Samuli

Well blow me down with a feather, you're right. V1 was exporting with a transparent background too. 
 
Same issue at heart tho (which was in V1!)
- If in Document setup I'm specifically ticking or unticking transparent background the behaviour for this should reflect correctly in both my document while editing and then my exports in a consistent manner and be the same result when exporting to png or pdf. 
 

I had some minor suggestions on the artboard tool that would save me one or two steps.
Allow the artboard tool to handle custom sizes at creation (Main focus of this post) Allow the artboard tool to create & delete artboard presets Show what size presets currently are. I work with print a lot and affinity artboard presets are currently mobile/device focused, allowing me to enter custom sizes would save me a little time.
Allowing me to create custom presets / swap presets like affinity already has would be a bonus.
I included a quick example of what I mean compared to what we currently have.

 

What we currently have 👇

An example of how the rename widow could look was also included, affinity pretty much could reuse their rename preset window.

Every time I use artboards I think man if only they made this one step instead of two or three.

Sorry to necropost, but the swatches palette really needs dumbing down. I read the mammoth post above and I still didn't have a clue how to add the currently picked colour as a swatch. This is such a basic thing it should be self-evident. I tried dragging, I tried "Add Global color" from the dropdown menu, which opens another window with an identical color selector and whatever I did, I got a black swatch. 
That is, until I saw this icon with the 2px "+" in its lower corner. That's just insane, you're trying to represent the whole swatches palette in one 10x10px icon with all the relevant information in a quarter of its size! Just replace this icon with a full-size "+" and people with normal eyesight will immediately know what it does. You don't need to draw the swatches palette when you're IN the swatches palette. People already know. They're just looking for the plus button.
 

Only used Freehand at school, but we were taught to use find & replace. InDesign’s links panel could do something like it but not seamlessly. To be honest, I preferred InDesign over Illustrator for basic vector work.
 
With this 2.0 update of Designer, I feel kind of homeless again, it’s such a letdown that they let all these UI issues slide. Maybe they got hit hard with covid or something, they haven’t said. Maybe this is just the way Serif is going to be. But there is no alternative really. Seems there is no money in going against Adobe, otherwise we would get actual competition. I’m just floored with how disappointing this is. 

Adobe used to have employees on their forums who knew the apps and their development and were occasionally super helpful… and other times the opposite, but they’re human, so they get frustrated. It’s been years since I last tried the forums because I’ve just minimized my Adobe exposure but it did work. The larger the dev, the bigger the chance that someone on the forum knows the issue. 

Only used Freehand at school, but we were taught to use find & replace. InDesign’s links panel could do something like it but not seamlessly. To be honest, I preferred InDesign over Illustrator for basic vector work.
 
With this 2.0 update of Designer, I feel kind of homeless again, it’s such a letdown that they let all these UI issues slide. Maybe they got hit hard with covid or something, they haven’t said. Maybe this is just the way Serif is going to be. But there is no alternative really. Seems there is no money in going against Adobe, otherwise we would get actual competition. I’m just floored with how disappointing this is. 

Your "UI frustrations" are spot on. I was nodding in agreement reading that entire section.

Sigh. I thought it would be obvious that this wasn’t a new ‘feature request’. It was a one-off review off the first major upgrade to Affinity‘s ‘pro’ apps, pulling together a bunch of missing features that I happen to think are most important. 
Yes, these features have been requested more than once already, over many years. (I’ve linked to some of those discussions). That’s kind of the point—they were things we might have expected to be in V2, and their omission is a signal to me that Affinity’s software designers don’t rate the importance of these things highly.
If this isn’t the place for an overall review and discussion of V2 and its most glaring missing features, how about being a little constructive and telling me where the right place is? I did look at all the options, and the ‘Feedback for the Affinity V2 suite of products’ certainly seemed like the best fit.

Exciting times. With precious little in the way of recent updates, some users wondered if Affinity was dead—but no, we were promptly told that they were just focused on the next major version. And four months later, here it is!
A common expression amongst users has been 'hopefully in version 2', so here's my list of hoped for changes. I'm about to fire up my new V2 apps for the first time and see if all the hopeful waiting has been rewarded. I've divided my list into two main categories: 'UI frustrations' and 'Missing or broken features'.
 
