A new version of Xara's flagship application might ship this year, but you should probably watch for Xara Web Designer 7 to ship first. When the agreement ended, Xara continued to develop the fastest graphic application on the planet. I've written about other Xara applications and you probably know the company's history if you've been a TechByter fan for more than a few years-how the company worked with Corel for a few years only to see Corel borrow program features without promoting the company's base application. Now, though, Xara has released version 7 and, although it continues to be easy to use, it offers several new features that you might expect from an application that costs several times what Xara 3D Maker does. If you've ever tried to create 3D effects, you probably think it's difficult to do unless you've seen Xara 3D Maker version 6. The only reason MixBook doesn't earn 6 cats is that 5 cats is the highest rating I can bestow.įor more information, visit the MixBook website. Move, rotate, and scale anything on the page. Drag and drop the images, "stickers", and backgrounds. If you have digital pictures on your computer, creating a book from them is a snap with MixBook. Bottom Line: Making a picture book has never been easier. The books arrived less than a week after I ordered them and I'm quite pleased by the result. Click the Play button in the lower left corner to view the pages or you can also view the book on the MixBook website. Combined shipping and handling fees are rather high for individual books, so combine orders if you can. MixBook also has hardcover books in a variety of sizes and some of the books can have 100 pages. The books I ordered are reasonably priced ($7 for a 4"圆" 20-page soft-cover book). You could even copy the text from the website and paste it into a word processor if you want to use the spelling checker. Proofreading is made easier by a MixBook feature: One view shows all of the text from every page in easy-to-read black text on a white background. After two hours, the job heads for the press and there's no longer any way to make changes or to cancel the order. Find your errors and correct them within 2 hours of placing the order and the corrections will be automatically included in the order. In my case, I spotted a comma that wasn't needed and one word that should have been capitalized in the title wasn't. The process is so easy that you may not need to take the guided tour that shows how MixBook works.Īfter placing your order, you might notice a typo. You can place a sticker so that it spans the page gutter. In addition, you have a choice of several typefaces and lots of colors. Text can be moved, sized, and have effects added. Each of the torn-paper graphics can be moved, changed, or deleted individually. Here I've selected a photograph and the modification tool bar is active.īy "every element", I mean everything you see. Along the bottom of the screen, MixBook shows the pages so that I can quickly jump from one to another.Įvery element on the page is editable. Photos with a check mark have been used in the layout. Tabs on the left control whether I see photos, layouts, backgrounds, or "stickers" (graphic elements that can be added anywhere on any page). One brought him home and, when she moved out, he adopted the other. One of our cats had recently died and I decided to put together a little memorial booklet about him for both daughters. That seemed like a good way to test the service so that I wouldn't waste my Groupon purchase on tests. The smallest books are the size of standard snapshot photos (4"圆") for $7 each. But before I could even use the Groupon discount, MixBook sent a new-customer offer that allowed me to get two books for the price of one. Now you can find online services that store your photos provide ready-made templates in various sizes allow you to position, size, and rotate photographs provide graphics that can be added to the layouts you create from scratch or to templates give you the ability to add, change, or move pages let you share the books online and (of course) print them.īecause of Groupon, I was able to get a good deal on some work from and decided to try it out. Using programs such as Photoshop or Paint Shop Pro, scrapbookers manually composited each page and then submitted the pages to a service that made the book. Electronic scrapbooking certainly isn't new but in the early days it wasn't easy.
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