Visual Studio 11 beta reveals simplified interface, adds Windows 8 Metro and app store support

Microsoft has released betas of its various Visual Studio 11 editions - Ultimate, Premium, Professional, Test Professional and Express - along with Team Foundation Server and the .NET Framework 4.5. And of course it's no coincidence that the latest version of the IDE has arrived on the same day as the Windows 8 Consumer Preview. Visual Studio is all about developing for Windows 8, and its integrated tools for publishing directly to the new Windows App Store will make it much easier for developers to reach a potentially huge market. The change you'll notice first is what Microsoft call Visual Studio's "minimalist" interface. Colour has been largely stripped out, toolbars removed or refined in an attempt to reduce distractions within the IDE and free up more workspace for browsing your code. Meanwhile you can now browse code directly from the Solution Explorer, helping to further reduce on-screen clutter as you're less likely to need to open additional windows. A simplified interface reduces on-screen clutter and delivers more space for viewing code Productivity improvements include the ability to pin frequently used files to the left side of the tab well for easier access. You can now preview files directly from the code editor; the new Quick Launch feature helps you locate commands, open Options dialog boxes or switch between open documents; and there's enhanced support for multi-monitor setups (you can now float multiple windows together from one monitor to another, and bring them back with a keypress, for instance). And elsewhere you'll find a stack of code editor improvements, new language features, simplified debugging, new 2 and 3D graphics development tools, and the list goes on. If you'd like to sample all this for yourself then the simplest solution is download the high-end Ultimate Edition ISO file. And the good news is that you can install and run this alongside Visual Studio 2010. Although whether you want to do that is open to question, as the setup process will carry out an in-place upgrade from .NET 4 to .NET 4.5. Microsoft claim it "provides very high app compatibility for all .NET 4 scenarios", but that doesn't mean you won't have problems, although you can at least uninstall it if things go wrong. If you're looking for one of the other editions, though, Premium, Professional and Test Professional are available from the Microsoft site, along with Team Foundation Server, various Visual Studio Express editions and assorted standalone installers: .NET 4.5, the Visual Studio SDK and so on).

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Software roundup – 20 important downloads from the last seven days

There are a number of worthy highlights this week, including the long awaited Opera 12 release, iTunes support for iOS 6 devices and a relatively major update to Skype for Windows and Mac. The major release this week must be Opera 12. After months of beta-testing, the browser was finally released, along with an interesting twist, in the form of the first native 64-bit build. Whether a 64-bit version of a web browser makes a huge difference is another matter entirely. Opera 12 ships with numerous speed improvements, including basic support for hardware acceleration. It’s not all good news though as gone are the widgets and other features such as Opera Voice. Download Opera 12, Opera 12 (64-bit) and the separate Opera Portable 12, which you can take on the road. Skype for Windows Skype 5.10 is a relatively major update for the Windows edition, despite the version number. Leaving aside the debate about adverts in Skype-to-Skype audio calls, the new version brings a single contact list for your Facebook and Skype contacts, the ability to pin your favourite contacts to the top of your contacts list, plus backwards-compatible video rendering, for older PCs that do not support hardware acceleration. Skype 5.8 for Mac also received a major upgrade with support for better handling of Skype calls from mobile phones, improved screen sharing, as well as a refined contacts list. Security-wise, Norton Power Eraser 3.0.0.21 received a big update this week. This powerful portable tool can be used alongside your existing security software to find, seek and removal problematic malware. AppRemover 2.2.26.1 is a very different tool which will remove stubborn security software, whilst Kaspersky Security Scan 2.0 is a simple tool which will find and notify of potential security issues (but won’t fix them). Bitdefender Parental Control Beta is new software you can use, as a parent to restrict your children’s access to the internet, plus monitor their behaviour. Note there’s a separate Bitdefender Parentral Control Beta (64-bit). VMware Player 4.0.4 is free software you can use to host a virtual operation system. Ideal if you want to test the latest Linux distribution or Windows 8 Release Preview. You can’t create a virtual host in Player, but you can within VMware Workstation 4.0.4, also updated this week. If you’re a Mac user, VMware Fusion 4.1.3 was updated and made available this week. iTunes Apple announced the developer preview of their iOS 6 mobile operating system this week and an updated iTunes 10.6.3 and separate iTunes 10.6.3 (64-bit) to allow users to manage their iOS 6 devices (if you’re lucky enough to be able to get hold of iOS 6). Free Studio 5.6.1 is a powerful 47-in-1 multimedia suite, with a host of conversion tools, whilst other DVDVideoSoft titles were updated, including Free Disc Burner 3.0.11, Free WebM Video Converter 5.0.13, Free AVI Video Converter 5.0.13 and Free Audio Converter 5.0.13. WinRAR 4.20 (32-bit) and (64-bit) was updated this week, along with the general-purpose archive management tool, PeaZip 4.6. Also available as a 64-bit build and portable version. Finally, if you have you have any downtime, take a look at 0 A.D. r11863 which is an alpha of an historical RTS game, with superb graphics for a free game.

