[Affinity is joining the Canva family. RIP ?]

This is how great initiatives get to die... we have a plethora of other examples.

Kinda sad, especially that it takes A LOT of time and effort to reach a point where you can compete with large corporations.

[Affinity Designer (possible all apps) Subscript BUG!!]

Tested in both 2.0.4 and in 1.x versions, and the issue seems to be the same. This is both worrying and reassuring: it looks like a ported error from some core programming of the app, but at the same time this can narrow the options and speed up discovering why and what's not working. So, devs... please dig!

The issue (tested in Designer, but presumably it may be in all apps): a character can't be made subscript. However, it can be made superscript. The toggle works, but there is no change on the screen.

There are more posts on this forum about this feature, but none in the bug report area, as I could see.

Please fix this ASAP.

 

[Affinity Account - can't log in, please help!]

System: Windows 10 Pro N
- Several protocols, services and features have been disabled in Windows, to reduce telemetry and Microsoft intrusion.

- Registration of the apps (by using email and product key) went on flawlessly.

- Attempting to log in into the account from within the app returns "We're sorry Something went wrong during registration or sign-in" and the error is: "Timeout while waiting for registration service "ready" notification"

What I did:
- disabled firewall
- used simplewall firewall with enabled filters to monitor requests and make sure they are allowed

Nothing seemed to work. My guess is that Affinity is using some protocol that is part of windows to do this account login operation and until I know what is that, I don't have any idea how to make it work. I'd appreciate some help from Affinity in this regard.

[Simplify Paths]

On 2/17/2020 at 10:21 AM, luvis said:

Just in case someone else is looking for a solution to this still. There is still no equivalent to illustrators simplify path but there is one alternative that I have been using lately that works fairly well. You'll have to try it out to see what works for you.

1. Select object with the node tool and make sure all nodes are selected

2. in the action tool bar, select "convert -> smooth" or "convert -> smart" to convert all the selected nodes. (in my experience convert->smooth has the biggest impact)

3. Now press the "action -> smooth curve"

If done in this way it actually removes quite a few unneeded nodes. The only way to customize the outcome is by manually selecting/deselecting nodes and choosing smooth or smart in the convert section.. You can do like MEB mentioned earlier and just use the action -> smooth curve but in my experience it never really changes much unless combined with "convert".

I truly hope a better option comes soon, so *bump* to the devs, simply path is a super useful tool.

Thanks for this ... although is not as straight forward as a dumb "simplify curves" button, it does the job and it can go from super accurate preservation of the original curve, to really simplified and smoothed out.

The secret: It depends on how many times you press the Smooth Curve button... In the experiment i did, i had to press it 3 times, in order to get a great balance between enough nodes removed and shape preservation. You can always undo, it you overdid it... and anyway, never edit your original geometry when you are not sure of the outcome. Always make a sacrifice copy.

[Still no vertical text in Affinity Designer?]

I want to do something really basic: Write vertically using Latin Alphabet (so, no fancy characters)... but I can't seem to see where I can turn the horizontal to vertical. 
Basically I want this:
T

E

X

T

but, the only way to do it, is manually to type each character on a new line and then very oddly to control the space between lines, rather than space between characters.


Please help.

[Affinity products for Linux]

Considering that Linux and OSX kernels are pretty similar, or at least derived around UNIX, which makes them to work somewhat similar, would it be so difficult to have a Linux version of Affinity Suite derived from the OSX version? I do understand that coding for Windows and OSX is literally maintaining two different software, but if a Linux version could be easily derived from the OSX version, perhaps the work involved to maintain it would pay off, as it wouldn't actually be a 3rd software.
I may be wrong here, but this is why I am raising the question... to find out if this is a possible route.

Also, everyone is arguing the EXISTING market, how many users on Windows/OSX/Linux, etc... I don't think this evaluation has any relevance. Yes, this is how is NOW. Bit anyone asked WHY? Is not because Linux is inaccessible, it is because most developers ignored it in the past. But that's not true anymore. Even Steam noticed the relevance of addressing Linux users.

It was argued "linux is for nerds". I'd disagree. Linux is NOT ONLY for nerds. Not anymore. Yes, it can be and there are flavors specifically developed for specialized use. But a lot of linux flavors are there for the general public, even tailored for smooth transition from any other popular OS.

