Chul

@emmrecs01
shine your passive aggressive self. "Welcome to the Affinity forums, even if your first post is something of a rant." i don't get the sense of this as a welcome hahaha
Its a forum there will be rants. but thanks for the laugh with your aggressive defense. As far as a rant, maybe count the use of bolds & italics, save that there are a couple of exclamation points thrown in for good measure in your reply. well done.
 
If you are a moderator feel free to ban me for whatever reason you see fit. i don't see me using this forum much after this anyway. Cheers.
 

@kww
Welcome to the Affinity forums, even if your first post is something of a rant.  😇
It has always been made clear by Serif that all releases of updates to version 1 would be free but that an upgrade to version 2 and, presumably eventually version 3, would require the user to buy again.  There is nothing deceitful about this!  Do you really think that Serif can afford to develop, extensively beta test and ultimately release new versions of their products, financed ONLY by the sale of whichever was the first version the user bought?  Remember, the initial purchase prices of the version 1 apps was considered by many who post here as an extreme example of "excellent value for money"!

i find that a little weird and deceitful really, its labeled as "one-off purchase" in the price card and nowhere in the card does it specify for "this version as long as it lasts, all future versions will be a new price". So affinity will continue to update versions and support all previous versions until they see fit? Why would one update at all? FOMO? Affinity you were sort of a cool product i could see using in the company, but you gotta be more up front, no one i know that's using this currently, thinks its ok what you did here. Our once little group, was growing, but i don't think we'll end up supporting in the end. the fact that so many of us were supporting and were early adopters. ouch

This is not an update. You get free updates for the lifetime of the version. A new version is an upgrade, and once you have purchased it, you will get free updates to it for the lifetime of that version.

Version 1 was released in 2015 or so. So version 2 was released about seven years later. Hardly 'annual".

@fde101   Maybe it is the proverbial Wall Street "Fat Cat."  For anybody who is interested, there have actually been four Affinity Cats.  Here is an Asset for three of them in case anybody would like to have a choice of one of the older felines.

 
Affinity cats.afassets

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.

Hello all, we're proud to announce that alongside the V2 launch of the Affinity apps, we've produced a completely new set of video tutorials to compliment the apps. These tutorials are all produced in-house by our Product Experts team.
We've worked incredibly hard on these videos, and feel they represent a huge jump in both technical and presentational quality. Hopefully you all agree! The old V1 videos—now considered legacy—are still available on YouTube, consolidated into one playlist. The link for this playlist is available at the bottom of this post.
Hope you all find the new tutorials useful!
What's New (Overview of V2)
What's New in Affinity Publisher 2 What's New in V2 for iPad Basics
Interface Overview (New: 22/03/24) Placing Images Transforming Layers Adjustment Layers Packaging Collecting Resources Linked and Embedded Resources Page Numbering Style Picker Advanced
Smart Master Pages Studio Presets Section Manager Auto Flow Notes Quick Grid Books IDML Import Opening, Editing and Importing PDFs Marquee Select Intersection Stroke Panel Rulers, Columns & Column Guides PDF Password Protection (New: 30/11/23) Tags Panel for Alternative Text (New: 30/11/23) Layer States (New: 20/03/24) Text Tools
Linked Text Frames Text Wrapping Text on a Path Hyphenation and Spelling Dictionaries Running Headers Pinning (New: 05/07/23) StudioLink - Designer and Photo Interworking
Designer Persona: Vector Drawing Photo Persona: Brushing Photo Persona: Live Filters Designer Persona: Multi Stroke and Fill Placing and developing RAW images Workflows & Techniques
OpenAsset Integration  

iPad Tutorials
Photo Persona: Paint Brush Tool Placing Images Designer Persona: Vector Drawing Command Controller Auto Flow Smart Master Pages Text Wrapping Linked Text Frames IDML Import Packaging Exporting and PDF Publishing  
Legacy V1 Tutorials
Desktop

So do you expect Serif to offer a different "upgrade price" to each customer depending on the price they originally paid for v1, including discounts, special offers and sale prices? I would have thought you'd be pleased to have got a very good discount for v1, without expecting the same discount every time you upgrade!

As a graphic designer how would you react if a client would ask you to work for free on their 2023 commercial brochure because they already paid for their 2022 brochure you did last year?
Sorry but this section of the forum has become a spoiled brats playground.

