-5

Adobe XD January 2019 Updates

over 4 years ago from , Design Product Marketing @ Adobe

Hello everyone,

The XD January 2019 release is now available with some new features requested by the community. Included in this month’s release

  • Auto-animate in the browser - The Auto-animate feature we introduced in October is now supported in the browser, so you can new preview and share animations between artboards in your prototypes and get the animation property values when you share design specs.

  • View all comments across artboards - Now when team members and stakeholders provide feedback you can easily select “View all comments” in the commenting panel to see feedback across multiple artboards. Click on a comment in your prototype or design spec and go right to the affected.

  • Voice prototypes in more languages with personas and accents - Voice now supports all Adobe XD languages - English, French, German, Korean, and Japanese - for both commands and speech playback. XD is now optimized for accents and you can select personas like Joanna, Matthew, Ivy, etc .

To get the details on these new features check-out the release post here.

Also be sure to join us on for a 3 day AdobeLive focused on UX design from Tuesday, January 29 through Thursday, January 31 from 9 AM - 5 PM PT.

We’d love to hear what you think about this update! Please, leave questions, comments, or suggestions below.

Thank you,

-Mike from the XD Team

33 comments

  • Marc EdwardsMarc Edwards, over 4 years ago

    Speech detection has been optimized for accents.

    What are you doing? Why would something like this, and the other January features take a priority over colour management, guides, layer blending modes, symbols being independently resizable, and the litany of basics XD is missing. There’s no polygon or star tool. Every couple of months I come back to XD to give it another try and it usually takes less than 2 minutes before hitting a roadblock, where I decide I can’t use it.

    I honestly do not understand the team’s priorities. I want XD to be good, but XD is definitely not good.

    53 points
    • Mike Hu, over 4 years ago

      Hi Marc, Many of the features you mentioned are on the roadmap and are prioritized for this year. The January release is a follow-up to our October release to make sure those features were more completed.

      -11 points
      • Marc EdwardsMarc Edwards, over 4 years ago

        XD was announced Oct 5, 2015. The public preview was released Mar 15, 2016. It was out of beta on Oct 18, 2017. How much time should the community give you for things that are absolutely mandatory features?

        28 points
    • Miramark DiazMiramark Diaz, over 4 years ago

      Agree on your point. :) Curious to know what is your main tool for UI designs now?

      1 point
      • Marc EdwardsMarc Edwards, over 4 years ago

        It’s probably best you don’t ask! :P

        I’m using a bunch of stuff, including Illustrator for glyphs, icon design and any heavy vector lifting, Photoshop for mockups and asset creation (there’s still a few things it does better), Principle and Processing for prototypes, sometimes Affinity Designer for SVG asset creation (it does a solid job), and occasionally Sketch and other tools. I do my best to be across them all, and use whichever is most appropriate for the task. I’ve been hoping to add XD to the mix for some wireframing and prototyping.

        2 points
    • Jan SemlerJan Semler, over 4 years ago

      I get you Mark. But i also see the fast technological change thats forced by a lot of companies forwards to AR, VR, Voice Recognition an so on. So i understand that Adobe is pushing into that segment. It might be business wise a logical move. The downside is that we as designer get tools with features that we don't use.

      It is nothing new that Adobe will decide whats best for Adobe and not whats best for the user.

      I used a lot of Adobe products in the last 20 years, just only using After Effects and Photoshop till this day. Ditched Illustrator 1 year ago since they broke it heavily.

      3 points
      • Marc EdwardsMarc Edwards, over 4 years ago

        But I also see the fast technological change thats forced by a lot of companies forwards to AR, VR, Voice Recognition an so on. So I understand that Adobe is pushing into that segment. It might be business wise a logical move.

        They can chase AR, VR, chatbots and voice interactions if they want. If that comes at the expense of other features, it may mean the app is not of any professional use to me. I feel like that’s where we are now.

        It is nothing new that Adobe will decide whats best for Adobe and not whats best for the user.

