Metalhead

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.

Hi all. Thanks for your patience over the weekend when our offices were closed.
We've had a meeting this morning and decided to ALSO offer MSI installers, to those people who would like them. I can't tell you when this will happen, as there is engineering work that will be required to allow this to happen, but we hope it won't be long.
Thanks for your feedback!

When you wake up 1,000,000+ customers with an email many will find their important feature has not been implemented. Please don't think this is an attack, they are real owners with real concerns. 
Particularly do not harass upset newbies, they can only be calmed by listening and NOT by accusing them of being part of some conspiracy to undermine us. 

That’s what you get when:
The price of admission is very low ➡️ you attract a lot of users who will always complain about prices. Don’t have a roadmap, no public beta-testing for the major software releases, overhyped marketing before launch, bugs from v1 still not fixed in v2  ➡️ you end up disappointing some pro users. And of course, there are some of them who just like to annoy anyone who is genuinely happy with what Affinity offers. But the main source of negativity on the forums is caused by Affinity’s own actions. 

Can we please bring back the checkmark boxes for the layers. I dont know why they were changed to circles. Who asked for this? No one told serif to change this. Nobody requested this. Dont fix whats not broken. Now we're having these debates about this new on/off circle icon that we shouldnt even be having. And theres bearly any contrast with this new circle on/off icon. When you turn off the layer its this dark gray circle on dark gray. Its just hard to see. Like, a checkmark is a good indicator to tell if a layer is on or off. Why change it? 
Theres also an issue on AD v2 on ipad where the new on/off circles in the layers vanish. Theres no button to turn your layer on or off. I have to close the app and reopen it. 
 
Ugh! Like, this seriously was the least of our problems. I go back to AD v1 on ipad and Im back to how it used to be. My problem is solved. I have my checkmark box in my layers but then I look up and realize that theres a bunch of affinity users debating about an on/off icon in v2. Why? Why are we debating over something that was never a problem? Now a problem has been creating for nothing and our energy is going towards it. 

well, I was in doubt whether to upgrade all 3 applications or not .. but the more details arise, the less I am attracted to purchase the update/upgrade.
- "strange" application types that break my data-structure (drive 1 for the OS, drive 2 for applications, drive 3 for data)
(MY computer, I decide where to install applications - not those ***** of Microsoft, NO Apps from the MS App-store)
- none of the promoted features addresses my issues (mostly Usability-flaws, which still isn´t something Serif does care about, as is seems..)
- new features are too sophisticated for my use-cases.
- even the Demo-Version requires registration?

I wonder if the basics have been fixed...
Variable fonts? (nope.)
improved usability of the straighten tool?  (click+hold-draaaaaaag-release  is stupid)
did the mesh warp and perspective tools get additional handles which are accessible when zoomed into the image?
is save/save as finally capable to cover the function of the export-menu?
is the GUI finally scalable? (nope, still too tiny)
are ALL interface elements finally mouse-over sensitve? (change color when pointer hovers above)
Have the keyboard-shortcuts for non-english application-language settings finally been adjusted to combos that are easy to reach on such a non-englisch keyboard-layout? 
(e.g. these [  ] require ALTGR-8 or 9 on a german keyboard but are the default-settings for several actions...)
are locked layers finally really protected from ANY change? (locked means locked/protected)
Is it still possible to select tools even if the document contains no layers?
are those notification pop-Ups finally moveable?(or are they still somewhere in the upper right area, colored similar to the background to make them harder to see?)
Does Photo-develop Persona still tell me "please use the cancel-button" when closing the window instead of handling this window-close-event the same way as the cancel button by showing an "are u sure" window...?
Can the e.g. curves adjustment window be resized? (made bigger, for more detailed adjustments)
 
Thanks for TINY (useless) Layer-Icons.
Thanks for new live filters layers... that require HW-acceleration.. is this finally 100% fixed on Windows?
Thanks for "normals adjustments" - I did not even know that more than 0 people out there may need such a feature...
 
Sorry guys... I am not convinced.

I fully appreciate the need for Serif to raise revenue - they can't go on doing updates for ever for no more revenue. But while there are some interesting things in Designer and Photo, which I have happily paid for, the upgrade to 2 for Publisher is disappointingly poor. I don't know how the Publisher team go about setting up focus groups to find out what people want, but I don't feel they can be going about it in the right way. As a professional designer, I spend a lot of time finding out exactly what my customers want, but I'm not sure Serif have done this. Even just hiring someone on to their staff who was a seasoned print designer with a wide range of experience would have made a huge difference, but I can't imagine this is something they have done. I'm echoing the post from Bryn Reiger here, though less optimistic than him that they will listen this time - they haven't done so yet! Perhaps their system of toting up the number of requests for each feature is at fault. If ten friends told me I had a cold and one doctor told me it was a serious disease, I think I would go with the doctor. Quality, not quantity.
But I am wondering - is it me? When the Affinity suite came along, I thought - aha, this is going to give Adobe a run for their money! But perhaps I have been deluded by my own expectations. Maybe all they wanted for Publisher was to make it a decent flyer/small booklet app - which it is. In fact the only one really, for the Mac anyway, as Word and Pages are just WP and InDesign too complicated and expensive for the average village hall or small company publicist.
Well it is what it is, and I'm not sure I can carry on carrying a torch for the Publisher part of the Affinity suite much longer, though I will continue to recommend Photo and Designer.
 

