Takudzwa Nyoni

If I understand correctly, did you create the effect in Photo and import it into Designer (copy & paste)? Because Live Filter cannot be created in Affinity (v1)? Interesting that things which cannot be created are supported by paste... Why not just allow creating live filters in Designer (at Serif devs)? Anyway... thanks for the hint. I hope this (unofficial?) feature works in the future (not tested in v2 yet). Update: There are some bugs e.g. when creating a group. It feels a bit hackish.
Update: It seems this no longer works in V2. I wonder why? Is this for marketing? I bought all programs (Universal License). NOT because of missing features in each program. So why blocking this core features? ...

I spent the last weekend creating a tool to convert Adobe suite .grd gradient files to .afpalette files for use in the Affinity suite.
There are so many great resources for gradients out there but no easy way to get them into Affinity applications without a lot of manual labour.
The tool is hosted on GitHub (the Javascript code is available for the curious), but all processing is done in your browser. No files are uploaded anywhere.
https://mikestimpson.com/GrdToAfpalette/
There are a few limitation around colourspace (RGB only) and transparency (not supported), and I have not tested with a huge number of .grd files. It works for what I needed 🙂

I think AI is very useful for selections (subjects, sky, objects, etc)

Hi All,
We are pleased to make available the next update to the 2.1 beta (2.1.0.1736). This will be available for you shortly on auto-update. Below are some of the main changes in this update...
WebP and JPEG XL now available in batch export
As has been commonly requested since adding these new formats to V2, we have now made them available as batch format options in Affinity Photo.

New left swipe options on iPad layers panel
You can now access lock/unlock, rename layer and change compound type (if layer in question is a compound) by swiping left on a layer as shown below:
RPReplay_Final1680080397.mov
 
Brush panel improvements
Texture brushes in Designer persona can now be viewed in thumbnail view (i.e. you now have ability to uncheck "Show as list") Alt-Click on raster brushes now changes brush while keeping your current brush width as well as ignoring associated tool. If you just want to ignore associated tool then use shift-alt-click Auto-select
With auto select turned off you can now hold cmd (Mac/iPad) / ctrl (Windows) to temporarily turn it back on to make another selection on document.
Also note: We have encountered some problems with auto select being off with multi-page documents. For that reason it is currently disabled with a multi-page doc, we are hoping to have a fix for this soon.
Vector flood fill tool
When your bucket is loaded with a colour / fill you can now just click on any object to fill it even if it is not selected. In this case this will just fill the whole object - if you want the fill tool to take into account intersecting shapes and curves they all need to be pre-selected as before. While in the tool you can now just click on an asset or stock item to load your bucket with that bitmap texture (i.e. without having to drag drop as before). This is currently only implemented on desktop, but will be added to iPad in too in the next update. There are new controls for whether you want to add as an additional fill or replace the current fill. To be honest there is still some outstanding work which needs to be done with this, so we will talk more about this / what the expected behaviour is in the next update. A new option to "fill to visible boundaries". This means if any of the objects in your selection are obscuring any line segments from other objects, these can now optionally be ignored by the tool. In the example below - without the new option checked there are 12 possible areas you can fill to, but now you can alternatively choose to just show the 6 areas on the right. 
Crop tool
Cmd / ctrl / shift constrain modifiers are now available when in unconstrained mode as promised.
Dashed lines
We now accept zero as the 2nd and 3rd dash value to give different options, particularly when in combination with balanced lines. This example was discussed on the thread - the left option begins with a dot and when balanced dots are in the rectangle corners. The right option begins with a dash, but the 2nd "dash" can now be set to a dot (zero value) to enable dashes in the corners in this case.

Pencil double tap option for quick menu
If menu is already visible a second double tap will now dismiss it.
Rename Layers
You can now double click / tap on an artboard name to rename it!
 
Plus as usual lots of bug fixes as listed in the fix list thread!
To comment / give feedback on any of these changes please go to the relevant thread for that feature which is linked to in each of the headings above.

Thanks,
Ash

I tried this in AD beta and it works great. Using CTRL on Windows to copy a guide is a great time saver. One thing that bothers me a bit is that I have to keep pressing CTRL while dragging. When you press CTRL and drag you have already decided you want a copy, so once you start draging I wouldn't need to keep pressing CTRL till the end. Just my thought.

Thanks @Pšenda, I've logged this with the devs for both macOS and Windows

As the title suggests, Gradient Fills do not move as expected when the group is warped. In the example - left the original, right a perspective warped copy where the gradients appear locked to their original, pre-warped position.

Greetings team. Should we expect to see any further improvements (feature wise) done to the contour tool like users had requested previously in the Beta threads? Any more functionality coming to it?

