions, layers and other page attributes in addition to all the objects on the page.

Improved anchoring of graphics & repelling text

If you are using Designer for page layout you'll appreciate these significant improvements to anchoring and repelling. Creating anchored objects is now a one-click action, and objects that you anchor in text now also repel text, helping you easily create a smooth flow around effect. Repel margins can also now be defined separately for the margin width and height. And anchored objects can be constrained to move vertically only, which is very useful where you have objects to the right or left of the text that need to move only up and down. All of which helps to make the anchoring and repelling features more flexible and much easier to use.

Brand new ‘magic snap’ for object alignment

Designer now provides ‘magic’ magnetic object snapping. As you drag an object, it ‘snaps’ to points and lines of interest nearby and indicates what it has snapped to by displaying dynamic snap lines and points.  This makes it easy to align objects with each other, and/or (at the same time) with guidelines, the grid, the page center or edges. You'll soon wonder how you ever managed without it!

Fly-out galleries for instant viewing and flexible docking

A new gallery bar gives instant access to all galleries, which now fly out as you hover the mouse pointer over a new gallery bar. It's easy to move galleries around the workspace, and you can pin and dock them wherever you want, either individually or in groups or 'stacks' on top of each other. You'll find it makes a significant improvement to workflow.

Export animation documents as AVI files

Designer now allows you to export any animation or non-animation document as an AVI file, or even an AVI with transparency, helping you create your own web-ready movie content.

Quick alignment of selected objects

Quick alignment of selected objects is made possible by the new right click menu option 'Align'. This enables you to directly align multiple objects horizontally and vertically, without having to open the alignment dialog.

Web Authoring / Web Publishing

New: Widgets

Make your websites eye-catching and dynamic with our smart new 'eye catcher' widgets that enable you to add an advanced selection of slick photo and text animations to your web pages without the need for coding knowledge. More widgets will be automatically downloaded and added to your gallery over time.

See the 'eye catcher' widgets

Plus there's a neat new 'embed a website' Widget - perfect for embedding blogs, microsites and other sites within your page.

New animated transition effects for layers and page links

Designer Pro makes it easy to add a wide range of animated effects to the layers and page links in your website. You can add animated transitions to any page link or pop-up layer in your web pages.

Quickly preview your pages in all the most popular web browsers

If you have Firefox, Internet Explorer, Opera, Safari or Chrome installed, you can preview exactly how your page will appear in each of these popular web browsers with a single click.

Create your own distinctive 'favicons'

Designer Pro now supports the addition of favicons, allowing you to customize the tabs of your web pages by displaying a custom graphic, such as a logo, on the document browser tab.

Built-in preview window now includes navigation buttons

The navigation buttons in the top bar of the preview window allow you to move back or forward, just like in a web browser, and the Home button returns you to the page you started the preview on.

Explore your FTP web space

You can browse and delete files and folders on your FTP server using Designer Pro's built-in Web Space Explorer.

Presentation websites

Create web-based 'slide-show' style presentations that your website visitors can step through using the keyboard arrow keys. Apply animated transition effects as each step and page is displayed. You can also easily remotely host a web meeting (a 'Webinar') to showcase your presentation, step by step and page by page, to a group of invited participants.

Example presentation
See the presentation templates
Remote presentation manager

Intelligent repeating headers / footers / watermarks

Designer now automatically updates all occurrences of a repeating object when you edit it, so you don't have to manually update when you make a change. When one instance of a repeating object is edited, the updates appear instantly on all other instances of that object on other pages of the document. What’s more, Designer is smart about positioning, so objects in the top half of the page are positioned on other pages relative to the top of the page, and objects near the bottom are positioned relative to the bottom of the page, irrespective of page sizes.

Sitemap support

You can now automatically generate a sitemap to assist search engines crawling your site.

New templates

A new range of web page/website and presentation templates give you an even greater design choice when creating your websites.

See the templates

Preview your web page in full screen

You can now preview your web page in full screen by clicking the new View Full Screen button in  Designer's built-in Preview window. When you next use preview, Designer remembers the last used mode (normal, maximized or full screen). and displays subsequent previews in the same way.

HTML 5 video

MP4 movie files added to your website will now play without Flash installed if the browser supports HTML5 video, so movies play on iOS devices such as iPhones and iPads.

Other Minor Enhancements

Other improvements include:

  • Greater control over clipping objects to page. A new option in the Website tab of the Website Properties dialog allows you to choose whether or not to clip objects to web page edges. If you do not clip, then any objects overlapping your page on to the pasteboard will be displayed in full, rather than cropped to the page border. In addition, any animated transitions you apply will now start from the browser window edge rather than the page border.
  • Improved context sensitive menus. There are some new context sensitive menus which give direct access to useful actions. Right-click on objects, page or pasteboard for instant access to many useful operations relevant to the object.
  • Clearer InfoBar text rendering. Brings greater screen display quality and clarity to all Designer toolbars, if ClearType text is enabled in your Window's control panel.
  • Add your website to Xara/MAGIX User Galleries. When you publish your website, you can now choose to include a thumbnail of your site in existing user website galleries hosted by Xara/MAGIX.
  • New Photo Optimize Dialog Control. The Optimize Photo dialog now includes the option to maintain the photo’s current resolution.
  • Text repelling within layers. You can now prevent objects on the current layer from repelling text on other layers using the new "Text repelling within layer" option in the Layer Properties dialog. This option also stops text on the current layer being repelled by objects on higher layers. This is useful for (and is set by default on) popup layers in web documents.
  • Easily add header code to a page or website. Designer Pro now allows you to enter HTML code into the head of your web pages, as well as the body, giving you greater versatility to customize your website. You can easily add your own code (or code from a widget provider) into individual pages or all pages in your website. Also code entry for either the head or body is easier with a new larger pop-up code editing dialog.
  • New languages added to the spell checker:  Czech, Polish, Slovak, Turkish and Hungarian.
  • Further improvements to the PDF import filter.
  • Improved EPS import reliability.
  • New cameras supported for RAW import.