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aitte

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Everything posted by aitte

  1. Damn right, Affinity should follow the standard. "2015 Pepsi Design Project.afdesign" is too long and takes up too many bytes. It should be "015~PSPI.AFD". Your phrasing at the end reminded me of one of my favorite geek jokes, called "Ed is the standard editor", which is the official helpfile description for the "Ed" Unix/Linux program. Ed was a very early text editor written for Unix and intended for slow remote connections and for terminals without monitors (which used paper trails and needed to save ink), so it is literally the worst text editor in the Universe with zero visual feedback and no error messages or text cursors or anything helpful like that, other than a "?" prompt to indicate that you entered an illegal command. If you somehow figure out how to use it, you have to remember what you have already written in the document you are editing, because ed doesn't even tell you that. I have been using Ed for two years now, mainly because I launched it one day and don't know how to quit it... With that backstory in mind, maybe more people will get the joke. Here it is in all its glory, from 1991: http://www.gnu.org/fun/jokes/ed-msg.html (It also references vi and emacs, which are much more modern text editors that are so powerful that they are still in use today. They are awesome.) Affinity could learn a lot about user interfaces from Ed. ;) Affinity Designer: "?" (I'm just filling time while waiting for an official reply about the filesizes...)
  2. Oh you have the portable ENIAC that only takes up half the size of a bus? You lucky sod! Affinity, @MEB, as you can see we're all wondering how to get the filesizes down so that the files fit on our state of the art hardware. Comment please? I know a workaround for the big .afdesign file sizes: Export the afdesign to SVG instead, to get a 1kb file. That pretty much proves that the huge afdesign filesize is due to an embedded preview. I would love an advanced option; just like "Save/don't save full document history". But "Save/don't save Finder document thumbnail". It would be trivial to add. And then just make the Finder display a neutral document icon for such files. The 150kb .afdesign filesize for a 1KB vector is a problem for me, and exporting to SVG solves it but loses all nice layers and FX I set up so I can't edit it anymore.
  3. You know how many Windows viruses I have? None! Because I don't have Windows. I have Window. Yep. Just one window at a time on the Commodore. And viruses need many windows to get in through. My single window is guarded by my 1 megahurts CPU equipped with brass knuckles *and* a hootentoot (a type of small and very annoying musical instrument). Ain't no viruses getting on this Commodore! Anyone that tries gets a face full of brass while listening to really, *really* annoying music. Some scientists believe it's actually the music that kills them by making the viruses lose all will to live. Commodore 64 power!
  4. This is totes important, guys. Don't laughing at me. Affinity, answer before we send out our spies. >:~O
  5. An MM machine can read an II file and vice versa. They just need to see the header, and if it's different from their own CPU, they flip the bytes in RAM before decoding the file (so they basically convert it from II to MM or vice versa). If a powerpc app cannot read an II file it just means that the app isn't doing the conversion from intel->powerpc when needed. Which is indeed a possible bug in some old powerpc apps. I wonder if Apple Photos always outputs MM files to work around that potential bug. Wouldn't surprise me, since Apple would care about powerpc compatibility. The affinity devs would need to check this: * If you output a TIFF, does it use little endian or big endian? And does it use the proper II or MM header to match the data order? * If it's outputting little endian (intel order) with an II header then everything is correct, and the bug is in the powerpc apps. * In that case, consider using MM order. But powerpc is like <1% of the mac market so maybe stick with intel order so that intel machines don't have to waste time flipping the bytes just to accomodate old machines that can be taken care of by an external file converter.
  6. The TIFF image file header instructs the application about endianness of their internal binary integers. If a file starts with the signature "MM" it means that integers are represented as big-endian, while "II" means little-endian. Those signatures need a single 16-bit word each, and they are palindromes (that is, they read the same forwards and backwards), so they are endianness independent. "I" stands for Intel and "M" stands for Motorola, the respective CPU providers of the IBM PC compatibles (Intel) and Apple Macintosh platforms (Motorola) in the 1980s. Intel CPUs are little-endian, while Motorola 680x0 CPUs are big-endian. This explicit signature allows a TIFF reader program to swap bytes if necessary when a given file was generated by a TIFF writer program running on a computer with a different endianness. ^ So as long as Affinity outputs "II" in the header to denote intel-order, then the fault is entirely with the viewer applications on your powerpc mac. And I would assume Affinity does the header correctly, otherwise we wouldn't be able to view the files on any systems that read the byte order header.