No global layers.
No multi-page spreads.
No scripting.
No typeface sets.
No informal spreads (so pages can be reorganised for side-to-side comparison).
Apparently there is footnote and endnote support. Anyone upgrading can tell me how that works. 
Ratio of 1 in 6 is not very good progress, IMHO. Publisher is way behind the other products in the suite and needs some TLC.

US: 99 $ = 98,50 €
UK: 89 GBP = 101,50 €
Europe... 119 €
I'm not happy with this regional pricing...

US: 99 $ = 98,50 €
UK: 89 GBP = 101,50 €
Europe... 119 €
I'm not happy with this regional pricing...

Yes. The app bundle, too.
Affinity Photo V1: € 49.99 -> € 54.99 -> € 64.99

Yes, 5 years of an unstable Publisher that still barely functions for my needs.  I sincerely hope V2 is better, otherwise I will not be purchasing their software again. 

Where did I say I'm after free?
Except Publisher has only been available for three, and obviously not everyone bought them on the day of release.
Voucher codes? I'm sure Affinity have records of how many licenses have been bought by each customer via their own website and the app store. Provide a percentage discount code for x-number of purchases.

I find it quite disappointing. I don't have 160 AUD to drop on software that I'm not really convinced is much of an upgrade, especially given the main changes seem to be a slight redesign with a mixed reception and some basic tools that should have already been in the program. I wouldn't really have a problem if there was fair upgrade pricing for previous customers, especially given how many of us have voluntarily supported Affinity through the store. I'm a hobbyist so it's quite difficult to justify.
The excuse for not offering upgrade pricing is weak. Some of the sales have been made in app stores, so it is impossible to offer a discount? There are so many ways to make that not a problem, like having the upgrade offer be contained inside a licenced version of the app, on the popup where you regularly advertise... offers. If you had said you needed the money to keep the company going, then that's fair, but you didn't, instead making up a weird excuse and dodging the question that is seeming to frustrate a lot of customers.
I've been an Affinity user for a while, but imagine someone who just bought the whole suite a month or two ago for full price. Well, they're now completely screwed, because 2.0 was not announced in advance, and new customers were still being sold a promise of future updates for their software which will now get none. Will they ever trust Serif or want to be a repeat customer? Nope. No warning.
The most frustrating thing for me is the way it has been communicated (or perhaps miscommunicated). Over time, I separately bought the apps for a combined total of 165 AUD. It's weirdly insulting that you are now saying I can rebuy all the software for 160 AUD which is a limited time bundle price, making it a whole 5 AUD less than when I bought all the apps separately. Out of the blue I have to double the amount of money I've spent on Affinity software to get any more updates, and there is no roadmap or transparency or commitment for how long it is until I'll wake up one morning and get an email saying it's happening all over again with 3.0. For people working at Serif, please remember that while you may have known about this coming change for a long time, all of this was just dropped on us customers like a rock with absolutely no heads up. It might still be a nice deal for new customers, but it is not the generous deal for us that you are trying to imply.
It's just a terrible deal. The Affinity software I own suddenly stops getting any updates immediately, with no prior warning. This legacy version is still relatively rough around the edges and has plenty of bugs that will never be patched. I can now spend the same amount of money all over again to continue getting updates using a limited-for-an-unknown-period-of-time offer and bundle price, which would only be a good deal if I wasn't already a committed user owning all the apps and supporting the store. This new software that I am being pushed to buy has absolutely no commitment, because getting updates until 3.0 could mean 10 years or it could mean 3 months. If I buy just one or two of the apps, then the files will no longer be intercompatible, nullifying one of the main selling points. My reward for being a loyal customer and supporter is absolutely nothing, and the seriously bad timing given the current global economic timing is weird. It's being called an 'upgrade' when there is no upgrade pricing and really you just have to buy it all again. That is replacing, not upgrading.
It's still possible to go ahead and clean up the mistake to restore all of the customer faith that has just been burnt for no reason by offering upgrade pricing, including retroactively. Additionally, there is clearly a lot of need for transparency and communication, especially given how invested into your ecosystem you want people to be. Again, if your company needs more money, just say so — I'd buy a properly signposted update for fair upgrade pricing every 3-6 years without hesitation. I would be willing to keep buying from the store to make sure Affinity stays profitable while getting a little something in return. While I'd absolutely love to keep supporting Affinity, I have absolutely no reason to trust Serif ever again until this situation is resolved.