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Review: MAGIX Website Maker 5

The web design market is packed with tools that promise to help you quickly build a website, even if you're a design novice. But while ease of use is great, the end results are more important still: and the dull, static HTML templates you get with many of these packages won't impress anyone at all. The cross-platform MAGIX Website Maker 5 takes a different approach, by allowing you to create animated Flash-based sites, which you can then customise with a host of animated and dynamic components: music and video players, photo galleries, contact forms, guestbooks, embedded YouTube videos or Google maps, and many more. The package is still reliant on the quality of its templates, of course, but fortunately these are generally very good. You get to choose from more than 150 in total, each of which includes multiple pages and comes with the navigation already built in. And they make excellent use of Website Maker's more advanced features. No need to take our word for it, though - just browse the demo site, which includes the lightbox, media player, contact form and other goodies. It's all very professional, and keep in mind that this isn't some polished product that might take you hours to produce: it's a template, you can start with something like this in seconds, and then easily customise it to suit your needs. Browser-based While you must install a local component before you can use Website Maker, it actually runs in your browser, and this may pose a few compatibility issues (only IE, Firefox 3 and Opera 9 are supported). Otherwise, though, the program has a rich interface that looks and behaves much like many other website designers. So, for instance, there are three ways to create a new website project. Beginners will appreciate the Assistant, a wizard that walks you through each step of the design process. You can choose your preferred site template from the excellent selection on offer, each of which comes with all the necessary pages and navigation built in. Or, if you know what you're doing, you can start with a blank page and build a site from scratch. Whichever option you choose, you can then customise your work with the program's sizeable library of Flash components. There are more than 200 navigation bars of various types, for instance. You get several media and music players, and a host of ways to present your favourite digital photos. The "Extras" section of the library includes some particularly useful dynamic components: contact forms, guestbooks, download boxes that can be used to host files for your visitors to access, and widgets that can embed YouTube videos or Google maps. And if this isn't enough then you're also able to add custom snippets of HTML, which may allow you to embed other services in your page. Adding most of these objects requires little more than a click, or a drag and drop. And you're then able to adjust them further with a range of interesting options. So instead of just having a static YouTube player, for instance, you can add a custom animation so that, say, it flies in from the left. Filters can then apply a block shadow, bevel, glow or other effect to the object. And you're able to tweak the colour, opacity, scale and angle of rotation of any component, too. Overuse these effects and, unsurprisingly, your pages can become a real mess. Apply them a little more carefully, though, and just about anyone can create an eye-catching site, packed with professional features, suitable for either personal or small business use. Publishing Once your site is finished then you'll want to put it online, and here Website Maker 5 is a little different to most of the competition. The good news is that purchasing the program gets you 5GB of web hosting space (with FTP access) for a year, plus the domain of your choice (www.your-name.com), plus support for managing 3 further sites based around your own MAGIX URL (your-name.magix.net/sitename). But the not-so-good news is you can't do anything more than this (it's not possible for the program to directly manage two dot-com domains, say). And in addition, you're locked into using MAGIX hosting, which will start to cost you $1.99 a month after the first year if you want to continue using the full features of the program (although if you're just leaving a simple site online, not editing it, then you can do this for free). This isn't a program for the web design professional, then. Template, navigation and page management issues mean it's really only suitable for small sites of just a few pages. The reliance on Flash makes these tricky to view on Apple devices. And the restrictions on hosting, and the sites you can create, are annoying. You'll be better off with something more flexible, like Xara Web Designer 7. If you're a web development novice who just wants to build a small site, at speed, however, it's a very different story. MAGIX Website Maker's excellent templates will get your project off to a speedy and attractive start. They're easily personalised with a host of professional features. Domain registration and hosting is handled for you, and you can put your site online in just a few clicks, no need to worry about server names, ports, or other FTP complexities - a perfect package for web designer beginners.

