Thomas Bohn

I think you need to ask when you want to delete your forum account and I don't think it will delete your posts

Managing Director is just British for CEO

I can only speak for myself, for me the independence of Serif as a company is important. Not being publicly traded like Canva probably will in the future is also important. I'll admit, I have trust issues. That is the thing, I just don't trust the people who made the pledge. If you don't really know if you can trust your future spouse you should probably say no.

The more I think about it the less I think the pledge means anything for the future, they put things like free licenses for schools and non-profits in, even though Affinity is already affordable for many of those, at least in theory. It addresses the issue of subscribtions but not really at the core. Also when Canva goes public all bets are off and only shareholder value remains. The only thing they could do to get my trust at least partially back is to reverse the acquisition and make Serif an employee owned company. I know, this is unrealistic but I need to speak it out.

To be very honest, at the moment there would be only one way to convince me, that Serif and Affinity is in good hands but this is unrealistic at this point. So, a pledge is pretty much just that a pledge. I'm not very optimistic.

That is the core issue nowadays, instead of developing Canva into a product professionals would use w/o alienating casual users they buy a small software house as a short cut. They are not the first and won't be the last but many good companies dissappear because of this. (PowerPoint was bought by Microsoft, Photoshop was bought by Adobe)

But at least it is cute and I needed that.

And just today I noticed that I made a mistake when setting up 2FA for my Serif account and made another mistake not disabling it, now I'm locked out and support only gave me a useless link which said that I should sent an email to support. This day is really awful.

I think the biggest question is, why does Canva need to compete with Adobe?

It would have been easier if you had started with those plans. At the moment there is no faith at all. We have seen it a million times, a company acquires another company and everything good about the acquired company will be gone. Broadcom is essentially butchering VMware, the team of Filmic Pro was let go, when the new parent had their own team in place. And now we have a VC funded company aiming for an IPO and I fear that Serif is just nice window item for that and when the IPO is done. Serif as it is now, will be gone. So, I don't where I should take faith, where?

Sorry, I've seen so many acquisitions in the last 20 years, hell 30 years that went downhill for the users and consumers. The chance that this will be any different is very low. Canva spent a lot of of money on this, and they want their money back, this has to come from somewhere (meaning users).

How long do you think this lasts, with the amount of acquisitions recently Canva looks like it will make itself more presentable to future investors and when the company is public nothing matters except the shareholder value. So I don't have much hope for Canva in the future.

Is this final and can it be reversed? Was Serif is trouble financially that is needed Canva? Will the acquisition costs be debt on Serif's balance sheet now? When will Canva announce their IPO? Can Canva garantee that nothing will change? I just want nice things and this isn't nice! I'm emotional, yes and recommended Affinity to a lot of people and now I no longer can do that.

This won't end well for us as users. Maybe it won't be as bad as what is currently happening to VMware or what happened to Filmic Pro or even Flickr but it won't be good. One of my reason why I bought Affitnity and upgraded early to 2.0 is that Serif was an independent company and not some huge corporation. It doesn't matter if nothing really changes, it is no longer a small independent company I like to support. Aquisitions are never a good idea, they always have consequences and most of them are not good. The focus will shift.

Yeah, I just tried Scribus, it can open the file but the file might be too complex, I think I need to find another way. But thanks anyway.

Good news, in the most current version all Affinity programmes got new document icons. So I'm happy.

I received on an old Zip disk a FreeHand 9 file, which was created on Mac OS Classic around 2003. The file has no extension, only thanks to the file tool I was able to find out that it is in fact a Macromedia FreeHand 9 document. And while adding the extension fh9 doesn't give me the option to open it with Affinity Designer, the extension fh10 does. Sadly it says it is not supported. I guess my only chance would be to find an old Mac with FreeHand 9 to actually see the file and create an PDF for my archive, which is my aim for this project.

I would be happy if it were just the default document icon, a white document with the application icon in it. But this situation is just awful, especially for a design software!

Document icons on macOS 10.15.4 are essentially the application icon. Which looks very weird. I can reproduce this for InDesign and Publisher files. P.S. This is valid for Affinity Designer and Photo also.