I'm brand new to Affinity Designer but trialing it I found it has a great ui and pretty much every feature I need except one major omission: bsplines.
By bsplines I mean b-splines or basis splines (or possibly NURBS curves? I'm not entirely sure on the math definition), basically a different way of drawing curves than beziers that can be far more intuitive. Specifically, I'm looking for the kind of bsplines Inkscape has where you can adjust the "pointiness" of each node in a bspline curve by shift-dragging node handles, kind of similar to how the Corner Tool works in Affinity. Open the attached svg in Inkscape for an example.
I use bsplines literally all the time in Inkscape because I find continuous curves without ugly flat spots far easier to make, yet they are surprisingly lacking from software. Adobe Illustrator doesn't have bsplines. CorelDraw has them but not with adjustable nodes as far as I can tell. Inkscape has them but Inkscape has lots of other drawbacks and issues. Now-legacy DrawPlus apparently had them though they weren't in the starter edition I was able to find. Affinity Designer, on the other hand, has been primed to get bsplines for a number of years according to various forum posts here like this, this or this from January 2015:
So here I am, expressing interest but the last mention I can find was in December 2016 and now it's 2019, so my big question is: is there any chance of bsplines finally coming to Affinity Designer in 2019?
The addition of bsplines with adjustable nodes to Affinity would make my rating of the product go from 8/10 to 10/10, or 12/10 if they could be drawn with the Vector Brush Tool (I would have easily paid double!).
Thanks for reading all this and making an otherwise exceptional product. I really want to make Affinity one of my core graphics programs, just the lack of bsplines is holding me back.
(Note that I am aware bezier nodes in Affinity have a "smart" mode where their handles are adjusted automatically, somewhat similar to bsplines, but I really don't find that the same, and the moment you adjust them they become un-smart. Also I did check the beta, no mention of bsplines there )
bspline_example.svg