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Review: Xara Web Designer MX 8 Premium

Some people see WYSIWYG web builders as basic, limited, strictly for novice home users who'll be satisfied with the poor quality templates and limited customisation options they usually offer. Xara Web Designer MX 8 Premium, fortunately, has a very different philosophy. Simple e-commerce tools can be added with a drag and drop Sure, there is a strong focus on ease of use, but Xara hasn't forgotten that quality matters, too. So the program's professionally designed multi-page templates get you off to a good start; Xara's years of experience with desktop publishing means they're all exceptionally customisable; and the ability to embed YouTube videos, Google maps, PayPal buttons, contact forms, social networking features and more will help you to produce stylish sites which will appeal to a wide audience. And there's also some depth here, with far more functionality than you'll find in most similar products. You get support for building Flash animations, for instance, or creating page and layer transition effects, and the excellent web presentation tools make it easy to create and showcase professional presentations. If you're looking to build something more than just a simple, personal website then Web Designer definitely merits a closer look. Attractive templates The creative process starts with you browsing the Designs Gallery, where you'll find Web Designer's website templates. There are only 40 of these, and they aren't presented particularly well (you can't easily compare designs side by side). Most of them look reasonably attractive, though - see for yourself here - and they're also multi-page, with built-in navigation, so just by double-clicking your preferred template you'll immediately have a working website. Thumbnails give you a quick look at each website template design You'll still have to provide your own content, of course, but that's easy enough. Click in a text area and start typing to add your own words; right-click an image and select "Replace" to insert your own photos; drag and drop a new colour scheme from the Designs Gallery if you don't like the default, and so on. And it really is that straightforward, too, thanks to Web Designer 8′s more intelligent approach to resizing text areas. There's no longer any need to manually reposition objects or drag the bottom of the page down as content grows; the program now automatically handles this for you, so it all feels very natural, just like working in a word processor. If you'd like to get a little more creative, though, then the Design Gallery also includes clipart, photos, icons, headings, buttons, navigation bars and more. With over 3,000 items of high quality clipart and photo objects alone it's surprisingly comprehensive. And adding items to a page is, for the most part, just a matter of dragging and dropping, with the program even asking if you'd like to adapt an object's colour scheme to match the website. Although there are still occasional complications, here and there (replacing your template's navigation bar with another, say, can be a challenge). Alternatively, expert users can always start with a blank page and build their site from scratch. And if you're looking to start with another design then Web Designer now claims improved import from the web, PPTX, ODP and PDF files. We're still not overly impressed - web import remains slow and unreliable - but if you just need to extract the text and graphics from a page then it could still be useful. Adding interactivity Web Designer can add interactivity to your sites via its "widgets", essentially chunks of custom HTML which embed all kinds of features into your sites: media players, RSS feeds, slideshows, Facebook and Twitter gadgets, chatrooms, forums and more. Most options just open web pages which you then need to configure to produce the results you need - the Google Search widget takes you here, for instance - so there's nothing too advanced involved, but it's still a useful feature which can extend your site in many different ways. The new Charts widget uses mouseover events to highlight the raw data The Premium edition of Web Designer extends these with a handy QR Code widget, enabling you to convey a line of text or URL to any mobile scanning device. And a well-designed Chart widget allows you to create column, bar and areas charts (both regular and stacked), line charts, pie graphs and more, each of which use mouseover events to display the underlying figures (see Xara's example charts to get a feel for the finished results). And the Premium edition's Presentations feature is almost as impressive. You only get 13 templates, but they're all nicely done, with professional animations and transitions to show you what's possible. As with the websites, they're easily customisable to suit your needs. And there's a very convenient addition in the new slide navigation menu. Move your mouse to the bottom left of the slideshow and you'll find Previous, Home and Next buttons, as well as a menu of the entire presentation so you can jump to whatever slide you like. New features We've detailed a few of the new Web Designer MX 8 Premium features already, but there are plenty of others. Support for text styles is one notable addition. If you've spent a while choosing the precise font, size, style and colour for a banner headline, say, you can now create a style based on all those attributes. Select the banner on another page, give it that style and it'll be updated immediately. And if you decide later that the bright green text doesn't quite work after all, change the style and everything with that style applied (across all your pages) will be updated immediately. Which all works well enough, although the template sites aren't styled by default, so to use this feature you'll have to create styles and apply them manually (wherever appropriate) to each page. The "Art" option is just one of 40 Photoshop filters now bundled with the program Web Designer Premium MX 8 now also supports Microsoft's Embedded OpenType (EOT), which means that if you use a non-web-safe font on a page then the program can embed this in your site. Sounds good, but of course this generates more files to download (embedding "Broadway" added 118KB to our test page, for instance). And if your visitors aren't using IE then they may not be able to see the font anyway, so this may be a feature to ignore. There's better news with the new Live Effects tool, which allows you to apply Photoshop plug-in effects to both bitmap and vector graphics. Especially as you get 40 filters thrown in (sharpens, blurs, colour tweaks, deformations, and a great art filter, amongst others). And the program has plenty of welcome smaller features, everywhere you look. Bullet or numbered lists can now use your choice of bullet or number character, for instance. You're at last able to set the frame rate of AVI animations. And layer animations now take advantage of hardware acceleration on iOS devices, delivering faster, smoother results. Put it all together and Web Designer MX 8 Premium retains a good balance of features, then, with plenty here to keep experienced users happy, while still remaining easy enough for beginners to handle. So if you're looking to build a website with the minimum of hassle then we'd recommend taking the trial for a spin, just to see how much you can achieve. If your needs are basic, though, keep in mind that Xara also produces a standard Web Designer MX 8 edition. This drops a lot of advanced features - presentations, animations, Live Effects/ Photoshop plugin support, HTML5 video, the chart widget and a lot of content, amongst others - but it's half the price, and could be a more sensible choice if you just need to create a straightforward personal site.

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Review: MAGIX Movie Edit Pro MX Plus

Opting for a consumer video editor doesn't necessarily mean going short on features, especially if you choose MAGIX Movie Edit Pro MX Plus. The program comes packed with high-end functionality, from the full HD support, to the 99 editing tracks, the multicam and 3D editing options, powerful sound editing tools, and wide range of output options: file, DVD, Blu-ray, YouTube, Facebook and more. And this latest version has more than 60 new features. Movie templates make it easy to create professional trailers; image interpolation delivers smoother slow motion effects; export presets help ensure you produce the precise video file you need; and a host of performance optimisations deliver major increases in speed, from faster load times, up to 10x faster image stabilisation, or 3x faster AVCHD export thanks to CUDA and OpenCL support. Sounds impressive - but what would all this mean in practice? We took a closer look. Interface After a straightforward installation MAGIX Movie Edit Pro MX Plus presents you with a familiar three-pane interface: video clips, transitions and effects top-right; preview window top-left; and your movie timeline displayed across the bottom of the window. Which works for us, although if you prefer another arrangement then panes can be dragged to rearrange them, or you can output your preview to a TV or a second monitor, leaving more space for the timeline and general editing tasks. The media pool is similarly well designed. You can jump straight to a common media folder (Videos, Pictures, Music), use an Explorer-type view to browse elsewhere, or launch a search tool to locate particular clips, and you'll see their thumbnails displayed right away. At least, that's the idea, although we found the program wouldn't generate thumbnails for all our .MOV sample files. Explorer and other programs displayed them correctly (even Movie Edit Pro did once we added them to the timeline), though, so we're not sure what the problem was. All our other media files were clearly visible, though, no real surprise as the program supports all the main formats (including Stereo 3D videos, audio files and images). MPEG-4, MPEG-2 and Dolby Digital Stereo licences have to be activated manually, but there's no charge, the small licencing fee last time has gone. Better still, in one notable addition to this version, you're no longer restricted to the default tiny thumbnails. A Zoom button immediately above the media pool allows you to choose from 6 thumbnail sizes, anything from 48 pixels wide to a giant 240, which makes it much easier to spot some videos. And once you've chosen a clip, a Jog button allows you to preview it frame by frame, and a quick double-click will add it to the storyboard or timeline. The missing thumbnails were annoying, but if you're not working with similarly affected source files then you should find the core interface intuitive and easy to use. The basics Getting started can be as easy as dragging and dropping any clips you need onto the timeline, then right-clicking a clip of choice to perform some action on it. There's capable scene detection, for instance. You get configurable image stabilization, which MAGIX claim is up to ten times faster than before; we didn't test this specifically, but it is quick, just a few seconds for short clips (under a minute). And the versatile audio cleaner includes a DeClipper, DeHisser and excellent DeNoiser, a 10-band equaliser, compressor and stereo tweaker, all of which