Adobe XD is showing a little love to those who like working with their hands (and pens) with its latest update. Adobe has announced that basic pen and touch support is rolling out to Adobe XD now, adding new ways to interact with with XD's various tools.
Designers with a touch display handy can use a pen or touch to do things like navigate through layers, create artwork on canvas, edit properties, and more. You can also use the pen to quickly scrub through values in a numeric field. Using touch, Adobe XD allows for quick resizing of objects, dragging and dropping of images, and picking colors as well.
According to Adobe, this is "just the beginning" for pen and touch support in XD, so expect more improvements down the road.
In addition to pen and touch support, the February update also allows you link vector graphics from Adobe Illustrator to XD. With linking, you can drag and drop vector graphics from your CC library onto a project in XD. From there, you can edit the graphic in Illustrator and have those changes applied to the same graphic in XD. Of course, if you need to, you can unlink the graphic at any time if you would prefer new changes not be synced.
There are other updates included here as well. Here's a look at all of what's new:
- Vector graphics from CC Libraries: View and drag linked and unlinked vector graphics from Creative Cloud Libraries into XD. Changes you make to icons, illustrations, and other graphics in Adobe Illustrator update seamlessly to XD through CC Libraries.
- Preserve scroll position: When clicking on a wired element, you can now control your position to maintain that place on the next screen without having to scroll from the top.
- Pen and touch support on Windows 10: Use basic pen and touch features as a companion to your mouse and keyboard to create artwork, wire prototypes, navigate layers, and more.
- Layout grids in Design Specs: View layout grids in the Design Specs (Beta) web app so developers can see column grid attributes such as margins and gutter widths.
- Eyedropper in Property Inspector: Based on your feedback, we've put the eyedropper back in the Property Inspector so it's easier to sample colors.
If you're an Adobe XD user, the February update should be available to download now. Otherwise, you can check out Adobe XD as a free trial at Adobe now.