Seriously, I think the responsiveness of Affinity's development and support team is one of the primary reasons i use this software! You guys are amazing!

Finally someone hit the nail on the head. I agree with you. I also fell into this trap, when moving from Adobe to Affinity I was under the assumption it was advertised as purchase once and use and get updated forever. If Affinity knew for a fact, which they would of that UPGRADES are not classified as UPDATES, then it should have been made very clear of this fact at the time of purchase. It is misleading and fails to give CLARITY.
Tactics like these will only lead to a bad reputation for the company the way I see it. I am not saying I do not want to pay for the upgrade, I probabaly will, but not without a bad taste in my mouth I never had before.
Just saying...

There is no "upgrade path" that we can reliably offer, so we are giving everybody this launch upgrade price.
To all here.
40% off as cheap as we can make it. If there were a way we could do an upgrade offer to previous owners that would be 100% fair and miss nobody out (and not break the rules of the Apple Store and the Mac App Store) it would still not be cheaper than 40% off for upgraders. In fact it would just be LESS reduced for non-upgraders, so this 40% is the upgrade price. Please don't be jealous that others who have never had our software are being offered your special price of 40% off, just be pleased for them and you.

I virtually never post to this sort of thing, but let me say that the Affinity apps have allowed me to do a few unusual jobs more easily than other, competing apps.  Plus, they are far cheaper than their competition.  I also deeply appreciate not being asked to pay a subscription to use them.  Thus, I am upgrading to version 2 of all 3 apps.

Just wanted to make sure you know that I appreciate the work y'all put into the V2 of Affinity. I have yet to find something I don't like about it.😊👍 Great job! I also appreciated that you let us have all 6 apps for only 99.99 as well as it being a universal license. Really nice! I downloaded the trial before I bought the 'real deal' and after switching back and forth between the 2, it made the old version feel clunky and old though I wouldn't have said so before I'd tried the new one! So thanks again for all the hard work @whoever all is responsible😉, I for one out here, definitely enjoy it!

I can't be sure if it's a joke or sarcastic comment by OP ... if it's not I don't know what to say...
Just look around... almost every creative software company has moved to the regressive rental/ransomware model and even then it's not cheap.
Affinity's entire graphic suite costs less than 2 months of rental of similar apps from the other company. 
If Affinity wanted they could have easily charged much more for their perpetual license given the current situation.

Of course, every one is missing some features or the other (for me it's mainly bitmap-to-vector-tracing, vector pattern and variable font support, the others main features from my wish-list have been added in V2). But weighing the overall situation, such as lack of decent professional apps with perpetual license and not to mention, how Affinity could do some things better than the market leader with practically unlimited resources - I see Affinity as nothing less than a miracle and I would do whatever little I could to to support and make their business model sustainable..
 
Oh, till now I thought I am the only one facing it! I had searched the forum but couldn't find that issue. 
Yes, that bug is debilitating for anyone  using something as basic as font and should be fixed.

I'm seeing Publisher V2 as a disappointment, too. Maybe it wouldn't have been, hadn't there been this Hyping by Affinity. The changes would have made for a nice update... It seems to me that it is an Upgrade not because of the improvements they made but because Affinity needed a justification to charge some money without switching to a subscription based system.

Just wanted to make sure you know that I appreciate the work y'all put into the V2 of Affinity. I have yet to find something I don't like about it.😊👍 Great job! I also appreciated that you let us have all 6 apps for only 99.99 as well as it being a universal license. Really nice! I downloaded the trial before I bought the 'real deal' and after switching back and forth between the 2, it made the old version feel clunky and old though I wouldn't have said so before I'd tried the new one! So thanks again for all the hard work @whoever all is responsible😉, I for one out here, definitely enjoy it!

Just wanted to make sure you know that I appreciate the work y'all put into the V2 of Affinity. I have yet to find something I don't like about it.😊👍 Great job! I also appreciated that you let us have all 6 apps for only 99.99 as well as it being a universal license. Really nice! I downloaded the trial before I bought the 'real deal' and after switching back and forth between the 2, it made the old version feel clunky and old though I wouldn't have said so before I'd tried the new one! So thanks again for all the hard work @whoever all is responsible😉, I for one out here, definitely enjoy it!

