It has a quick and easy way for managing shapes – SmartShapes. You can create covers for Facebook, Google+ and Twitter. It has 166 business themes added – free – including website themes. I haven’t tried this yet, but I intend to. It has a photo grid feature which allows you to create a grid of photos of different shapes. On reading the sales pitch for X365, it tells you that it is good for web design (I don’t do that, Brian here in the office does it), animations, improved test handling and text enhancements (as mentioned above), an improved magnetic lasso, etc. I’ve used some of these on RAW images in RAW software. You can play with it and create some imaginative photo effects and using different photo filters. In addition, it is good for rescaling, cropping and moving photos with the new handles. I was able to create some great panoramas relatively easy. It’s a fascinating place and brilliant for photographers. On photo editing, a lot of what you would expect is included, such as red eye removal, cropping, cloning, basic healing, paint-on effects, content-aware resizing and brightness/levels adjustments. Blocks of text can now be tied to specific objects or a position in a document. This means that you can now select from over 1,500 symbols with the help of a search function. Font Awesome has been updated and is now improved with a collection of Google Material Design Icons. You can insert symbols and fully editable vector shapes into text strings.

Johnny D Fox PosterI used X365 for creating some one page newsletters for distribution using the templates provided. But they suited a purpose and I was able to do it. Now before some experienced smart assed graphic designer looks at these and says that he can produce them in 5 minutes because they are so basic – I know. Johnny D Fox is a client and he needed two posters as a matter of urgency.

I can’t make fancy or complicated graphics. Like X9, X365 is easy to use – compared to Photoshop. I’ve used Designer Pro X9 for basic jobs in the past, so I had an idea of what to expect. You can look at the many instructional videos, go to the help section or just dive in. I downloaded the programme, installed it with the code (without the Simpliclean option) and off I went. In January 2014 I wrote a review of Xara Pro X9.

Xara designer pro x9 templates