UI frustrations
Window management (Separated Mode)
Ever since MultiFinder appeared on the Mac in 1987, we've been able to run multiple apps and see their document windows side by side. Over the years came other improvements like drag and drop between apps and documents. You lose some of those benefits when an app takes up the whole screen with a solid background. For this reason, many of us preferred a separated workspace (turning off Application Frame in Adobe apps), but after switching to Affinity, quickly discovered that Affinity's Separated Mode was pretty broken, with document windows and Studio panels seemingly having no knowledge of each other's existence.
After much criticism, Affinity finally responded in June 2020 with a help article titled 'Increase your efficiency with Affinity’s Separated Mode'. There was no admission of any issues though, and I parodied the unhelpful article in this forum comment.
Changes in V2
Affinity seems to have finally acknowledged the issues with Separated Mode. Their solution? Remove it altogether! The new 'Float View to Window' command kind of gives us the worst of both worlds… separate windows that still aren't aware of your Studio panels, and a big old solid-grey app window obscuring every other background app. It looks like Affinity might have just put this one in the too hard basket.
Panel management
Resizing Studio panels in V1 is somewhere between painful and impossible. To be fair, this was never a perfect experience with Adobe either, but Affinity takes the pain to a new level. Can't see most of your Paragraph panel? Hover your cursor very carefully over that one-pixel hairline between panels… Nope, there's the 'no entry' cursor telling you the panel can't be resized (for some unknown reason). Double-click to minimise a panel or two to make more space… only to find that it added several inches of completely empty space to a different panel instead. Try to resize that one. Nope, there's the 'no entry' cursor again. Start double-clicking ALL the panels until you can finally see the one you want. Utter frustration.
Changes in V2
After playing around with panels for just a few minutes, the results are mixed. Firstly, I can resize panels (without seeing the 'no entry' icon all the time)—great! Secondly, the hover-zone seems to have expanded from one pixel to around two—I'll take it! Beyond that, things are still quite unpredictable. For example, I currently have a massive Swatches panel full of mostly empty space, and a tiny Text Styles panel below it which is showing me only two lines. I can resize the Text Styles panel to my liking, but if I then minimise and reopen it, it's right back to the way it was—tiny and useless. Whatever algorithm is determining these panel sizes is clearly not fit for purpose.
On a positive note, on the Mac the Studio panels are now listed under the Window menu—exactly where they should have been all along!
Oh one other thing… I lost the Swatches panel in Designer. As in, it just totally vanished. 😳 I can hide it and unhide it again from the menu, but it does not reappear. Restarting the app doesn't bring it back either. This could be a bit of a problem!! (Edit: Found!)
Working with guides
Creating a simple guide the normal way, by dragging out from the ruler, works fine. Unfortunately though, Affinity apps lack the power and flexibility of other drawing apps like Illustrator, which let you select and manipulate guides like normal objects—positioning them numerically for example, or hitting delete to remove then. Illustrator even lets you convert normal vector objects into guides.
With Affinity apps, you have to drag a guide off the edge of a page to remove it. The issues with this approach are (1) you have to be zoomed out so that you can see the edge of the page, and (2) it's inconsistent with the behaviour of other objects, which can be safely dragged and positioned beyond the edge of the page. This creates confusion for users as discussed on threads like this one.
Instead, Affinity gives us the Guides Manager. It's a useful tool, but it would be less necessary if guides were more flexible in the first place.
Changes in V2
There appears to be no changes to the way guides work in V2.
Working with colour swatches
In my opinion, Affinity seriously dropped the ball in V1 with the way colour swatches are handled. Here are some of the features that are missing or broken:
There's no obvious place to put your custom colours. You have to find the 'Add Document Palette' command first, which then creates something called 'Unnamed'. Other actions may trigger the app to add a second palette named 'Document'. Once a swatch is created, you can't convert it to or from a global or spot colour. You can't select more than one swatch at a time. You can't drag and drop colour swatches between palettes or between different parts of the UI. There's no obvious way to add a Pantone swatch to an existing document palette. (You need to apply the colour to an object on the canvas, select the object, switch back to your document palette and click on one of the two 'Add…' buttons.) New global colours are given generic names (Global Colour 1, etc). Pantone colour names are not preserved when added as global colours (the most common requirement!) and need to be typed in manually. Global colours are not transferred between documents when copying and pasting objects. (You need to explicitly export a palette from the first document and then import it into the second document.) Global spot colours are not added to a Publisher document palette when placing a Designer file (unlike InDesign and Illustrator). There's no search field in the 'Add Global Color' panel or edit colour pop-up, making it almost impossible to select the one you want from a large list of swatches. (They aren't displayed as a list, even if you set the panel appearance to 'Show as List'.) There's no command to find and delete unused swatches from a document palette. There's no option to merge two global colours. When deleting a used swatch, you're not asked what to replace it with. (If you delete a global colour, all instances just get replaced with a non-global version.) Yes, colour swatch management in Affinity V1 is bad—really bad. In one forum comment I wrote, 'That's one thing Adobe got right, and something the Affinity devs would have done well to replicate, rather than trying to get clever and do their own thing. Gosh I hope version 2 starts to take this seriously.' Well let's check out V2 and see…
Changes in V2
(1) The 'Add Document Palette' command now displays a pop-up which asks, 'Please enter a name for the new palette.' It still defaults to 'Unnamed', but it's a small improvement over the previous behaviour.
(9) Both the 'Add Global Color' panel and the edit colour pop-up now feature a search field, making it much easier to select from a large list of swatches. (They also now respect the 'Show as List' setting.)
Aside from those two improvements, very little seems to have changed with colour swatches across the Affinity suite. That's a big disappointment, and seems to communicates that the Affinity team don't share the view of many users, that this really needed an overhaul.
Undo/Redo
In Affinity apps, the action of selecting or deselecting an object gets added to the undo/redo stack. This is counterintuitive, goes against years of established practice, and (if the user is not familiar with it) can lead to data loss. Only an action that alters the artwork in some way should be added to the undo/redo stack, as discussed here.
Changes in V2
Nothing has changed.
 