are both highly configurable and easy to use. A "Find and remove ads" option tries to remove adverts from recorded TV. Results can be good for 16:9 movies as Movie Edit Pro will detect the presence (and absence) of the black stripes at the top and bottom of the screen, though it's less reliable with other material. And if you want to quickly apply some simple effects then you can add a pan or zoom, or maybe insert the movie's date as a title in the opening few seconds, in just a couple of clicks. There are some complexities here. The trimmers, in particular, are less than intuitive and it takes a little experimentation to figure out how they work. But for the most part MAGIX Movie Edit Pro MX Plus offers a good set of features which will have you producing your movie right away. Effects The download version of MAGIX Movie Edit Pro MX Plus only includes a few effects, to keep its file size down. And while there's plenty of additional content available for free, downloading could take a while. The transitions pack is 135MB, for instance; extra title effects are 44MB; there's more than 1GB of menu templates in three different files, and the list goes on. A fast internet connection is a major plus here. With everything downloaded (eventually), we found more than 100 transitions under the oddly-named "Fades" tab. These are categorised a little vaguely - instead of "Slide" or "Spin", say, you get sections like "Standard", "Movement" or "Effect fades" - so at first it can take a while to find what you need. But there are plenty of stylish choices (which now include sound), they're easily applied by dragging and dropping them onto the appropriate transition point, and right-clicking this later allows you tweak details like the transition length. Clicking the Effects tab reveals plenty of additional options. There are a host of corrections, for instance: brightness, contrast, gamma, colour, sharpness, red-eye and more. Movement effects allow you to size, move, zoom, rotate, mirror and otherwise manipulate the movie. You can add fun effects from rain and snow, to thought bubbles, animated fish and other objects. Advanced options include an effective chroma key, many picture-in-picture options, collages and more. And the Titles tab is just as packed with options, with over 200 styles on offer (including many 3D effects). The sheer volume of possibilities is initially overwhelming, and a poor effects viewer doesn't help. You can't resize the effect thumbnails to better see what they do, for example, and the thumbnails won't always rearrange themselves to fill the available space, so there's some unnecessary scrolling. The effects themselves are easily applied, though, and once you start work it won't take long to figure things out. With the titles, say, you just choose a title style to see a preview, double-click to apply something you like, type your text in the editor, and that's it - you're ready to go. Authoring Once your movie is finished, then MAGIX Movie Edit Pro MX Plus can export it in many different ways. You're able to save it as a 2D video in MP2, MP4 or WMV formats, for instance; as a 3D movie in WMC anaglyph or side-by-side formats; or ready for use on a mobile device (iPod, iPhone, iPad, Android phones or tablets). Format and device support isn't exactly extensive, but it covers the basics. The program can also upload your creation to YouTube, Facebook, Vimeo, or MAGIX own Online Album, ready for sharing with others. Selecting "Export as media player" saves the movie in a web-ready form, both a video and HTML file linking to a video player, so it's immediately ready for use on your own website. Though, bizarrely, there's no progress bar, so after clicking "Save video" the program appears to have locked up until it finally finishes. And of course there's the usual ability to author DVD and Blu-ray discs, complete with a selection of animated and HD menus. There aren't many of these, but they can be customised quite easily, and you can buy more online if you like (a typical price might be $1.99 if the disc is solely for private use). More new features MAGIX Movie Edit Pro MX Plus includes many new features, and the claim that it's "on average 3x faster" (thanks to support for GPU-based acceleration) seemed particularly appealing. It's true, too - the program is noticeably more responsive in just about everything it does. But of course the competition is also accelerating, and in particular we found CyberLink's PowerDirector 10 outperformed Movie Edit Pro in most areas, from launch time to rendering. This new version can still improve your productivity, though, especially with the new Movie Templates. Choose from multiple styles (Action, Adventure, Love Story, Travel etc) and an appropriate storyboard appears, with soundtrack, effects and animations already added. Drag and drop your own clips onto the various placeholders, enter your own credits, and you could have a professional movie trailer ready in minutes. The revamped travel route animation is another highlight, a great way to produce TV-quality animations showing your travels around the world (or just your local neighbourhood). New frame interpolation support means that you can slow down a clip considerably, but still deliver quality results, as the program will generate intermediate images for you. And there are many smaller additions dotted around, like the ability to view the EXIF data of images in the media pool, or the option to resize the heights of individual tracks according to your editing needs. Most of these are well-judged and genuinely useful, though, and they all play their part in creating what is a significant step forward for the Movie Edit Pro name.

