Xara offers 4 versions of its design application, one intended for website design, another for page layouts and publications, a third for photographers, and a fourth that contains all features for purposes. Although all four applications share numerous base functions, the Designer Pro version includes everything from the other three and adds a few.
In the past few months, I've reviewed the two of the three previously released applications. Now Xara Designer Pro X365 is available. Most of the new and improved features have already been described in those earlier reviews:
Most of the features in Designer Pro X365 are available in at least one other version of the application. Xara comes in four versions: Web Designer Premium, Pages & Layout Designer 11, Photo & Graphic Designer, and Designer Pro X365. These are the features that are exclusive to Designer Pro X365:
Support for multi-core processors: This support brings faster execution to the program. This isn't a new feature, by the way. It's been present since version 4.
Support for 64-bit operating systems: Designer Pro has had a 64-bit version for a while, too. Instead of being limited to about 3GB of RAM as the application would be in a 32-bit version, the program can address vastly larger amounts of memory. Today's 64-bit systems often come with 8 to 16GB of memory and systems could support up to 16.8 million terabytes. No existing system comes anywhere near that, though.
Advanced Panorama Studio: Although Web Designer Premium and Photo & Graphic Designer include a panorama function, Designer Pro has a more advanced version. Panorama Studio includes the ability to stitch together (theoretically) any number of images, to create web-based 360-degree panoramas, and better controls for cropping, sharpening, and enhancing the final image.
If your mouse has a scroll wheel, you can zoom the image in and out. Clicking and dragging right or left will rotate the image. This is a full 360° image created from 19 original pictures.
The panorama consists of 602 small JPG files, a Javascript file, and two JSON files. These are all created and organized by the Panorama Studio application, which also generates an HTML file. Adding these components to an existing HTML file, as I've done here, requires an understanding of cascading style sheet syntax, positioning, and sizing.
Collecting enough images for a panorama is easy enough. I stopped at a small park, stood in one location, and took 19 images with a point-and-shoot camera. There are a few things to remember:
Back at the computer, I imported all of the images into Advanced Panorama Studio and the application arranged them automatically. It also asked me to specify the focal length of the lens and guessed properly what it was, do I didn't change anything.
The application also did a good job of identifying the horizon and created a preview image. Clicking the Render button, I stood up to go away, expecting that the process would take at least several minutes. The process was complete before I finished standing.
Instructions in the upper right corner explained how I could export the panorama in a usable form. That process, too, took far less time than expected.
Support for JPEG XR import: Also known as HD Photo format, JPEG XR is a still-image compression standard and file format for continuous tone photographic images. It's based on technology Microsoft developed and patented under the name HD Photo and, before that, Windows Media Photo. It supports both lossy and lossless compression and is the preferred image format for ECMA-388 Open XML Paper Specification documents.
Possibly the most important new feature in these two versions is this one:
Keep with next paragraph, keep lines together: This is a key formatting function that's important for printed documents to avoid what are called widows and orphans in publications. Typographers and designers argue over which is which. For my purposes, I'll define them this way (but some people reverse the definitions): A widow is a short line -- usually just one word or the end of a hyphenated word at the end of a paragraph, column, or page. An orphan can be part of a hyphenated word or just a single word at the beginning of a column or a page. Both of these are considered to be poor typography and these functions automatically eliminate such problems. It's also possible to define a paragraph (a heading, for example) so that it will always stick to the following paragraph. This eliminates having a headline at the bottom of a column or page, separated from the following text.
The application can now automatically hyphenate words. This is a feature that has been absent for too long. A dialog box offers control over how hyphenation is applied.
Those who routinely need to type the same long text in a document will welcome the combined auto-correct/text expansion function. Auto-correct can be set to recognize your most common typos (for me it's "hopsital") and automatically fix them ("hospital"). This feature can also be used to expand small bits of text. For example, you you set "tosu" so that it expands to "the Ohio State University".
Because the program uses paragraph styles, the user can swap one font for another throughout a document. The easiest way to do this is to redefine a block of text and then set all matching paragraphs to use the new style.
After changing the text in the first paragraph of the document, I updated the style and all paragraphs with the "normal text" style were converted.
Page & Layout Designer now gives more control over graphics in a publication. For example, inserting a graphic into columnar text resizes the image to be the width of the column because that's what's often desired. Unfortunately, I didn't find a way to override this once the image has been placed, but that's probably more my shortcoming that Xara's.
