mayfly

I can see the controls in the Transform panel enable and disable as I change tool. Clearly, the panel only works when the Move Tool is selected. The rotate and skew functions are working today, so I guess whatever stopped them working yesterday has gone away. The areas where those functions active are quite small and hard to find though. It wouldn't hurt for the move tool to display a little padlock if you try to use it on a locked layer. The icon in the layers panel is easy to miss, and since locking a layer doesn't stop you editing it in some ways, it is easy to forget that a layer is locked. Also, if you open a JPEG, you start off with a locked layer that is selected, so that's a way to be working on a locked layer without having actively selected it. Why are people so set against this application being made easier and more intuitive?

"And yes this has to be done by the move tool as the name implies to transform/move the object." But it's bad interface design. If the controls in the Transform Panel are tied to the move tool, then they should be contextual controls which appear when you select the move tool. The fact that they are in a panel which has no obvious connection to the move tool suggests that they are not connected to the move tool. The move tool doesn't even give any obvious indication of why it isn’t working when you try to use it on a locked layer, so there is clearly work to be done with its visual feedback.

I actually saw that help page, but I couldn’t get the move tool to do anything but move stuff. There’s either more to it than that page suggests or it doesn’t work properly. There isn’t any visual feedback to suggest that it should be do anything or why it isn’t. But the point stands - the transform panel shouldn’t be connected to the move tool. And you really should be able to perform basic transformations without even having to think about it.

I often think that the designers of Affinity Photo have looked at how things are implemented in other applications and then deliberately done something else. I don't mind that they've done something different, but it shouldn’t make theoretically simple tasks really hard... I wanted to rotate a layer by a degree or two... There's no rotate tool. There are rotate options in the menus, but they only do 90º steps. Maybe the move tool has a rotate mode? Nope... Try the help... Ah - there's a transform panel... but it is greyed out and there is no obvious way to enable it... Google search... find a forum thread from when the application was in beta and nobody could figure this out... Right - so you have to select the move tool for the transform panel to do anything. That's just illogical. So - please remove the connection between the transform panel and the move tool. There is nothing in the interface or the help to suggest there is one, and I can't see any reason why there should be one. And please turn the move tool into a more general transform tool, with modes for move, scale, rotate and skew. People will probably be able to figure that out without all the frustration.