COMING SOON! No, It's Not Xara 3 — It's Xara 3D 4!

If a picture is worth a thousand words, how much is this animation worth? $39 US to be precise! The price is the same but that's about all. To be released in  sometime in March, Xara 3D 4 continues to break new ground for ease of use and cool new features. If you look at the animation shown here, all but the brain dead will immediately see two new features. The first is called Step in which a message is displayed in steps (makes sense to me). The second is multiple baseline settings. So what else is new and improved in this little gem?

Buttons! With a variety of shapes such as the elliptical button shown on the right or the beveled rectangle shown on the left. While these can be used as animations, you can also create 3D still images to be used as buttons on your web page.

Notice if you will the thumbs up, thumbs down on the button. Again a product of Steps.

There are six new bevel shapes including Rolled and Square Incut shown here. Rolled has concave sides while Square Incut looks as though it has been chiseled out of metal.

New as well is the ability to apply a different fill color to the front and sides.

In addition to multiple baselines, characters can have different solid fill colors as well as different bevels and extrude depths. Characters may have a combination of solid and outline extrudes too.

New Texture Tints can be applied to individual characters but only one texture per animation is supported.

One of your editor's favorite new features is the ability to see the entire character set per font via the drop down window shown on the bottom accessed by pressing the More button.

Clicking any character enlarges the character while double clicking places the character in the text edit window. Support for a variety of character sets including Central European, Cyrillic, Arabic and more is also new in Xara 3D 4.

The ability to shift the background texture vertically, horizontally as well as rotate the texture fill is a welcome improvement. This helps to align a texture to a symbol or character.

And did I mention that each character can be a different font, with a different color, and a different extrusion and bevel? I didn't? Well, it certainly can!

Xara 3D 4 should be available by mid March. Check the Xara Store page for availability.