        Oh, it’s entirely their choice. I am just voicing my opinion, with the hope it’ll help steer the product in a better direction.

        Mike did say “we’d love to hear what you think about this update”. My frustration is that the product is now years old, and the missing features would only be excusable during a beta. Is XD supposed to be for professional production work? If it is, it’s falling very short right now.

        5 points
    • Chris KeithChris Keith, over 4 years ago

      You can imagine the conversations among the XD product team:

      “Forget table stakes features. We need to INNOVATE.”

      “What will look cooler on the website: auto-animate, or guides?”

      “They can just use Sketch for stupid polygons. I want more prototyping features in there. Prototyping is so hot right now.”

      3 points
  • Michael G, over 4 years ago

    I love the monthly XD post because it always gives me a good laugh. It's like the team is purposely de-prioritizing the most basic of features.

    10 points
  • Brian A.Brian A., over 4 years ago

    Hi Mike! I've been using XD quite a bit recently and it's been great to see the constant improvement and refinement. Thanks for posting an update.

    If you're able to answer, I was wondering if you could shed a little light on your internal process for road mapping feature releases. For the last few updates at least, it feels as though "nifty" features have been prioritized over heavily-requested, mission-critical ones.

    For example, we've had a few releases with incremental improvements on voice prototyping, but we're still missing essentials like rulers, guides, and basic text transforms (all of which are near the top of the "Top Ideas" list on UserVoice).

    How are you balancing user requests with your own internal requirements? Could you possibly provide a little insight into how this process works now? Thanks!

    7 points
    • Mike Hu, over 4 years ago

      Hi Brian, I totally hear you. It’s a complicated balancing act. There are top feature requests, core pieces of technology, and future features that take us forward. There is also desktop(Win, Mac), mobile (Android, iOS), and web aspects of XD. Plus quality and performance are so important to this team. I can tell you that lots of what people are asking for will come soon, it just takes time to really think about how to implement, build and test all this so it isn’t buggy and bloated software.

      4 points
  • Perttu Talasniemi, over 4 years ago

    Dear XD Team, why have you made sharing so cumbersome? It used to be really simple and clear, now I really need to think about which action to choose. And if I accidentally save the design to the cloud, it's game over. Also saving the file now needs more work than it used to. Please don't ruin things that are working just fine and are following the industry standards.

    2 points
    • Mike Hu, over 4 years ago

      Hi Perttu, Thank you for your feedback. I'll make sure the team is notified about your issues so we can improve the overall sharing experience.

      0 points
  • Joe BlackJoe Black, over 4 years ago

    A historical moment to see how Adobe's post on DN going sub-zero...

    1 point
  • Daniel GoldenDaniel Golden, over 4 years ago

    Upvoted for the thread

    1 point
  • Emil Edeholt, over 4 years ago

    Just spent two hours trying to find missing fonts in 80 artboards. Since there is no tool for actually finding the missing fonts I had to split the file into 80 separate files, and ungroup everything, and search object by object. I dont care about comments, because I have nothing to show my stakeholders since my time was spent searching for missing fonts.

    0 points
    • Carmen RuseCarmen Ruse, over 4 years ago

      Hi Emil, sorry you had to go through that, i know exactly what you feel, we've been there multiple times as well. This workflow will get some well deserved improvements in the near future.

      Until then, I can share a hack we're using in our team. Just select everything on your canvas, go to Assets and tap on + for Character Styles. This adds all the fonts used in that document as Character Styles, including the missing ones. You can identify and manage them from there faster than going one by one.

      2 points
    • Mike Hu, over 4 years ago

      Hi Emil, I checked with the team and Adobe Font synching is in development now. Hope to have good news for you soon.

      0 points
  • Marek LMarek L, over 4 years ago

    Blending modes please ASAP. We have no real use for any of the features added this month.

    0 points
  • Miguel Solorio, over 4 years ago

    How did this post make it to the DN newsletter while having -5 votes? Smells like a sponsored post.

    -1 points