Just wanted to make sure you know that I appreciate the work y'all put into the V2 of Affinity. I have yet to find something I don't like about it.😊👍 Great job! I also appreciated that you let us have all 6 apps for only 99.99 as well as it being a universal license. Really nice! I downloaded the trial before I bought the 'real deal' and after switching back and forth between the 2, it made the old version feel clunky and old though I wouldn't have said so before I'd tried the new one! So thanks again for all the hard work @whoever all is responsible😉, I for one out here, definitely enjoy it!

Hi everyone, 
I make a calendar every year for my large extended family with all the birthdays and anniversaries printed on their respective dates. I started this custom several years ago, and at that time used Microsoft Publisher 2007 to whip up a calendar template for the year, and then added text boxes with all the holidays and special dates. Needless to say, that was not a very efficient way of doing things... Every year I had to manually move every single text box to the new calendar and make sure they all were more or less lined up and evenly spaced. This year I suddenly realized that I had Affinity Publisher at my disposal! So I went searching about these forums to find out a better, more automated way to publish calendars. A few posts, such as this one on calendar automation, and this one on data merges gave me some guidance in the right direction, and eventually I figured out a way to make a calendar in AfPub using the power of data merge to do the heavy lifting of inputting the dates and the power of text styles to make it all look right. Needless to say, this will save me a lot of time in the future! 
I'm attaching an AfPub template and a sample .csv file. Anyone is welcome to use/customize these if they would like. I'm sure there are more efficient ways of doing things that I might have missed, so I'd appreciate any constructive feedback you might have to offer! Enjoy! 
If you have questions about how (or why) I did something the way I did, feel free to ask! Downloading the samples and running the data merge correctly should give you results that look like this: 

Other resources that were useful:
Ubuntu Font: https://design.ubuntu.com/font/ Affinity Publisher Data Merge Tutorial: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aU98GmaQsFQ Deep Dive Data Merge in Affinity Publisher: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wav8wuucZUY 2022-afpub-calendar.csv 2022-afpub-calendar-template.afpub

Yeah. I mean... It's ridiculous. I was more than prepared to pay 2x that this morning. Saving as much as I did is just icing on the cake. Pricing for V2 is a steal. It may not have checked off my wish list, but I'm sure that there are many people quite happy atm.
I'll be honest with you. Thanks to my in-law's employee discount, I could get the entire Adobe CC suite for even less than this discounted price.  However, Adobe lost my money the day they started up with subscriptions and the associated "pay to play or go away" tactic; You pay regardless of whether they add new features or not, which is just a bit of a joke.
Consequently, I will continue to support the non-Adobe alternatives. A 40% intro discount and being able to buy a perpetual license to Affinity's trio for only $99.99... Like I said, a no-brainer. I didn't even have to read the new features before clicking "BUY". All I needed to see was "Serif" (ie. not Adobe).
In a whole lot of ways, even at a nearly $70 full price tag per app, you're still getting WAY more than enough functionality to get the job done and with the least amount of hassle. (I recall paying way more for older Adobe equivalents that had less going on under the hood; Apps that I beat the heck out of and to good effect back in the day.)

I have just received your completely unnecessary email of 19 January "We’re here to help – use our apps free for 90 days" WHY I am a registered used of all three apps plus add ons. I do not need to be offered a 90  Day Free Trial, and 50% off all apps etc.
Unnecessary emails clog up email in boxes and will tend in the future to just dump email from affinity without reading them.
Someone in your marketing departments needs to be sacked.
Please put a stop on this type of email to existing customers.

I don't usually comment but all I can say is Amazing! and big Thank you! Affinity People for your continued support...It is obvious that a lot of people are struggling with current events!...
These offers do not apply to me...which does not concern me in the slightest...The applications are a bargain at full price!...but it's not about the price....It is about what you can achieve... I am just relieved that I had the incentive to engage with this software in the first instance...into my fifth year now...with over 200 drawings and 1000's of brushes and assets!... none of which would have been completed without these apps! 

I cannot believe that there would be any negative response... to offering software that is innovative, evolved so rapidly at a discount...

So will all loyal customers -  been with Serif since PagePlus Release 1 in 1990 - be getting a refund? I await Affinity's generosity!