chessboard

Hi @stokerg,
thanks for responding. Here's a recording I took. I hope it understandable what I do. I just use Shortcuts to switch the tools and do deselect.
 

@stokerg thanks for the link!
I tested the MSI/EXE install and I must say, that AD now feels so much snappier! I didn't test long (just 10 minutes for now, because of other things to do), but my first impression is, that the MSI-Version runs much more smoothly (even with OpenGL turned on). At the moment I can't see almost any delay between clicking an object on the canvas or in the layers palette and the object being highlighted. Even without real lagging, the MSIX-Version felt much stolid.
I hope that this impression will be confirmed as I continue to work.

@stokerg thanks for the link!
I tested the MSI/EXE install and I must say, that AD now feels so much snappier! I didn't test long (just 10 minutes for now, because of other things to do), but my first impression is, that the MSI-Version runs much more smoothly (even with OpenGL turned on). At the moment I can't see almost any delay between clicking an object on the canvas or in the layers palette and the object being highlighted. Even without real lagging, the MSIX-Version felt much stolid.
I hope that this impression will be confirmed as I continue to work.

I would like to bring this up again. Double tap to Undo and/or Icons for Undo/Redo and Delete in the toolbar would really help and would be appropriate for a pen and touch device like a Surface. At the moment a keyboard is still needed when using Affinity on a Surface. That's counterproductive for a mobile device.

I would like to bring this up again. Double tap to Undo and/or Icons for Undo/Redo and Delete in the toolbar would really help and would be appropriate for a pen and touch device like a Surface. At the moment a keyboard is still needed when using Affinity on a Surface. That's counterproductive for a mobile device.

In Affinity support on Surface pro, I miss the icons: undo and redo and the trash icon and rotating the canvas with a gesture. Working on the tablet itself with a pen and without a keyboard is very tedious. Although the drawing itself is quite smooth, to undo or redo the operation you have to click on the Edit menu and then click on undo. Or if I want to remove a node with a pen, how do I do it? only by invoking the on-screen keyboard and clicking the DELETE button. With more serious work on the Surface Pro, the service becomes very cumbersome.
So my suggestions: Add the ability to add undo, redo, trash, print, import, export icons to the top toolbar and add two-finger double-tap support on the screen to undo operations - just like on the iPad.
I bought Surface Pro 8 specifically to support Affinity, but working on it to support Affinity programs is very tedious with just the pen and actually without any gestures. How much do you have to pay to add these options to the Affinity package?
Serif give me the price - I'll pay what it takes - I need it for my professional work, not to play on the tablet.

@mara.cernoch @earl_greyand @chessboardand anyone else reading this thread running Affinity Designer on Windows,
Would you mind trying something for me?  Uninstall the current version of V2 Designer you have installed and install the MSI/EXE installer which you can download from this page:
https://store.serif.com/en-gb/update/windows/designer/2/
Theres a link just under the download button which says 'Also available: Download latest version EXE (572.42MB)' if you can download that version, install it and see if it performs any better for you.  I'm not working this weekend (yay me) so will check the replies on Monday.  But i'd be really interested if the users with the Ryzen CPU's see an improvement. 
There have been users reporting the MSIX versions, which we launched with were running slower than expected in certain workflows (for all Affinity apps, not just Designer), due to the sandboxing of MSIX installs but the .exe version isn't sandboxed so would be a good test to run to see if things improve.  I'm also interested in hearing if the Intel users see an improvement as well, so please don't feel left out and do post your findings, be them good or bad or the same  
 

Hi @stokerg,
my processor is an Intel i7-11370H in a Surface Laptop Studio. I turned off OpenCL now, but for the next days I don't have jobs to do in AD. I was testing yesterday for ca. 15 minutes and didn't see any lags. But when I turned in on again, there where no lags either, even with the documents that caused them before. Just selecting and moving objects around doesn't seem to produce lags, even with large documents. Sadly I am to busy at the moment to test further.
Edit: I see, 2.0.4. is out! I will check this and stop testing 2.0.3.

hi @stokerg,
I'm glad you care about the problem we face. As chessboard said, the stuttering does not happen with specific files. In fact, no matter what file I open, if the windows version of Affinity Designer 2.0 runs long enough (For me it is 30min~60min), I will definitely encounter the lag. If you can ask your team's designer to work with windows Affinity Designer v2 for a few days, he must be able to experience the problem we encountered.