  7. There is no such thing as a "mac format". Actually, the mac format IS the PC byte order. Because like it or not, the "PC" byte order is correct. The weird, old powerpc big endian stuff isn't sane in a fileformat that we export for use on windows, intel macs, linux, ios, android etc. Yer gonna have to keep converting manually if you want this to run on powerpc macs. THEY are the weird ones with their weird cpus and weird byte order. ;)
  8. Al465: that one is a million times better designed and is very readable too!
  9. Simplest way would be if Affinity Designer gets the Affinity Photo feature: Layers - New Fill Layer. It covers the whole canvas in one color. No need to make a vector rectangle manually. I wish Designer had it.
  10. http://tools.dynamicdrive.com/favicon/ Or head <link> Tag to use favicon.png instead
  11. Would be very hard to do. Imagine if you have two rectangles, round all corners on both, then overlap two corners and use boolean add. That means two rounded corners are on top of each other. What should it do then? The only thing that makes sense is to bake the changes and merge the actual curves. I think another workflow for you is needed. Try to GROUP objects inside folders instead of boolean adding them. Then apply layer FX and adjustment layers on the group. The folders will act like a boolean add/single layer. Another thing you may wanna try is a non-destructive boolean. It's called a compound path. Acts like a single object but its sub-parts are still individually editable. PS: If you intend to export as raster then these solutions will solve it for you. If you intend to export as SVG vectors you should do a real boolean add to simplify the geometry and filesize.
  12. Current picker double-plus ungood. Mouse move over whole screen. Head hurt. New picker need shortcuts to use picker and to apply its color to primary/secondary swatch.
  13. Very cool idea. But it's as impossible to read as it is to draw ;) https://mir-s3-cdn-cf.behance.net/project_modules/1400/7adffa29461079.55f4179ef0940.png Looks like someone dropped a box of Jenga.
  14. So, I'm using Affinity Designer on my Commodore 64, and I want to send a vector design to my friend, but even simple files with just some vectors and zero raster data are astronomically huge - in the 100-150kb range! It fills up almost an entire 170kb 5" floppy disk! This is simply too much time to transfer on my 300 baud (0.0375 kbytes/s) modem. Before I upgrade by adding another 128kb of RAM and a CPU with more megahurts and a 1200 baud modem to my Commodore 64, I thought I'd ask: Why are the files so freaking huge to just describe some vector X/Y coordinates and layer FX? :D I bet I could design the same file format to take less than a kilobyte for that. Is it storing some sort of raster-based preview image or something? If so, can you please allow us to disable that? I need vector designs to be super small for steganography, since I work for a secret government that's so secret that you've never heard of it. Edit: Real info here: https://forum.affinity.serif.com/index.php?/topic/14277-vector-files-massive/&p=65016
  15. Rounded corners works great in Designer. The shape tools in Autism let you switch shapes after you've made one. Should be easy to bring to Designer: Change shape and maintain the same outer dimensions (bounding box) for the new one's size. Extending path: This I want... And the generally slicker and faster way of working with vectors I want too ;)
  16. Oh my god. If Designer can ever do this I'll be blown away: http://astutegraphics.com/software/vectorscribe/
  17. Hi Andy! Yep I just verified that the license is Apache 2.0 even for the PNG part: https://github.com/google/zopfli/blob/master/src/zopflipng/zopflipng_lib.h Good luck and have fun investigating this. It would certainly remove the advantage photoshop has in the "export for web" filesize department. If it makes it into Affinity, I suggest something like an export checkbox saying "Optimize Filesize (Slow)" which runs the "0me" algorithms with the default iteration count (usually, but not always, finds the smallest filesize and does it reasonably fast). And an "advanced" button to enable other algorithms or increase iteration count. And... Since zopfli is somewhat slow, it may be worth showing a progress window which shows the algorithms it's trying and what sizes it finds, while the user waits (i.e exactly what the command line tool above outputs). Maybe as some nice "size" bars to get the user excited about getting efficient files for the web. That feedback also helps a lot; i.e next time you wanna export the same resource you may know that the "e (entropy)" algorithm was the correct one for that particular image, and can uncheck the rest to save time. Maybe the GUI could even help do that automatically. Well, there are lots of considerations so I'll let you have fun exploring the tool and checking it out now :)
  18. Please add an option in the assistant menu, for "show handles around selected object", to disable this. And make it possible to scale/rotate objects just by hovering in the vicinity of where the ball would have been if it was visible. Or better yet, something like "ctrl+drag" = scale, ctrl+alt+drag = rotate, so that we can permanently work without the blue outlines.