The increased awareness in data privacy is making more and more users look into privacy friendly software. Artists and Creators are not always ignorant. Many are growing interest in protecting their digital life. So, a patronizing attitude that says "we don't develop for linux because our users aren't informed and educated enough to use linux" is actually offensive towards your clients pool. Moreover, I believe you should be encouraging privacy and good ethics by supporting people to migrate towards more privacy friendly options. 

[Affinity Photo Windows Customer Beta - 1.9.0.815]

2 hours ago, dominik said:

 

Please read the entire post of Ash:

No one is forcing you to log in to use the content you bought. It is up to your preference.

Cheers,
d.

you are missing the point: the reason why Affinity is being designed that once you opt in for the account you must always be logged in, is to avoid abuse, as from what they say. Now, the same "abuse avoidance" can be achieved by means which allow freedom to users and at the same time don't force one to be constantly logged in. What happens if internet drops, for example? Will Affinity compensate me for possible losses? I doubt.
And I also doubt that you understand that freedom and privacy rights are not subject to status. 

[Affinity Photo Windows Customer Beta - 1.9.0.815]

7 hours ago, Ash said:

Yeah, we’re very interested in hearing feedback on the reg / content streaming stuff.

 

The issue with allowing your store content to still be available if you sign out of the app is that it could be open to abuse (i.e. credentials for an account which has purchased all content could be passed around for 1,000s of people to sign in, install and then immediately sign out of). Of course this concern isn’t directed at you guys, but something we need to think about

 

But yes we are very interested in your feedback on all of this and are definitely listening.

I am sure there is a healthy way of preventing this without abusing your users. And yes, requiring an user to be constantly logged in to have access to own tools is abuse. Once I buy a software or digital goods, I want to be able to have access to that good in my terms, not in seller terms. There is a law in this regards, by the way.

Now, in terms of preventing abuse, you can limit connections by preventing an account to connect from multiple locations in a short period of time. Also, upon logging in, the account owner should be requested confirmation in their email. If an account would be shared, having to confirm access by email, would make it impractical for abusive purpose (imagine that you are the person sharing the abusive credentials, would you spend your time to manually grant access to all sorts of requests from random people?). Also, as mentioned above, if the requests would come from all over the world, that would be a clear sign of abuse and the accoint can be permanently banned from using the service.
You may be concerned that if user has to email confirm every log in, it will become frustrating. Not if the assets are being installed locally on log in. This means that once logged in, one doesn't necessarily have to log in again until new assets are purchased/added to the inventory and they have to be installed on the specific terminal.

You must understand better than anyone that you CANNOT prevent piracy. You may make it less appealing, you can control the level of abuse, but in the end, piracy is part of the game. Moreover, is in your benefit (yeah, surprisingly, piracy is beneficial for commercial software, under certain conditions).
Also, I switched from Adobe to Affinity for the ethical stand... I won't support you if you take the control-freak path... please be ethical in your actions.

[Affinity Designer - Layers vs Groups?]

18 minutes ago, telemax said:

The layer allows you to edit objects within itself, isolating them from others.

Great finding, thank you. I understand how this could be useful. So far, when I needed such functionality, I used to lock all other groups that might interact with my work. Bit tedious to go all locking and unlocking.

[Affinity Designer - Layers vs Groups?]

Question has been asked countless times. Most answers reflecting the best efforts of people to provide an explanation, but hardly the official position or Serif's intended purpose for the two elements (Layers and Groups in Affinity Designer). If there is a clear explanation, I clearly missed it.

*I AM AWARE YOU WISH TO HELP, But if your answer is only relying on assumptions, or what you *think* it may be an explanation, please do not reply to this question. The reason for this request is that there is a lot of confusion in this area, so is time for a clear and definitive explanation. Thank you for your understanding.

My findings so far:

- both layers and groups can hold objects inside.

- a group can have layers under, and a layer can also have groups under

- when a grouped set of objects is selected and manipulated on the screen, it acts like an object (moves together, scale together).

- when an object on a layer is selected on the screen, it is being selected separately from the rest of the objects on the same layer. However, when the layer is being selected in Layers Panel, all elements are being selected and the selection behaves like it was a group.