Would be great if the team at Affinity would add a feature that enables us to sort out artboards like HOW MANY IN A ROW or a COLUMN. Also if an artboard is Numbered at the end it would be good for it automatically increment numbers when artboard duplicates are created.

Don't know who. This is from the early days of computer programs, it is a metaphor.
The idea is that the layers are pieces of glass with things on them that are put down one on top of the other. Easy to put a piece of glass on top of thirty or so other pieces of glass. Very difficult to put one piece of glass underneath thirty or so pieces of glass. 
Another metaphor;
Brushstrokes put pigment (ink paint etc) on top of earlier pigment, not underneath it.
 

Yes this would be so useful. I spend hours renumbering artboards, it would be so easy to create an incremental numbering system. Also, why does it count upwards from the bottom rather than downwards? Who came up with that idea?

Would be great if the team at Affinity would add a feature that enables us to sort out artboards like HOW MANY IN A ROW or a COLUMN. Also if an artboard is Numbered at the end it would be good for it automatically increment numbers when artboard duplicates are created.

No
No
IT still does everything you bought it for.
Bye, if you are going, it's a shame as there is a lot more to come from the Affinity range. We have not given up we are just developing some bigger stuff

Click here to download the latest beta
Status: Customer Beta
Purpose: Fixes
Requirements: A valid product key (for Affinity Store purchases), or an installation of the full retail version from the Microsoft Store

As this is a beta it is considered to be not suitable for production use. This means that you should not attempt to use it for commercial purposes or for any other activity that may be adversely affected by the application failing, including the total loss of any documents. We hope you enjoy the latest build, and as always, if you've got any problems, please don't hesitate to post a new thread in this forum and we'll get back to you as soon as we can. Thanks once again for your continued feedback. 

If you have a general question about the software, please head over to the Questions Forum, or if you have any suggestions, please head over to the Feature Requests forum.
Changes
Fixed document with 'Save History' failing to save after promoting a Group to a Layer Fixed vector import potentially importing with the wrong document size Fixed PSD import of Linear Burn blend mode being imported as Multiply Fixed some occassionally fonts failing to be recognised at startup Fixed Borderless printing having a border Fixed 'Preset Manager' > 'Shape Presets' being unable to click Fixed hang on My Account page  Fixed crash when closing the application Fixed potential crash on launch when a sync'd asset references an unavailable font Fixed 'Convert to Curves' crash with underlined text, emoji etc.  Previous release notes

Click here to download the latest beta
Status: Customer Beta
Purpose: Fixes
Requirements: A valid product key (for Affinity Store purchases), or an installation of the full retail version from the Microsoft Store

As this is a beta it is considered to be not suitable for production use. This means that you should not attempt to use it for commercial purposes or for any other activity that may be adversely affected by the application failing, including the total loss of any documents. We hope you enjoy the latest build, and as always, if you've got any problems, please don't hesitate to post a new thread in this forum and we'll get back to you as soon as we can. Thanks once again for your continued feedback. 

If you have a general question about the software, please head over to the Questions Forum, or if you have any suggestions, please head over to the Feature Requests forum.
Changes
Updated help and translations Improved performance of importing PDFs Improved OpenAsset support Fixed issues with documents that have large numbers of embedded documents, failing to load because we exceed the maximum number of open file handles (leading to Future Version Error) Fixed copying clipboard data as PDF forcing a conversion to RGBA8 Fixed Convert to Curves on text giving unwanted transforms on child nodes Improved performance of rendering tiny clips Previous release notes

Click here to download the latest beta
Status: Customer Beta
Purpose: Fixes
Requirements: A valid product key (for Affinity Store purchases), or an installation of the full retail version from the Microsoft Store

As this is a beta it is considered to be not suitable for production use. This means that you should not attempt to use it for commercial purposes or for any other activity that may be adversely affected by the application failing, including the total loss of any documents. We hope you enjoy the latest build, and as always, if you've got any problems, please don't hesitate to post a new thread in this forum and we'll get back to you as soon as we can. Thanks once again for your continued feedback. 

If you have a general question about the software, please head over to the Questions Forum, or if you have any suggestions, please head over to the Feature Requests forum.
Changes
Improved linked documents to try to restore the correct artboard after a linked document has been modified Improved IME text editing Improved support for some lesser used Unicode characters Added Emoji support Fixed SVG export not exporting stretched text correctly when transforms are flattened Fixed SVG import to allow whitespace between "translate" and the following open bracket Fixed RTF export to close small caps correctly Fixed placing an embedded file incorrectly favouring the edited one in memory and not the source file used Previous release notes

Hi Takudzwa Nyoni,

Thanks for getting back to me. Firstly that's great news that the performance and issues you were getting have now gone away with the new changes!

With regards to the other behaviour with the sub categories, I've been able to reproduce that and passed that on to development. That is actually being caused by the new 'Sort Categories By' option.