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A change is gonna come: see what's stewing in the Firefox cook pot as pre-release channels are updated

Following on from the release of Firefox 12 FINAL, Mozilla has updated its developmental branches to versions 13 (Beta), 14 (Aurora) and 15 (Nightly/UX) respectively. Those looking for major changes in version 12 will have been disappointed, but future builds promise a number of radical new features, including redesigned Home and New Tab pages, plus panel downloads manager and inline preferences screen. Get a head’s up on what’s coming and discover which build is best for your personal needs with our essential guide to what's coming up in the near future for Mozilla's open-source, cross-platform browser. Firefox 12.0 FINAL This is the recommended release for most users, being as it is the latest stable build available. That said, version 12 will not go down in the annals of Mozilla folklore as a notable release, with a minor refresh of the HTML5 controls and the move to silent updates on Windows machines being the only two changes of note. Ordinarily we’d caution against moving rapidly on to the next version, but read on to discover why you may not be able to resist taking the plunge and moving to the beta channel. Check out the new Home page, which makes its debut appearance in Firefox 13. Firefox 13.0b1 Beta Last August, Mozilla unveiled a presentation of how it saw the Firefox user interface changing in the months ahead. A few minor tweaks have already landed in Firefox, but version 13 sees two noticeable new features making their first appearance: a new Home page, and a New Tab page. Firefox’s new Home page (type about:home into the Address bar) provides users with a customised page that includes shortcuts to bookmarks, downloads, add-ons, history, sync, settings and an option for restoring the previous session. This latter feature is another new addition to Firefox’s feature set, and restores all open tabs from a previous browsing session. The home page, which can be pinned permanently as an app tab for easy access, is fully functional already, but will evolve further in time – Mozilla plans to use it as a portal to the upcoming Apps Market, for example. Firefox 13 also introduces a redesigned New Tab page that will be familiar to Chrome and Opera users: thumbnail previews of frequently visited sites. On first visit these will appear blank, but as time goes on and you visit said sites, they should start to populate themselves with thumbnail images of the site itself. Sites can be permanently removed (click X), pinned to the list and even dragged and dropped into a new order, and those who hate the new feature will find a small button in the top right-hand corner that toggles between this new view and the traditional blank tab page. There’s one other major change in version 13: smooth scrolling is now enabled by default, despite the acknowledgement of one bug that may cause issues on certain web pages. Meanwhile, Android users will be pleased to learn that support for Flash is finally being enabled in version 13 of the mobile app, but only if you’re running Android 2.x or 4.x. In the absence of anything visually new in Aurora, we thought we'd show off the New Tab page, also accessible in Firefox 13 Beta. Firefox 14.0a2 Aurora Aurora is an “alpha” build of Firefox, which means it’s undergone minimum testing only. As such it’s not suitable for everyday use, which is why Firefox Aurora is installed as a separate build alongside the stable or beta build, allowing you to test its features without affecting your day-to-day browsing. Settings are shared between Firefox Aurora and your other build, however, so again caution should be exercised before installing it. After all the excitement of Firefox 13 Beta, you’d think the Mozilla developers would rein things in for v14, but none of it. The most exciting features planned are currently listed as in definition, design or development, which means there’s no guarantee they’ll appear in Firefox 14. These include a version of Firefox that runs in Windows 8’s new Metro interface, support for desktop apps (which can be installed and used independently of Firefox, even when offline), and the panel-based download manager that’s been a staple of the UX build for a long time. One other tweak in development is an extension to the silent updates feature introduced in Firefox 12, and that’s the ability of Firefox to update itself in the background, so the user will never have to worry about manually updating again. This is slated for version 14, but may yet slip to version 15 due to a current slew of issues undergoing fixes. The inline autocomplete function remains stubbornly part of Aurora, where it’s been since version 12 was released. This is designed to anticipate what URL is being typed into the Address Bar, pre-loading the web page in the background before the URL has been entered. Other “landed” features are minor, and behind-the-scenes tweaks. These include incremental garbage collection, hang detector and reporter, and cycle collector performance improvements, some of which were slated for Firefox 13 Beta and may yet be implemented in this version. As things stand, there’s nothing visible to get excited about in Firefox Aurora, which makes us think it’s probably best to wait until it gets to Beta before seeing if any of the more exciting new features mentioned above are ready for their move to primetime. Preview the new inline preferences screen in Firefox 15 UX. Firefox 15.0a1 Nightly/Firefox 15.0a1 UX Firefox’s two Nightly channels give users access to code hot off the press, but while you’re looking at the latest bleeding-edge version of Firefox, you’re also venturing