- both layers and groups seem to respond the same to effects and other modifiers (unless I omitted to try certain features which may be specific only to one of the two)

Questions:

1. What are the punctual differences between Layers and Groups in AD?
2. When to use Layers and when to use Groups? - of course, the answer to this question will be logically derived from the first one.

[Affinity Designer 1.8.5 - Can't see constraints panel]

thanks, that solved it.

[Affinity Designer 1.8.5 - Can't see constraints panel]

Windows 7 x64

AD 1.8.5

- Constraints Panel activated in View/Studio

- Constraints Panel nowhere to be seen.

Need Help.

[Affnity 1.8 - New Document Interface]

4 hours ago, dominik said:

For me the DPI value only changes when I click on a preset itself. Not when clicking on the different sections at the top.

I just tried that, indeed it changes the dpi depending on the actual page size (when clicking on it), you are correct.
Thank you.

[Affnity 1.8 - New Document Interface]

1 hour ago, Pšenda said:

In your words, it seemed as if the dialogue was totally bad, but you came up with only minor improvements (a larger description and the need to remove some of the initial deficiencies).

In my own words, if you copy something, copy it to make it better, not a cheaper version. Makes sense?

Let me say it again, for you to understand (i'm worried that you often skip the essential):

If you come up with your new original, never seen before idea, then you can say "well, is new, is a bit rough, we'll see how it catches and we will adjust it". But when someone else came with an idea and you just copy it, then make sure your copy brings something considerably better, improve it.

[Affnity 1.8 - New Document Interface]

1 hour ago, dominik said:

in my observation new features tend to have some rough edges. I agree that some things in the new dialogue can be improved a little.

Two things came to mind, though:

1. the DPI setting changes correctly here in AD, APub and APh. I wonder what may be the difference between our two setups. I'm on Windows.
2. The font for the page format setting has to work for different amounts of text. Admittedly 'A1' looks rather small in that rectangle but it also has to work for e.g. 'Social media square post'.

This post is not meant to be a criticism, but a suggestion. I would have not spent my time drawing and taking screenshots if I just wanted to rant about something what bothers me. I did observe the interface can be easily improved and I offered my suggestion as designer, exactly because new features tend to have some rough edges. And as a user I'm always happy to provide my feedback.

For pct.1:

I'm on Windows (still Win7). Tried on all three software. Behavior is similar: the preset DPI will not change when switching between different presets. This is a standard feature, designing for certain applications requires different DPI, so it should come into the help of the user by suggesting the most common dpi value for the need (300 dpi for print, 72 or 96 for various screens, etc). Please check the attached video (was made for AD, but the other two are the same).

For pct.2:

I understand the reasoning, but "the needs of the many vs the needs of the few"... most templates come with fewer characters, where a bigger font will be just fine. The longer titles, as 'Social media square post' can be written on two lines. No sane UX designer would sacrifice the user experience for a 4 words title. In my view, is way more important that the user has a comfortable experience overall, by easily choosing a page size without having to think too much, compared to the fact that one or two templates may have to suffer in some way. There are always solutions, what matters is the intended result: do we want to make it better for the users, or we stick with some nonsense pattern because we are attached towards it?

[Affnity 1.8 - New Document Interface]

I'm really pleased with all the new features and improvements in the new version of Affinity Software. Great work, thank you!

One major change I noticed to be the New Document interface, which tries to copy the Adobe style. Getting in trend isn't a bad thing. However, copying for the sake of it I believe it is a very bad thing. In my experience so far, I learned that every feature must have a very clearly defined functional purpose, and not to be there only because it looks cool, or because "other did it too".

This being said, the following are a series of suggestions which I believe would help improving the New Document interface for all your products. I hope they will be considered and if deemed worthy, implemented (an image is worth 1000 words, so I made an image for you):

 

[Affinity Designer - Layers vs Groups, what is the difference?]

Hi,

I'm getting confused about how and when to use groups vs layers in AD. The question has been already discussed (previous discussion about groups and layers) but the answer seems to be unsatisfactory as it's full of personal opinions and the only video that seems to answer the question is not available anymore.

So, if there is any solid, official answer to the question: what is the difference between LAYERS and GROUPS in Affinity Designer?, please post it here, so people like me, looking for it, will find it in the future.

