Corel officially announced the new CorelDRAW Graphics Suite X6 yesterday and made available the trial version at corel.com/coreldraw. After having worked on it with the team for the last two years, I am really excited about this latest version. While I don’t want to go through the whole list of new features (the previous link will get you all this), I wanted to highlight a few points:

• 64-bit: The team worked really hard in order to get to our goal of feature parity between the 32- and 64-bit versions of CorelDRAW Graphics Suite X6, not a small thing to do in the development cycle of a single version. On the subject of 64-bit, I am particularly happy about the fact that we have full support of both Microsoft Visual Basic for Applications as well as Microsoft Visual Studio for Applications in both flavours of CorelDRAW. Not only that, but X6 is one of the very first software to include the brand new version 7.1 of VBA in both 32- and 64-bit, making sure that you can automate and create custom add-ons for both CorelDRAW and Corel PHOTO-PAINT in your language of choice (VB, VB.Net, C#, …).
• Text engine: To summarize, we’ve started from scratch with the brand new OpenType text engine included in CorelDRAW Graphics Suite X6 (both CorelDRAW and PHOTO-PAINT have it). With support of all the advanced features included in some of the modern fonts (one that comes with Windows Vista / 7 is called Gabriola for those who want to play with it in the trial version as you only get the Corel content when you purchase the product), you can now really create amazing designs and layouts leveraging the full information embedded in the OpenType fonts.
• Styles: Being able to define styles, style-sets as well as color-styles / harmonies and implementing these is a similar way to CSS in the web world, e.g. you can have sub-styles that only change parts of what the parent-style has defined, will really change the way you can design with CorelDRAW. And because you can export styles and color harmonies and them import them into another document, you can really standardise the look & feel across all the documents for a give project / customer / company. Think about how easy it will be to react to the “btw, I would like to use another font and default colors for my company” comment from your clients.
• Getting things done: we’ve introduced many new enhancements and new tools with X6 and I won’t be able to list them all here. My favourites so far are definitely the new object properties docker (I keep it open all the time to make all the changes to the elements on my page with minimal effort), the new powerclips, the smart-carver in PHOTO-PAINT as well as the new shaping tools in CorelDRAW (my favourite, the smear tool).
• Performance: In addition to full 64-bit support, which provides between 10 and 20% performance gain under normal operations, we’ve also done a lot to support the multiple cores in your computers. While I won’t list the individual filters and features that have been enhanced that way, we’ve mainly focussed towards the features you use the most. You will really feel it when you save a document for example, as we are now doing this in the background, e.g. you can continue working almost instantaneously after doing a CTRL-S or when the auto-save kicks-in. We’ve also implemented this for cut&paste in addition to printing. Bottom line, X6 feels significantly faster to X5 and previous on the same system.

Corel has put together a small video that highlights the main new features and I wanted for share it with you here:

Looking ahead, we have started working on what we call “Update 1” that will be available in the 2nd half of 2012. One thing that we are aiming to do with Update 1 is to address two points regarding 32- and 64-bit parity and provide you all with an even better experience (this will be a free update for everyone who purchases CorelDRAW Graphics Suite X6 now). Here are the two things we will add with that version:

• WIA support: Today, PHOTO-PAINT X6 (in both 32- and 64-bit) uses the TWAIN standard to access the scanner. While this works great for both flavours of PHOTO-PAINT, it is also clear to us that while most of the scanner vendors claim they support 64-bit TWAIN drivers, it is not the case in most of the instances. We will therefore implement the support for the WIA format with Update 1, which will enable scanning directly from PHOTO-PAINT with almost any scanner out there, whatever protocol is used.
• PS plug-in support: With PHOTO-PAINT X6 (in both 32- and 64-bit), we support a specific version of the Photoshop Plug-ins SDK (it’s the same version than the one with X5). This is working great and you can see it in action with PhotoZoom that is included with X6. But we also know that some of the plug-ins out there, especially when it comes to the 64-bit version, require a different version of the Plug-in SDK, and we are planning to support that one with Update 1 when we release it in the 2nd half of 2012.

Final point. With X6, and following the standard Corel policy introduced in 2011, we have changed our upgrade eligibility. Going forward, only people who own two versions back, e.g. from X4 or X5. We understand that this is a change compared to previous versions, and we have therefore announced a 90-days period with an extended upgrade path that includes any version of CorelDRAW (even version 1.0 that was launched in 1989!). Check out corel.com/coreldraw for more details.

We are really excited about this new version and can’t wait to get your feedback in the forums.