into uncharted waters because much of this new code has had no testing at all. Nightly builds update regularly, so once installed you’ll find your build updating on a much more frequent basis than other unstable releases. After the excitement of features being developed in versions 13 and 14, Firefox 15 looks like being a more minor release at this early stage in its development. At the present time only three new improvements are in the pipeline: two performance-related (faster start-up times for Windows users, and tweaks to session restore so it doesn’t slow down the browser restart process) and one that’s being developed by students at Michigan State University. This latter feature, “in-content preferences”, will see Firefox’s Options dialogue box removed and the program’s preferences moved into a browser window, similar to how Chrome’s preferences currently work. This is currently accessible in Firefox 15.0a1 UX, the parallel nightly build of Firefox where interface improvements such as the panel-based downloads manager and New Tab pages first made their appearance. When selecting Options, you’ll see the old pop-up window is replaced by a new tab with a series of buttons to choose from. Click one to access that section’s settings – at present this feels a little clunky, but we suspect it’ll evolve into something sleeker in time. Windows and Linux 64-bit users may be interested in trying Firefox 15.0a1 Nightly 64-bit and Firefox 15.0a1 UX 64-bit. We’d recommend all but developers and serious, knowledgeable enthusiasts avoid the Nightly builds of Firefox. So, to summarise Which version of Firefox should you try? Stick to the most stable version you feel comfortable with, although the temptation to sneek a peek ahead is actually quite compelling with these latest developmental builds. That said, it’s hard not to recommend people check out Firefox 13 Beta – the new features will make a difference to the way you use your browser going forward, and it’s a shame one or other couldn’t have been made ready to provide version 12 with a little more pizzazz. If you do plan to take a look into the future of Firefox, back up if you plan before installing Beta or Aurora builds of Firefox. And If you do decide to give the Nightly or UX builds a try, consider using a non-critical machine or virtual setup (try VirtualBox) instead of your main computer, just in case

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Review: Xara Designer Pro 6

There are many different ways to get creative with graphics, and satisfying all those needs can require an entire library of applications. So you'll open one program for photo editing, another for web graphics, a third for desktop publishing, and the list goes on. Maybe, though, there is a another way. Xara Designer Pro 6 is a photo editor, yes. But it's also a vector drawing tool. A web graphics creator. An excellent desktop publishing tool, with templates to help you build calendars, greetings cards, brochures, business cards, CD covers and labels, newspapers and more. An easy to use and very capable WYSIWYG web designer, a useful collection of 3,000 clipart items, and more. There is a down side to this level of graphics power, of course: the interface can be confusing, at least initially. Open a photo to edit it, for instance, and the toolbars remain packed with options that you probably don't need right now (extrude and transparency tools, "snap to objects", link properties and more). The menus offer little help, too, so it'll probably take some exploration before you find the options you require. This isn't an issue for too long, though. After a little time spent pointing and clicking, or maybe consulting the excellent Help file, you soon learn where everything is and are ready to start using the functions on offer. Photo editing Designer Pro 6 opens images in all the main formats (including PSD and many RAW variants), then provides an "Enhance" toolbar for quick tweaks. Brightness, contrast, saturation, temperature, and blur/ sharpness can all be adjusted separately through sliders, or if you prefer the easy life, then just click the Enhance button and the program will optimise them all automatically. There are a reasonable number of filters here, too, and they're mostly very configurable. You don't just get a locked "Emboss" option, for example - this one lets you set direction, light colour, luminous intensity, shine, angle of incidence, depth, smoothing and reflection. And support for Photoshop plugins means it's easy to find and add any other effects you might require. Importantly, a new Mask feature finally allows you to apply these effects to a selected area of an image. And there are a host of other useful additions. Content-aware zoom allows you to get a closer look at the focus of your photograph, without changing its overall dimensions. A Perspective Correction tool provides a simple way to fix many common perspective problems. The Levels dialog now lets you construct a manual brightness curve for detailed brightness control. An EXIF viewer displays basic image metadata, and this is now preserved when JPEGs are exported. Xara is playing "catch up" here, to an extent, and the new features aren't always as easy to use as we'd like. Still, the various improvements do mean that Designer Pro 6 can now be taken seriously as a photo editor - you may never have to use anything else. Design Designer Pro 6 is, at heart, a vector drawing tool, and the program provides plenty of useful options to help you get creative. It's easy to create freehand lines, curves and shapes, for instance. If a curve isn't quite right then you can have the program smooth it out. The Quick Shape, Rectangle and Ellipse tools help you draw shapes, and everything