There's also the option to specify whether an embedded image is placed in-line (within the text) or whether it should float left or right in the text.
This version also works with Dropbox and Google Drive to enable file versioning so that you can go back to an older copy of the file.
Websites, Photographs, Publications, and Design Come TogetherIt's rare to find an application as versatile as Xara Designer Pro X365. If you've looked at the individual applications, but haven't been able to make up your mind, maybe it's time to take a close look the the application that does it all.
Additional details are available on the Xara website.
Once Yahoo was valued at $125 billion. This week Verizon bought its core internet assets for a little less than $5 billion and some analysis say that was too much. Last quarter Yahoo lost more than $400 million and has been hovering near extinction for a decade or more.
As an advertising medium, Yahoo has been a failure, but it still attracts a lot of users every day. Nearly 1 billion people use Yahoo component at least once per month and that's what Verizon has purchased. The company bought AOL last year for a little less than they just paid for Yahoo. Both AOL and Yahoo have numerous properties that, while not profitable from advertising, still attract a lot of users.
Buying AOL and Yahoo positions Verizon as a content powerhouse with sites that include Engadget, Huffington Post, TechCrunch, Tumblr, and Yahoo Finance. The market leaders for on-line advertising are Google and Facebook. Combined, they have just about everything, but even a weak third place is still worth a lot of money.
CEO Marissa Mayer says that she plans to stay at least until the deal closes sometime early next year. Shareholders have criticized Mayer for being unable to do what previous CEOs were also unable to do -- reverse Yahoo's downward course -- so her future is not exactly assured. Don't feel too bad for her, though. Her contract calls for a severance package of nearly $60 million. During Mayer's tenure as CEO, the company did a lot to improve its core business by investing in new apps and services and well as acquiring 20 other businesses.
Verizon says that it will maintain Yahoo email and most of Yahoo's other products, and that it will spend money to improve them. The big question now is whether Yahoo's original business -- search -- will continue.
The attackers had been invited by PornHub and their successful break-in earned them a reward. The on-line pornography site wants to know about its site's vulnerabilities before bad guys find them.
Things have changed. In the old days, porn sites were considered to be dangerous to your computer. Today's legitimate porn sites (if you don't consider that an oxymoron) are more about attracting repeat visitors who will spend money on the site. But wait -- PornHub is free.
I'll come back to that in a moment. First, let's consider the break-in. By its own account, PornHub is the world's most popular pornography site. Two months ago, the owners invited coders to find ways to break in.
The bounty program's objective was to reveal dangerous security flaws before they could be exploited. Now they've paid the first bounty payment, $20,000 to three people who found a way to get remote code execution permissions on PornHub's servers.
What they found is a zero-day vulnerability in PHP, a very popular programming language used by numerous websites.
This flaw allowed the intruders to determine the location of the server's POST data, which in turn let them create a malicious payload that could execute malicious code on PornHub's server. POST data is used to communicate information between a website form and a PHP application running on the server.
The bounty winners say that the process they used was complex and cumbersome, but it provided access to the "passwd" file in the server's "etc" directory.
PHP has already fixed the flaw but any unpatched version of PHP 5.3 and above will still be vulnerable.
PornHub was headquartered in Montreal and had offices and servers in San Francisco, Houston, New Orleans, and London. It was acquired by Manwin (now known as MindGeek) in 2009. MindGeek owns many other websites that specialize in pornography. The site is available in English, German, French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Polish, Russian, Japanese. MindGeek's headquarters are in Hamburg, with office in London, Dublin, Montreal, Miami, Los Angeles, Nicosia, and Bucharest.
From the organization's main page, you'd never guess what's behind the screen.
Visitors may, but are not required to, register a free PornHub account that allows them to post comments, download videos, and upload videos.
It's "free" because the site displays advertisements. As with other sites that include ads, some of them have been accused of installing unwanted applications, but the site has generally tried to remove these.
It can also be free because PornHub launched an on-line casino earlier this year and that is expected to provide income. MindGeek owns several commercial pornography sites and may steer some visitors to the paid sites.
The site has been sued for copyright infringement by sites that it doesn't own and the "Great Firewall of China" started blocking the site in September 2013. Russia blocked the site briefly in 2014.