Essentially that option should sort your main asset list by name or by date added. Previously it has always been date added. This is what is causing the issue - the sub category was actually being created in the asset pack as though the list was sorted by Date Added and not the list you were viewing. This was leading the confusing behaviour you're seeing - and took me some time to get my head around!

It is also worth noting that on Windows the list sort seems to only happen when you create a new category or restart the app, but not when you rename or import a category so I have also passed that along to development to look into as well. That could be why the list sorting didn't appear to change for you when you were using that, especially if you had imported some assets too.

Thanks again for your help!
 

Hi Takudzwa Nyoni,

I'm not sure if you're still struggling with this, but we have discovered an issue with assets containing lots of raster content that was causing Affinity to eat up a lot of RAM (around 11GB here) whilst importing, renaming, deleting or re-arranging assets. 

I'm wondering if this has been the root cause of the issues you're seeing. We have just released a 1.9.2 beta containing a fix for this so I would be interested to see if you find importing and exporting in this new build an improvement over what you were getting in 1.9.1.
 

Can't we just get rid of Unsplash?????????

dragging an image into a document from stock-unsplash crashes all 3 programs....both release and the Beta

Hi @Steesigna,
Welcome to Affinity Forums
As said above this is already logged/being investigated. Thank you for your feedback.

Click here to download the latest beta
Status: Customer Beta
Purpose: Fixes
Requirements: A valid product key (for Affinity Store purchases), or an installation of the full retail version from the Microsoft Store

As this is a beta it is considered to be not suitable for production use. This means that you should not attempt to use it for commercial purposes or for any other activity that may be adversely affected by the application failing, including the total loss of any documents. We hope you enjoy the latest build, and as always, if you've got any problems, please don't hesitate to post a new thread in this forum and we'll get back to you as soon as we can. Thanks once again for your continued feedback. 

If you have a general question about the software, please head over to the Questions Forum, or if you have any suggestions, please head over to the Feature Requests forum.
Changes
Fixed crash at startup due to bad OpenCL drivers (really this time) Fixed some downloadable brushes being considered undeletable Fixed being unable to download full resolution OpenAsset images Improved Brush and Asset categories to be alphabetically sorted Fixed line breaks not being copied to clipboard  Fixed Assets and Symbols transforming when dragged onto resized artboards or groups Previous release notes

Click here to download the latest beta
Status: Customer Beta
Purpose: Fixes
Requirements: A valid product key (for Affinity Store purchases), or an installation of the full retail version from the Microsoft Store

As this is a beta it is considered to be not suitable for production use. This means that you should not attempt to use it for commercial purposes or for any other activity that may be adversely affected by the application failing, including the total loss of any documents. We hope you enjoy the latest build, and as always, if you've got any problems, please don't hesitate to post a new thread in this forum and we'll get back to you as soon as we can. Thanks once again for your continued feedback. 

If you have a general question about the software, please head over to the Questions Forum, or if you have any suggestions, please head over to the Feature Requests forum.
Changes
Fixed failure to Save As after opening a read only document Previous release notes

Click here to download the latest beta
Status: Customer Beta
Purpose: Fixes
Requirements: A valid product key (for Affinity Store purchases), or an installation of the full retail version from the Microsoft Store

As this is a beta it is considered to be not suitable for production use. This means that you should not attempt to use it for commercial purposes or for any other activity that may be adversely affected by the application failing, including the total loss of any documents. We hope you enjoy the latest build, and as always, if you've got any problems, please don't hesitate to post a new thread in this forum and we'll get back to you as soon as we can. Thanks once again for your continued feedback. 

If you have a general question about the software, please head over to the Questions Forum, or if you have any suggestions, please head over to the Feature Requests forum.
Changes
Fixed failure to Save As after opening a read only document Previous release notes

Click here to download the latest beta
Status: Customer Beta
Purpose: Fixes
Requirements: A valid product key (for Affinity Store purchases), or an installation of the full retail version from the Microsoft Store

As this is a beta it is considered to be not suitable for production use. This means that you should not attempt to use it for commercial purposes or for any other activity that may be adversely affected by the application failing, including the total loss of any documents. We hope you enjoy the latest build, and as always, if you've got any problems, please don't hesitate to post a new thread in this forum and we'll get back to you as soon as we can. Thanks once again for your continued feedback. 

If you have a general question about the software, please head over to the Questions Forum, or if you have any suggestions, please head over to the Feature Requests forum.
Changes
Fixed crash at startup due to broken OpenCL drivers Disabled hardware acceleration for AMD Radeon RX 5000 series and later cards (awaiting response to bug filed with AMD) Fixed asset dragging performance for some assets Fixed some documents failing to load (hanging) Improved content syncing Previous release notes