Missing or broken features
1-bit black and white artwork (line art)
Graphics applications have, since the beginning of time, supported true 1-bit black and white artwork, so many professional users were understandably shocked to discover that Affinity V1 apps offered no support at all for 1-bit files. The only workaround is to work with grayscale and manually compress your lightness levels. This is anything but reliable, as compression algorithms at export time will not recognise the difference between a faux B&W image and a grayscale one, downsampling line art to an unacceptably low resolution and adding unwanted antialiasing.
Changes in V2
Incredibly, there's still no support for 1-bit black and white artwork.
Turning off antialiasing
The ability to turn off antialiasing of exported graphics is an essential feature for any professional graphics application. Affinity V1 apps lacked this feature entirely in the beginning, but in response to a forum post in 2015, one of Affinity's developers added highly-customisable, per-object control of antialiasing. Then, in 2020, it got better, with a simple on or off option, which you can apply to multiple objects at once.
This is a huge improvement already, but some of us would still like to see a simple on/off checkbox at export for outputting something like a raster print versions of a logo. As I explained in the same discussion: 'it's about tailoring the artwork to different output media. That should be an export function, not something I have to hard-code into the design file.'
Changes in V2
Turning off antialiasing cannot be done globally at export—it must still be hard-coded into each object of the file.
Reliably exporting for print
Affinity Publisher's default PDF export settings for print-ready artwork ('PDF (press-ready)') turns black (K:100) to a CMYK mix (e.g. C:71, M:66, Y:66, K:76), which would be a disaster if not detected before your job goes to print (something which is difficult when there are no pre-press tools provided). There are other issues too, like line art being downsampled and antialiased (related to the previous two issues).
Changes in V2
This has not been fixed. The 'PDF (press-ready)' export preset still has an all-or nothing 'Embed profiles' option ticked by default, and still causes black artwork (like text) to get converted to a CMYK mix.
Previewing colour separations
Affinity has no alternative to Acrobat Pro. For print professionals, this means no way of previewing and checking colour separations before going to print. When combined with the issues mentioned above, the chances of poor quality artwork and printing are high.
Changes in V2
There are no new apps or built-in tools for checking colour separations.
 