Thank you.

[Resize Canvas - Percentage required!]

51 minutes ago, carl123 said:

Despite not being in the drop-down list you can enter percentage values directly into the width and height boxes

e.g.

24%

300%

etc, etc

Thanks! I wasn't aware of this hidden feature and funny thing, never thought to try :)).
Much appreciated!

[Your Affinity 2020 wishlist]

On 12/5/2019 at 1:40 PM, AITCH said:

To prevent me going back and forth from Affinity Photo to Adobe Photoshop/Essentials 2020 it would be great if the development team at Affinity could implement Automatic Shake Reduction and Colourise Photo functions. And also introduce the Trace Bitmap/Image Trace functions I already enjoy in Corel Draw and Illustrator would be a major boost.

Thanks guys

 

Hi, not sure what is your workflow, but until AF Designer has Trace Bitmap implemented, you still can benefit of this feature for free: Inkscape is free, open source vector drawing software with a rather decent and powerful Bitmap Tracing functionality.

[Resize Canvas - Percentage required!]

One of the most needed features in resizing the canvas is percentage! We have percentage in Guides Manager, but we don't have it when resizing things. How much is 50% from 3255? Yeah, I need a moment to figure it out too... but if we would have an option to choose percent along with mm, pixels, points and other units, that task would be performed by the computer (this is why we invented computers, i believe).

So, if there isn't too much trouble and the Affinity Development team is listening, it would be awesome if the next release has this feature.

 

Best wishes!

[Is it possible to run Affinity software as portable?]

Hi, I switched to Affinity for about one year already, because my university won't offer free educational license for Adobe software, and it was really obvious that one time payment will do for all my needs for long time and not have to deal with Adobe's business model.

The only issue now is that the computer at the university are all running Adobe software, so I can only work at home, which at times can really complicate things.

So, I was wondering if there would be a way to carry my Affinity software on a USB stick and run it on a machine at university, without requiring installation.

 

Thanks.

[AutoTrace (convert raster image to vector)]

The absence of bitmap tracing feature is a big minus for Designer... definitely reducing its appeal among professionals.
Even Inkscape (free/open source) has a decent bitmap tracing engine.

Hopefully Designer will have soon too.

[From 2D to 3D... and beyond]

One of the most successful 3D Mesh Modellers was SketchUp. The initial developers (@Last was their name) came with the most intuitive and simple way so far to work in the 3D space.
Unfortunately, since Trimble acquired SketchUp, things started to go south and the company is more focused in money making at all costs (and by this I mean sucking the blood out of the people which have little choice but to stay with Sketchup for one reason or another) and did too little to improve the software and the experience. The new version (SketchUp 2019 just moved towards web-based and yearly subscription...and users aren't happy about it.

On the other hand, there is another company which thought there would be a bit of a market to compete with SketchUp (Bricsys - https://www.bricsys.com/en-intl/), they are offering the free software Brics CAD Shape (https://www.bricsys.com/en-intl/shape/). The similarities with SketchUp are obvious, but the downside of this one is they won't allow expansion by using plugins. SketchUp's real power came from plugins developed by the community members.

Maybe it wouldn't be such a bad idea for Affinity to consider an alternative for SketchUp, following the same principles: take what is good and make it better, but at a decent price. And focused on users, because users will reward you for that.

 

Wishing you best!

 

 

[Save Failed because ownership of the file could not be verified]

2 minutes ago, Steps said:

Yes, I saw your screenshot in the first place but I assumed it will perform a autosave before doing so.

Maybe you should write in bold letters in the starting post that you loose all data since the last autosave due to this to make the relevance of the problem much more clear. I did not get the consequences in the first place.

But staff already answered so this will be tackled.

It's just surprising that so much discussion happened there after.

done. I added your suggestion. thanks for pointing it out.

[Save Failed because ownership of the file could not be verified]

Just now, Steps said:

That does actually happen?

Affinity closes down without asking to save the altered document something else? 

Never had this situation but if it is so I would fill in a bug report and let me explain why that should be intentional.

Please read the first post in this topic and you will understand when it does it. And why... I experienced the joy of losing work 3 times before I decided to ask here about what's going on.