We are not yet finished with all our testing of these but they have passed initial testing and are ready for use to outside testers. 
These UNSANDBOXED (MSI/EXE) installers are available to use, hosted on Dropbox while we complete our testing.  IF you would like to try these please do so, but as I say they are currently unofficial.
Affinity Designer 2.0.3.1688
Affinity Photo 2.0.3.1688
Affinity Publisher 2.0.3.1688
I think that these will soon be replaced with official 2.0.4 ones but you are welcome to use these and @ me with what you find.
You can simultaneously have BOTH the Sandboxed (MSIX) and the Unsandboxed (MSI/EXE) installed, but note they are hard to tell apart.
You cannot run a mixture of both MSIX and MSI, at the same time that will NOT work.

I hate to be a nagging complainer, but I figured this would be worth a comment.
Is Serif a small company with limited resources? Yes. Does Serif have to maintain three different platforms with the same code-base? Yes.
But does Serif also have an obligation to make their paid Windows software as optimized, and well maintained and the other two? Yes.
I've got an AMD 6700XT paired with a Ryzen 3800X. You may expect this can destroy a little passively cooled Apple laptop or iPad. Unfortunately, that's just not true. With a combined Multi CPU score of 524, this desktop workstation has less performance than an M1 iPad. I'm not sour or jealous at Apple for releasing an objectively amazing product. But the fact is, the M1 does not have a superior CPU to the 3800X. M1 scores about 7000 in Cinebench R23 while the 3800X scores about 13,000.
Lets consider something else, my desktop class GPU. With a combined Single GPU score of 1114, and no Multi GPU score, the M1 Max is about 16X faster than my 6700XT. That's not a "wow Apple is so fast they beat everyone" that is a FAILURE to optimize for Windows in any fashion. If anything, it's so slow that it could be considered a fault in the software or a quality assurance problem.
To add more insult, hardware acceleration adds so much flickering and stuttering in the UI and canvas that it may as well be left off. Can you blame AMD for this? I'm not so sure. Software like Photoshop or Blender works perfectly fine, with proper acceleration.
I'm convinced if someone at Serif had actually USED the Windows version with regularity on different GPU platforms they'd realize how far off the mark they are. Seriously, it's like Windows has been abandoned.
(I've owned Affinity 1 on Windows since it just came out of Beta. It may have always been this slow, but I cannot recall.) I also own an iPad and recently sold my MacBook so I know what it is CAPABLE of. If I remember correctly, very fast performance and optimization was one of the selling points of Affinity. Now it's one of the major downfalls, unless you own an Apple product.

Depends what you are doing but you can still copy between programs. Alternative is to export as a standardised format such as EPS or SVG. That way you can still work between both programs. 
 
Maybe I'm just odd but I often work between affinity designer (because in v1 the performance, brilliant snapping tools, grid setup, UI was great) and Adobe illustrator (for select tools like warping, blend tool, pattern, shape builder etc) and have to save as EPS or SVG frequently or copy over and rescale if the dimensions change.  

I think I can create a topic everyday for each freeze I get. Everytime when I'm zooming in/out.
More I use this software, more I'm telling me "You bought it too soon, it's not properly debugged"

I'm also experiencing this issue with affinity designer 2. Never had this issue in v1. The lag isn't too bad but it get pretty tiresome after a while. Selecting objects, groups or layers seems to have a delay each time I click.

I have to admit that I have more crashes since the version 2 release. I use mostly Photo and Designer and never did serious work with Publisher. 
It feels like if computer memory gets all mixed up. After a little while it become unresponsive, it stutters, then its back to normal... for a few minutes ... just to crash all of a sudden a few minutes later. 
I never lost any work as I save almost every two minutes, but I'm confident that crases will be a thing of the past some day.

That may or may not be a legitimate request. I personally hate the Mac way to have no application frames and the ability to see other app palettes or windows behind the app in front and was really glad about Adobe introducing the application frames. But if it would be optional, I would have no problem with this.
I'm sorry to take your request here as a reason for another topic, but it is another example of this, that the tone here on the forum lately leaves a lot to be desired. At least a "please" would not have hurt the desire. "Give me back" reads like it was yours before and Serif stole it from you.
A great many users here are very demanding and formulate their criticism in a way as if Serif had personally insulted them with the appearance of V2.