Summary
V2 may have brought some cool new features, but it has only brought modest improvements to a few of the features which matter to me the most, while other issues have been overlooked completely. Having waited so many years for the first major update, I have to say, I'm pretty disappointed.
I'll still purchase all the apps, and I'll still recommend them to family and friends. They do a lot of great things, and you certainly can't beat the price.
Of course, this is not an exhaustive list of the issues I have with the Affinity apps—just a few that frustrate me the most. If I've left out some of your biggest issues, feel free to add them below with a note on whether V2 fixed them for you.

Really, really need this feature! My pattern recognition skills are way below what Affinity expects of me. I need names for brushes!

There is no substitute for 1-bit 1200ppi images and how they are used in print publications. The filesize is negligible compared to greyscale or heaven forbid, CMYK. We are talking 1-bit – a couple dozen MB and CMYK – several GB. This has a direct effect on speed at every stage of the process. 
Add to this the fact that Affinity has no Live Trace equivalent, which makes large scale hand drawn type next to impossible to work with in Affinity. I have to send my type as separate Photoshop prepared files and just tell the client to place it into the layout themselves. It’s not a great look for a professional.

Still an issue in 2021. And it's not just "Save As…", each file action is its own little island. So if I open a file, Save As…, find the original folder, then I'm ready to Export that file and I get to do it again because it assumes I want to Export to where I exported last time.
So, basically this is designed to work well with large series of images that all end up in the same places. But that's what Lightroom does for photos and Affinity is not particularly suited to that workflow. It's even more obvious when you consider Designer and Publisher. They're not factories, they're design apps. 
It's engineer logic vs. designer logic again. Serif sits squarely in the engineer space.

I agree that modal windows should never be hidden behind other UI elements. The developers have mentioned that one of the design goals for the Affinity apps was to eliminate as many of them as possible, but I think in this case they have taken that too far.

And is there any hope of this unusual and unhelpful behavior being changed? It's a right nuisance.

Is it true that the brush names appear in the Brushes Studio only if a brush is assigned to a particular brush tool, or am I overlooking a preference or option to show the brush name for all brushes?
If only assigned brush names are displayed, are any plans to add a preference to show the names for all brushes?

Ok, this is what I said: ”This icon doesn’t work, it’s too small and vague.” You said: ”Look, there are other things that do its job.” I said: ”There are other apps in which this icon works.” See the difference? You don’t have to agree with me but the discussion is about the icon, not all the documentation Affinity has come up with to explain the problem away. 

Let’s put this into a form that’s more approachable: you design a book cover, but let’s say only 25% of the target audience can read it. The back cover does a good job explaining what the front cover is about but you still don’t exactly know why. Is the front cover good? Is it fulfilling its task? This is the same thing, the icon should work. I think I’ve proven that it can work much better because it does in other pro apps.

Oh, I don't mean arguing in a bad way, I mean it in the neutral sense – we have differing opinions and present arguments in favour of those. But I would argue, that "save" is not among the first words you would try when you want to export something from iPadOS to a desktop. It's just a different way of thinking about it. Save on iOS and iPadOS has traditionally meant local saves, "Save a copy" is a macOS concept that isn't something native to the iOSes and hasn't even become very common on macOS outside Apple's own app suite. 
But to be honest, I'm not going to start a separate feature request thread, there is close to zero chance of success and it would just be the same as this thread. But don't get me wrong, people have been helpful and argued thoughtfully. I'm just not in the majority, apparently

Hi Samuli,

I don't think this is a bug, its just that the guides that are shown are not updated until your selected object changes. However I've passed it on to development as an improvement!

-

a double click will select items in a group.

Sorry, that was sloppy of me, fixed now. That is awesome, thanks! I knew some of these must be "one checkbox syndrome". 

Thanks very much, that's one down!
 
Yes, that is true and I was aware of that, but worded my post carelessly.  My point was that creating multiple separate gradients is significantly slower than swiping five times in a single layer. It seems like a small thing but multiply this by a few hundred times per day and it gets way bigger. 
 
Snark aside, the app contains DAUB brushes by well renowned digital painter and brush wizard Paolo Limoncelli, it is obviously also aimed at digital painters just as "Photo"shop is also aimed at digital painters. It's just a name. 
 
That sounds promising!