  19. I recently did a logo design where I wanted to zoom out to a postage stamp sized view to try different fonts and offsets between objects to make the logo work at small sizes. The blue box with its round balls were larger than the font! I couldn't see anything! The box is really distracting when trying fonts. I had to hold down space permanently and the box kept coming back whenever i clicked a gui element like a dropdown list. Suddenly, Affinity Designer bugged out and the blue box permanently vanished. I thought I was in heaven. I could see everything clearly and my blood pressure went down 50 points. Unfortunately the awful blue box was back after the next restart. I crid evrytim :(
  20. To show the results for some graphics, here are some compression numbers. The "Input size" is the size that was created by Affinity Designer, and the "Result size" is the zopflipng result. + $ ./zopflipng --filters=01234me -m ~/Downloads/backgrounds.png ~/Downloads/backgroundzop.png Optimizing /Users/Aitte/Downloads/backgrounds.png Filter strategy zero: 152892 bytes Filter strategy one: 109296 bytes Filter strategy two: 115480 bytes Filter strategy three: 113140 bytes Filter strategy four: 107029 bytes Filter strategy minimum sum: 105744 bytes Filter strategy entropy: 105074 bytes Result is smaller Input size: 130432 (127K) Result size: 105074 (102K). Percentage of original: 80.558% + $ ./zopflipng --filters=01234me -m ~/Downloads/test.png ~/Downloads/z.png Optimizing /Users/Aitte/Downloads/test.png Filter strategy zero: 108460 bytes Filter strategy one: 97149 bytes Filter strategy two: 100206 bytes Filter strategy three: 101311 bytes Filter strategy four: 98841 bytes Filter strategy minimum sum: 98427 bytes Filter strategy entropy: 97128 bytes Result is smaller Input size: 124845 (121K) Result size: 97128 (94K). Percentage of original: 77.799% Also, you will notice I ran with all filters (01234me), but they recommend "0me" because usually one of those three is gonna be the winner. So a good default profile is "0me". And the extra "-m" flag I specified just makes it do more iterations to try to make the file even smaller, but usually that's not needed.
  21. I see the multiple light sources now. The "Add" button had eluded me before. But the inability to control light-size ("spot size") and shininess per-light in Affinity made it impossible to get really sharp highlights, as well as making it impossible to get really popping colors. I set up 3 white lights and 3 colored lights, just like the Art Text example, and got this washed out and melded-together result in Affinity because all lights are equally bright and equally blurry (see attachment). Would it be possible to improve the light control in the future? About shadows: I hope so. Perspective shadows look great. Extrusion: Okay, understandable. To extrude vectors you'd need to build a bit of a 3D engine and that's a waste of time when there are more important things.
  22. I just did a trial of the Logoist and Art Text 2 apps and thought they were really poor and tacky for the most part, but saw some nice ideas in them. These would be great effects for Affinity, if you would ever consider implementing them in Designer & Photo. - Perspective Shadow: making it possible to angle the shadow, and making them more blurry further away, as well as the option of inverting the perspective so that the shadow is in front of the object instead. The example is from the Logoist app. - Extruding shape layer effect (see Logoist app : Style : Effects : Extrude : Color/Gradient Extrude). It allows you to select an object, apply the layer effect, set the X and Y offset relative to the original location, the inset (allows you to shrink the extrude-point), set either single shadow/highlight colors or a gradient, as well as setting the angle of the light. - Multi-point 3D Gloss: Look at the Art Text 2 app, it has the ability to create very advanced gloss effects that emulate anything from plastic to glass and metal, with multiple light sources. Beyond creating the outdated "Aqua" effect, it can be very useful when used moderately. Especially when you want to make vector designs look 3D. Instead of creating thousands of small layers and making them white and partially transparent to emulate gloss using vectors manually, you could just apply a proper 3D gloss effect with colors and light sources that are automatically correct. See attached examples of each.
