Graphical system design achievement recognised!

“Over the past five years, the Graphical System Design Achievement Awards has become more than an awards ceremony; it’s a forum for those who are changing the world,” said Dave Wilson, NI Director of Academic and Proficiency Programs.  “NI helps engineers and scientists find solutions for some of the world’s toughest challenges, ranging from improving medical device development to bringing mobile phone coverage to rural areas, and we want to take the time to honour them.”

NI's Dave Wilson

The 11^th annual National Instruments Graphical System Design Achievement Awards honours engineers, scientists and researchers for developing solutions that address critical challenges. The award ceremony, held during the annual NIWeek conference and exhibition, recognised the following winning applications:

• Application of the Year, Life Sciences and Humanitarian Awards: Controlling a Heart Simulator With CompactRIO and LabVIEW, University of Leeds, UK
• Energy: Bringing Mobile Phone Coverage to Rural Areas With a Green, Off-Grid Energy Solution, Diverse Energy Ltd. UK
• Green Engineering Award: Automated Dynamometer Testing of an Advanced In-Wheel Electric Drive System for Electric Vehicles, Protean Electric Ltd. UK
• Student Design Award: Kinesthesia - A Kinect Based Rehabilitation and Surgical Analysis System, University of Leeds, UK
• Advanced Control Systems: Building a Nanomeasuring Machine Using NI LabVIEW and NI PXI, Ilmenau University of Technology, Germany
• Advanced Research and Editor’s Choice Award: Developing an EMI Desktop Evaluation System Using a New Measurement Technique, PERITEC Inc. Japan
• Automated Test: Using LabVIEW, NI TestStand and PXI to Test a Medical Glucose Meter and Insulin Delivery System Within a Regulated Manufacturing Environment, Advanced Instrument Technologies and TestPro Systems, USA
• Education and NI Community’s Choice Award: Creating a Real-Time Simulator for Power Quality Signals, University of the Andes, Colombia
• Structural and Physical Test and Monitoring: University of Nevada Researchers Use LabVIEW, PXI and NI CompactRIO to Measure the Effects of Earthquakes on Bridges, University of Nevada, Reno, USA
• Transportation: Siemens Uses CompactRIO, LabVIEW, and NI DIAdem to Determine the Root-Cause of Damaging High-Voltage Transients, Siemens, USA
• Multicore Award presented by Intel: Using NI PXI Modular Instruments and LabVIEW to Build UHF RFID Development Platforms, University of the Philippines, Diliman
• NI LabVIEW FPGA Innovation Award presented by Xilinx: Developing a Fracturing Pump Controller Using LabVIEW, NI Compact FieldPoint and CompactRIO, Data Science Automation, USA

The UK & Ireland’s prestigious Graphical System Design Achievement Awards will take place on 19^th November at Savoy Place, London, the day before NIDays Conference and Exhibition, held at The Queen Elizabeth II Conference Centre, Westminster, London.

Graphic designer products

Xara's new version 8 Designer products - Xara Photo & Graphic Designer MX (v8) and Xara Designer Pro X (v8) are now available.

Both products are super-fast, easy-to-use single integrated programs that provide all the tools for a range of graphic design tasks that would normally require three or more separate ‘suite’ programs; iIllustration, photo editing, advanced page layout, web graphics and animations – and in the case of Designer Pro building complete websites and online presentations.


Xara Photo & Graphic Designer MX and Xara Designer Pro X are the world's highest performing graphics software titles, with their speed enabling more complex and realistic graphics to be created more easily and in less time.


Xara Photo & Graphic Designer MX is ideal for any graphics enthusiast, small company or academic user that requires the best value general purpose photo and graphics design tool.


Xara Designer Pro X is the flagship of the Xara product line, the ultimate all-in-one creative tool. As well as the website design features, it provides tools that might typically be required by professional designers such as PANTONE®, CMYK, color separations and PDF/X. It also supports multiple processors for even faster performance.


New features in Xara Photo & Graphic Designer MX and Xara Designer Pro X include:

• Powerful Color Erase /Selection to enhance (change color, adjust brightness, blur, etc) or make parts of photos transparent based on the selected color.
• Photo hue adjustment to change the color tint of any part of a photo.
• An innovative new Shape Erase Tool that can perform both vector erasing or path adjustment, as well as 'soft mask' painting to perform detailed soft-edged erasing of vector, text and photo objects.
• A new Text Styles feature that offers an efficient and powerful way of controlling the global appearance of text. Generates CSS compatible styles.
• New Inline Graphics for embedding symbols and icons into text.
• Many new Template Designs including a selection of modern new print templates, such as greeting cards, brochures, business cards, CD covers and certificates, plus many new categorised clipart designs.
• Many other Photo Tool improvements and additions including the integrated Panorama stitching tool, a more efficient ‘Optimize all images’ function and ability to optimize images upon upload.
• Media Exchange. All titles in the MAGIX/Xara range can share media files with each other and with some important third party services such as Flickr and Facebook.

In addition to the above features Xara Designer Pro X includes:

• A Shape Builder Tool to ‘paint’ onto an existing shape to enlarge it, add new areas or adjust the shape or outline. This compliments the new Erase Tool to provide two basic new shape editing tools, that are entirely vector in nature (resolution independent, fully editable) that can edit vector outlines of shapes, or provide soft air-brush like painting and erasing.
• Smart object positioning and page resizing which automatically adjusts the size of a web page and position of objects as you enter more text
• Embedded fonts – website creators are no longer limited to a small list of websafe fonts, but can use just about any font (assuming the font allows website embedding).
• New resizable JavaScript Widgets, such a smooth photo slideshows and an interactive Chart Widget for embedding high quality charts into documents or websites.
• MP3 player widget - just drop an MP3 audio file onto the page, and this will embed a fully cross-platform compatible audio player (including iOS for iPad and iPhone) into your website. This joins the existing MP4 player that does the same for MP4 video files.
• Create numbered lists and graphical bullet points - using Xara's vector graphics capabilities you can now design your own graphics for use in numbered and bulleted lists.

Managing Director, Charles Moir commented “The Adobe approach of selling separate, expensive programs to perform the common creative editing operations is fundamentally wrong in our opinion. Modern documents (whether printed, PDF or web document) should not need separate tools to edit the text, the graphics or the photos. This is not just a costly process, in time and money, but totally inefficient.  Xara's approach offers not just dramatically better value, but we believe it makes the software considerably faster and easier to understand and learn.“