By Dani Beaumont
With the latest cloud document features in Adobe XD, working with and sharing XD Designs has never been easier. Let me take you through a few of these new capabilities. I'm here in the application and I want to create a new document. I'd like to start with an iPad artboard so I'll go ahead and click the iPad icon and XD will create that new document for me. Now if you've used the application in the past, you'll notice some differences here. Towards the name of the document on the Left, I have a cloud icon. This is indicating that the document will automatically be saved to the Adobe Creative Cloud. I've got the default title of that document and then towards the right you'll notice that it's saved.
XD cloud documents have an auto-save feature that's going to save changes that I make. We'll talk about that a little bit more in just a second but let's look at this drop-down arrow here towards the right. When I click it, it allows me to come in and name my document. Let's say I want to call this real design variations. Notice that I have the ability to toggle here between a cloud document and one that's saved to my local computer. I'm gonna stick with the cloud document for now and I'll go ahead and click the Save button. Notice that it's being saved here up to the cloud and I can see that in the saving indicator.
Now that that's done, let's go ahead and open up a larger document from the Creative Cloud. To do that I'll come in and close out this document and here in the home screen, instead of selecting a new document, I'm gonna come down to the recent document area. Notice that I can see here the difference between cloud documents that are saved to the cloud and those that are still on my local device. I'll come on in and open up the real to cloud document by clicking it and XD will again open that up from the cloud for me.
Now this document has a lot of content to it. What I want you to do is kind of keep an eye on the status here towards the top as I'm working. XD is not going to get in my way with the auto-save feature. Let's say I duplicate out some contents. I'm gonna as well when I stop working for a moment. If I pause, XD will kick in and automatically save those changes that I've made, seamlessly in the background. Let's say that as I've been working here and I've made mistakes and I want to actually revert to an earlier version of the document. I don't really need to worry in that XD is going to save every iteration. Every step that I've gone through for this session with this document, so if I just pull down under Edit to select Undo -- or alternatively I can hit Command + Z to undo on the Macintosh or Control + Z to undo on Windows -- I have multiple levels of undo that will take me all the way back to the very first saved version of this document during this session.
Another really big advantage of the auto-save feature is that I can access this document from any network location when I log in with my Adobe ID. This means I can easily jump between machines like my work machine, my home machine or from a Macintosh to a PC if that suits my needs. Although the file resides in the Creative Cloud, we have support for off-line work as well, if I find myself without a network connection, let's say on an aeroplane. I can create a new document or access all of my recent documents right from the home screen. Let's go ahead and close out this document. Any work that I do on those recent documents when I'm off-line will be retained here on my local machine and the next time that I have network access, the files will automatically be updated with the Creative Cloud in the background.
Just one more thing I'd like to mention before we go and that's the shortcuts that are here on the home screen. On the left-hand side under your work I can access all of my Creative Cloud documents. I can delete any of the ones that I no longer need. If I accidentally delete something I did need, I can go to the deleted directory and from there, restore an individual item or permanently delete it -- if I know that I need it for sure, I can also come in and access any of my original files that reside on my local computer. I can open those files up here and then easily save as to save them as cloud documents, so that I can take advantage of the cloud document features going forward. In this video, I've only lightly touched on some of the new cloud document features that we've made available with this release. I encourage you to take a look around and start to integrate them into your everyday workflow.
Adobe XD supports both local and cloud documents. Adobe XD cloud documents unlock powerful collaboration workflows allowing teams to work from a single document, keep marked versions of a document and see a history of recent changes. Cloud documents can be stored in a central cloud based location for team members to access from anywhere.