you draw has handles for easy resizing and rotation. New to this version is live shape drawing, where you see a solid shape (not just an outline), with the correct fill and line colours, as you drag. Which means there's no guessing how a particular idea will turn out, as you can the results immediately: it's a far more WYSIWYG approach and helps you work more quickly. And if you use pressure-sensitive tablets then you should find Designer Pro 6 delivers better results, producing accurate real-time variable-width lines as you draw with a pressure pen. Elsewhere the design tools are mostly as they've always been (which isn't really a problem, as they've always been impressive). The Extrude tool makes it easy to turn any shape into a properly rendered 3D object, and you might then add soft shadows or bevels to objects in a click. Variable transparency, clever contouring and a host of fills provide even more creative possibilities. There is one appealing addition, though, in the shape of the new opacity masks, which will quickly create an irregular transparent shape around any object, or group of objects. They're easy to create, just draw a shape around your subject and Designer Pro does the hard work. Then paste it into your image, and admire the results: they're perfect for creating a vignette or soft fade around the subject of a photo, for instance. And useful text improvements include the text tool's new ability to handle bullets, numbered lists and indents, as well as a search and replace option. If you're upgrading from Xara Xtreme then this may not seem quite enough. If you're a newcomer to the package, though, Designer Pro 6 provides plenty of creative power and could be enough to handle all your illustration and design needs. Web tools If you've used the drawing tools to create web graphics then you'll appreciate the GIF, JPG and PNG (including alpha channel) support. You get full control over the palette, including the ability to lock particular colours so you can be sure they're always present. You're able to choose colour depth, dithering and transparency options, minimise apparent anti-aliasing effects, and more. There's good support for image slicing and image maps, with Designer Pro 6 doing most of the hard work. If you assign a URL to each object within a document (or an area within that object), perhaps, then you can export it as an image map and the program will generate both the image and the necessary HTML for you. And it's reasonably easy to create simple animations in GIF or Flash formats. The real star in Designer Pro 6, though, is the revamped web designer. If you like to take control yourself then you'll appreciate the new NavBar object, which helps you quickly create horizontal or vertical NavBars, while DHTML submenus provide their own animation and transparency effects. Or, if you're in a hurry, maybe just use one of the bundled web templates - there's plenty, they look great, and you even get a few fully-linked 8-page sites. Insert your own content and they're ready to go. It's now much easier to add all kinds of files of files to your site. Drag and drop an MP4 video onto the page, say, a Flash video player will be embedded, and the video uploaded to your web server. You'd prefer a slideshow? Just drag and drop the photos onto the page, set the appropriate options and Designer Pro 6 will build the necessary code for you. And easy-to-use Widgets allow you to add all kinds of interactivity and features to your site: contact forms, e-commerce options, YouTube videos, Flickr slideshows, Google maps, RSS feeds, Facebook and Twitter comment, and more. Just drag and drop whatever you need onto the page, configure it accordingly and once again Designer Pro 6 will handle all the difficult bits. Experienced web designers may be frustrated by the lack of low-level control. And the HTML code generated here isn't always as efficient as it could be (though it's generally good enough). If you just want to generate an attractive site at speed, though, Designer Pro 6 does the job very well, delivering feature-packed and professional-looking pages even if you've no previous web design experience. More features Designer Pro 6 also comes with a sizeable collection of document templates in an easier-to-use hierarchical Designs Gallery (no more hunting around for the examples you need). There are calendars, photo albums, greetings cards, brochures, CD and DVD labels, a new "interactive presentations" category and more. The designs are generally high quality, and in some cases deliver notably more than you might think. Open the Business Cards and Letters category, say, and along with the standard fax cover, invoice and statement, you'll find almost 50 themes providing matching business cards, compliments slips and letterhead designs. Customise the content and you'll have a complete business stationery set in minutes. And while you can get most of this functionality in the much cheaper Xara Photo & Graphic Designer 6, Designer Pro does have plenty of features that are all its own. The website creator is strictly Designer Pro-only, for instance. Photo editing improvements include HD Photo/ Windows Media Photo import, and an enhanced Panorama Studio for stitching together any number of photos, and even creating 360 degree web panoramas. Multi-core CPU support improves performance, while the option to reconfigure shortcut keys may help your workflow. PANTONE libraries can be used as spot and process colours. And when you've finished your work, Designer Pro 6 can now export the results as colour separations, XPS or even PDF/X files, the latter providing complete control over every aspect of the finished PDF file.

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