Barrowman

I suspect that too, caused no doubt by the awful Mac security settings which hound us at every action now.

This happens in Photo as well, when going to save, export etc, intermittently as soon as the file dialog window opens, the beachball appears and never stops spinning, needs to be force quit. Then second time it works fine. Feels like you have to get the first time crash out of the way to be able to work in it without a problem thereon in.

Thanks @stokerg I'll give that a shot!!

Hi, I'm finding Designer more and more unusable due to the the amount of time it spends beachballing. I'll start working and everything is flowing wonderfully, suddenly it then starts beach-balling on the most innocuous of things, ie select something. Then it just becomes a total pain. I have a MacBook Pro 16" M1 MAX with 32GB of RAM. I does the same on my 13" M1 Macbook as well. Any idea what could be causing it, as it is a real pain, I used to love this app, but now I dread using it.

Hi, haha I'm still not sure why those colours are showing there though, but very glad to have sorted my masking out. Even though it does feel like the white going 0% opacity seems quite a bizarre behaviour. Thanks all.

Not when you're painting with white clearly selected in toolbar and swatches and it's not making a difference. And I was referring to "why there were colours in my grey palette", to which I have no idea and wondered if it was a bug. Wow people seem pretty touchy, did the haha imply something other than mirth. @NotMyFault saw the problem and resolved it with a simple observation, which was great. - Thanks.

Yes that was it, thanks so much, very strange behaviour as when I paint on a layer it paints white, but when I then edit mask it makes the white a "zero" opacity brush which I never noticed. Excellent - resolved.

Oh okay, where did I say I had a problem with people trying to help? 🤨

Haha no idea but people seem to be getting a bit waylaid the vagaries of the swatch panel (should I post that in Bugs?), rather than the masking procedure. One can quite clearly see in the toolbar of the left what colour and tool I'm painting with. I'm not clueless when it comes to selecting a colour, so I'm not trying to pretend there's a problem. I've had to "sort" this by going to Photoshop in the meantime, which is NOT my preferred solution to things that should be straight forward in Designer.

Hi, You can see that white is the current selected colour on the toolbar and in the swatches, not sure what else I need to do to "prove" that I'm painting white? 🤨

Yes that's how I would expect it to work but it doesn't. Here's the full screen, white brush on "edit mask", paints black line as you can see on shin there, but it doesn't matter what colour it always paints black.

How do I edit this mask in Photo (after selecting edit mask), all it does, no matter what I try is add to the mask, ie black, if I want to subtract from the mask with a paintbrush or an eraser, I can't no matter what colour I select, I can't see any setting that will allow me to do this, which seems absolutely mad, I must be missing something, surely you can't only edit a mask one way?

This is an example of the "beach-ball experience" that I'm now blighted with. This one is actually unworkable, but I have other files with a lot few layers that get beach balls for varying length of time when I click and try to move etc. It was not apparent on the previous version, in fact I came to Affinity because this kind of behaviour was blighting Adobe InDesign (along with Photoshop files sizes being massive etc) & I loved how quick and smooth Affinity was. Screen Recording 2021-08-14 at 10.45.02 pm.mp4

This is my machine.

Yes but then those options should be greyed out in the settings, as Illustrator does. A stroke however can have a base from where a user would wish it to expand from, so I can easily see a usability reason for the option to exist to chose the base/alignment of a line irrespective whether it was closed or not. Either way if it isn't an option it should NOT be able to be clicked. So it's a bug.