For what it's worth, I expected a paid upgrade (or, rather, a new paid version) at some point, and, I think it was also communicated. 
What I don't like is that they raise and raise the prices though. I got the Affinity apps for their low costs, which was a big argument. It's getting smaller and smaller.

I wouldn't call it "big features" to get absolut basic functions that should have been included in the 1.7 launch version. I started with InDesign CS2 from 2005 - I don't know a dtp world without "save as package" or templates. Maybe my expectations were too high for Publisher's release und now I'm disappointed to pay again for more basic features like span columns or global layers they are still not present.

People keep talking about 8 years and 7 years and ignoring that the number of years is pretty much irrelevant. What matters is the number and quality of updates in that time. Which, since I've bought anything from Affinity, at least, has been few and minor. Maybe the pace and substance of updates was better in the early years?

Exactly !
The Drop down menu is annoying. Clicking an icon was faster! Everything looks like a badly done app wish a fishy framework and takes more screen space : v1 : v2: Scrolling and resizing the window to get to the other settings? That's a UI/UX design that comes from Web apps, Chrome... yuck yuck yuck. v1: v2:  
 

After banging on about tables for years in this forum, I had hoped that Publisher version 2 would have addressed the glaring issues. Alas no text to table, no table to text, no flowing tables. And no span columns. These are essential tools.
It's hard to see what is that different. I am beyond disappointed. This is a dot update, not a version upgrade.
I said recently I would wait for a major upgrade before passing further judgement, and have wanted to support Affinity by giving them the benefit of my 35 years experience in DTP. Sorry folks, this is not yet a serious publishing tool, it is still just a flyer app. Hey Ho, can't ditch Adobe yet I'm afraid.

US: 99 $ = 98,50 €
UK: 89 GBP = 101,50 €
Europe... 119 €
I'm not happy with this regional pricing...

99.99 $ incl. VAT...

US: 99 $ = 98,50 €
UK: 89 GBP = 101,50 €
Europe... 119 €
I'm not happy with this regional pricing...

US: 99 $ = 98,50 €
UK: 89 GBP = 101,50 €
Europe... 119 €
I'm not happy with this regional pricing...

WIN11 - AFFINITY Software - First impression
Just buyed and installed cause I believe in Affinity revolution, the things I'm going to write are for improve and not to just critic, so:
The UI loose some fresh, the color contrast has some problem, lookat the "vector head" panel loosing the blue line had become less contrasted, in general all the Icon seem less professional than before, was better the V1 for me. 


  The instrument Fill was ugly before with the colourized circle now is better. Where are the nice blue icon for vector? Suggest, why don't you do an Orange graded UI for Publisher, blue graded UI for Designer and pourple UI for Affinity? that would be useful to remark wich software we are using and it's will be very cool my dear!
The New Document window become a little more complicated, no nice preview like before (very useful to me) the new one remember QuarkXpress to me in the New Document window: orizontal or vertical button are moved on wrong way, i need to search with my eyes on the screen (loosing time), leave near the measure of the document pls! Before was an UI experience to select with wheels the format and search
ADesigner: the Pencil and the Vector Brush together make people dooing one click more, separete them like before!
THERE ARE STILL NO COPY BRUSH ???? STIILL? Appreciate the Select Style pick but it's work only on text, in AD I've a lot of brush line on a reetrace document and the Select Style doesn't select but simply apply something I don't understand. Why is missing such a total instrument?
PLS ADD THIS BUTTON (screenshot of LibreOffice a FREE software as you know!)  Grafica: The global contrast of Interface in Publisher is less smooth than before and the text has loose antialiases, very strange Publisher fixed: it doesn't crash more the app before when i search font pressing a letter! Very good! Not this one is the worst, the nice ad fast first looking export panel with the icon of the format where is gone? PLS Tel me why?
Where is gone the welcome window at the beginning? With information, fast link to example forum and news?  Just discover that the file version V2 are not COMPATIBLE with the V1? Really start to go back to Adobe it's seems to me all the smothed experiences I had with the V1 is going quite lost. Again is no sense!!! Amd when u axport pdf it doesn't open automatically the file in reader. OMG.  Definelly there's less attention to the V2 i going back to the V1.  OMGII: I cannot go back to the V1 cause the Publisher crack when I search font in the text windows... Ahi ahi ahi! - It's sound sooooo programmed! Come on Affinity Team! Give back an answer to whom believe to you! Unfortunally more I use more I found things i really dislike!
I'm sure I've still many new things to discover, Photo just crashed now.. oh.. no!
Go back on the rigth smothed icon UI you had created with the good feature of this one but make the experience nicer as before!!!!!
Sorry for my english!
 
 

Agreed, and this is the biggest disappointment for me in what I have seen from the 2.0 apps so far.