To be fair: If the option "show lines in points" is enabled, you can still enter the value in millimeters in the input field for the line width, if you add the unit "mm" to the numerical value. It's just that you can no longer read the value in millimeters, but only in points.
However, it is no problem to set a line to a line width of, for example, 10mm. I just realized that I have never changed the units in the fields to mm in version 1, but have always worked with pt.

That may or may not be a legitimate request. I personally hate the Mac way to have no application frames and the ability to see other app palettes or windows behind the app in front and was really glad about Adobe introducing the application frames. But if it would be optional, I would have no problem with this.
I'm sorry to take your request here as a reason for another topic, but it is another example of this, that the tone here on the forum lately leaves a lot to be desired. At least a "please" would not have hurt the desire. "Give me back" reads like it was yours before and Serif stole it from you.
A great many users here are very demanding and formulate their criticism in a way as if Serif had personally insulted them with the appearance of V2.

That may or may not be a legitimate request. I personally hate the Mac way to have no application frames and the ability to see other app palettes or windows behind the app in front and was really glad about Adobe introducing the application frames. But if it would be optional, I would have no problem with this.
I'm sorry to take your request here as a reason for another topic, but it is another example of this, that the tone here on the forum lately leaves a lot to be desired. At least a "please" would not have hurt the desire. "Give me back" reads like it was yours before and Serif stole it from you.
A great many users here are very demanding and formulate their criticism in a way as if Serif had personally insulted them with the appearance of V2.

When launching APV2 just a few minutes ago, I get the update notification. It says there's an update, which is 2.0.0 to 2.0.3 (current Beta). I've not seen anything posted on the forums by Serif about any updates, and most of the time they do.
Also get this update for Publisher, HOWEVER what is strange, Designer says that the 2.0.0 version is up to date, ie; no update available..
 

Now, this works. But would you say, that it is logical to need two times the same colour (i.e. the same CMYK percentages) to have it one time with overprint and another time not overprinting? Say you want to have magenta to be not overprinting in general, but one shape with the colour magenta should overprint (a yellow shape to get a nice red). Therefore you need to set up a second mangenta colour with overprinting turned on. Mm 🤔, not sure if this is really a logic workflow, because after all it's still the same ink and still ends up on the same color separation.
I would say, that overprinting is rather shape based and should be adjusted for shapes, because it determines if a shape is part of a specific separation plate or not.
This is something that can be found throughout the Affinity programs - breaking with traditional workflows for... - well, what for? Just to be different?

I really don't understand why people get upset that Serif have increased the base prices of it's software, by a comparatively modest amount, over the original prices they were charging years ago.
Here in the UK (where Serif are based), and AFAIK in most of the world, costs of everything (energy, food, transport etc) have rocketed over the last few months. All business are having to contend with these price increases, not to mention increased labour costs, and are having to pass on some of this to their customers. Add to that the development costs for a new, improved product and it's hardly surprising that, like just about everything else, the cost of software has to increase!
One other point. With the deal Serif are currently offering, you are still saving money, even if you only want the suite for one OS!

I prefer the drop down menu as I can change the type of file either with the up/down arrow keys or, better still, by typing the first letter or two of the type you want.
So if I last exported as SVG but want a PSD, I just type P S ... and PSD is selected. (This is on Windows; don't know about the other platforms.) Couldn't do that on v1.
I'm a keyboard shortcut junkie, so it's actually a huge improvement for me.

Now, this works. But would you say, that it is logical to need two times the same colour (i.e. the same CMYK percentages) to have it one time with overprint and another time not overprinting? Say you want to have magenta to be not overprinting in general, but one shape with the colour magenta should overprint (a yellow shape to get a nice red). Therefore you need to set up a second mangenta colour with overprinting turned on. Mm 🤔, not sure if this is really a logic workflow, because after all it's still the same ink and still ends up on the same color separation.
I would say, that overprinting is rather shape based and should be adjusted for shapes, because it determines if a shape is part of a specific separation plate or not.
This is something that can be found throughout the Affinity programs - breaking with traditional workflows for... - well, what for? Just to be different?

Comming from an other discussion I would suggest to implement a separation preview at least in Designer and/or Publisher.
With this preview you should be able to check all separation plates, including overprinting and see if there are any spotcolours.