  23. Would you be able to include the world's best PNG compressor in the export features? It usually produces files 60-80% of the Affinity PNG size and is available as a C library. The compression is the best in the world, and the only feature they lack is extra-advanced palette optimization (it does optimize, but could be even smarter, it is on their todo list), but even without that they're still smaller than all other PNG compressors. License is apache 2.0 = free for commercial use if you attribute them in the about-box. Project was made by Google employees. If you include it then please preserve control over the various tuning/algorithm parameters (you'll see what I mean if you try their command line version), because that is how to achieve the best compression.
  24. @jmac: I was already pretty angry, but I would have been pissed as hell if I didn't work with vectors often enough to enjoy my $50 Designer purchase. But as it stands, I am pretty happy about it since it allows me to create even better logos and websites without being restricted by document resolution/pixels. It was a joy to see my designs in total non-pixelated clarity for the first time. It just seems like they're trying way too hard to differentiate the apps, when they're already very different and both worth owning. You are correct that photographers need attractive text, and that's why even Photoshop *ELEMENTS* has Text on a Shape (live-editable smart object), Text on a Curve (vectors), and Text on Selection Outline. Elements is more powerful than even Affinity Designer at creating text... let that sink in for a moment. Anyway... Affinity Photo: Extremely powerful photo editing features (loads of filters, live fx and adjustment layers, correction tools, etc), some powerful vector features but none of the Designer niceties that make vectors easy and attractive to work with. Affinity Designer: Extremely powerful vector features that make it vital if you want to *enjoy* working with vectors the way they're meant to be seen: Infinitely zoomable without pixelation, letting you make every little detail perfect. Also has some good pixel editing features but lacks the ultra-powerful ones from Photo. Bim bam bom. They're already unique apps. No reason to wall off creative and attractive text as a $50 extra. It looks kinda desperate and pathetic. My heart goes out to all photographers who don't care about vectors, and who are forced to flat, boring text that's even worse than what the newbie-app Photoshop Elements would have given them.
  25. Very poor of Serif to not address this shortcoming and preferring to stay silent. Many people have asked for this feature in Photo in the past and half a dozen people in this thread have asked for it via posts or likes, not to mention all the lazy people who agree but didn't take the time to post. I decided to buy Designer to get this basic photo editing feature. I am happy with the ability to work on my vectors in a better program for that task, and only use photo for doing photo editing. But the list of reasons to buy designer is huge so why the f}## restrict "text on a curve" to only designer?! Here is my own list of Designer features that ultimately made it worth owning in addition to photo, and you can draw your own conclusions about whether "text on a curve" really needs to be walled off as a $50 extra on top of affinity photo's price. Great designer features: Transparency tool - drag gradient-like transparency on layers without using pixel-based masking infinite non pixelated zoom - awesome when drawing logos, icons and symbols - great for real-world object designs etc; no constraints to artwork size based on pixels, easy to zoom in and see all the details Incoming ability to apply multiple fx/strokes per layer - very useful since you can create staggered outlines without duplicating layers draw vector paths with a pen or mouse, instead of clicking control points - useless to me, but great for people with drawing tablets text on a path - vital to be able to create eye popping photo captions Tool for smoothly rounding vector corners - useful to have when designing; really nice to be able to round off sharp corners pixel and retina preview - great; seeing vectors when zooming and still being able to preview what pixels will look like wireframe view - incredible when refining finished vector designs; lets you focus on the curves instead of being distracted by shading Incoming tool to automatically vectorize pixel art - can be great; hopefully rivals vectormagic Incoming tool to mesh-warp vectors nondestructively - SO DAMN USEFUL Incoming knife tool to cut vector shapes in half - ultra useful Incoming artboards to let you have multiple designs in one file where each design will be independently exported - kinda cool Text features like text styles (ability to save presets of all attributes common to text like choosing fonts and kerning and outline and gradient and easily reusing that), bullets, numbering - very nice And those are just the exclusive features that I cared about in designer. There are other exclusive ones. So why the %{%{% is basic "curved text" abilities locked to a $50 photo addon?! :/ There are lots of reasons for people to buy designer without crippling a basic photo editing feature: The ability to create non-boring text.
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