pentool

Create a new document in Publisher. Switch to the Master page. Create a text frame on the Master page and type some text into it. In the Layers panel, lock the text frame. Select the text frame in the Layers panel and copy it. Create a new document in Designer and paste the copied text frame into the new document. The text frame will appear in Designer and will be locked (since it was locked on the Master page in Publisher, too). You cannot unlock the pasted text frame in Designer. It will remain locked forever. However, if you create the text frame (in step #3) in Publisher on the Page (as opposed to the Master page) and lock it, then when you copy the layer and paste it into Designer, it will be pasted unlocked ready for editing.  
Suite V2.04
macOS 12.6.5

APhoto
 
I need to measure distances and I seem to be missing some sort of tape measure tool. So resorted using the selection tool and selecting the area I want to measure but I don't see any information either that would give me some sort of readout of the W/H of the selected area.
 
I can see that the info panel is showing the width and height of the selection AS I DRAG, but as soon as I let the mouse/trackpad go, the readout for W/H disappears.

Sorry, if this has been posted already (search didn't show up results), but would like to see a "Stroke Selection" feature in APhoto.
 
Eg, create any combination of lasso, circular, rectangular selection and stroke it with a color and a specific point size.
 
Thanks.

i really did try hard to make AP work for me, missing plugin support is not an issue i even can live without actions but non sticking settings drive me nuts.  working on more than one image is simply frustrating when you have to apply the same settings again and again.  this does not work in a professional situation.  the repetitive tasks are time consuming, annoying and prone to introduce mistakes.  it is sad but this for me is the main reason i have to stay with photoshop until a fix is available.
 

I won't switch back to something else but I understand what you're saying.
 
Most people here are asking for features like Artboards and whatnot. I personally think the developers could better work at 3 major 'improvements' updates in the months to come before starting adding new features and functions to the core.
 
I mean, if you read a single review online about Affinity software changes are they are positive and they should be but within the first 10 lines of each review you'll see  the software get compared to Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator.. Yes they have a similar tool sets and you can do almost the same things but - boy if you're starting working with Affinity software and you've had some years with Adobe under year belt, you will notice how improved Adobe software really is based on usability.
There are lot's of small usability features in Adobe software most of us probably never notice and take for granted - until you switch to some other software and this software doesn't have this easy to use settings or features. Only than you'll understand how solid software made by Adobe really ( after so many years ) is from the ground up. It's not only features and getting the job done faster each year by Adobe but there are lots of very tiny small things that make it so easy to use.
 
I don't wanna say anything bad about Affinity software I really like what I got this far and I can understand the software is still very new and needs to mature over time. But when I select an opacity input field and drop the value from 100 to 60% with my keyboard arrow keys I expect the jump/toggle to the next input field when I press the Tabs key on my keyboard not just deselect the window i'm working in.
Those are very tiny things that doesn't work but should work in any software today, even Pages and Numbers can do stuff like that. I'm confident the developers will all fix those things in the years to come I just wished more people would really like to see those smaller bugs and improvements get fixed first before asking for new features and whatnot.

+1 possibility of resizing icons :)
 
And i agree with Richard above, when having to work with a clear canvas it's difficult to see and focusing on the icons...

Love the program, hate the UI. I too can't live with dark UIs but also, the icons are too small on my 27" iMac screen. Please, can we set our own UI colours and icon sizes?

I've just set up an account on this forum specifically to make this request.
 
I'm an Illustrator user who really resents Adobe's new CC subscription scheme, so I'm interested in software that provides a realistic alternative to Adobe's core products. I've just bought Affinity Designer and so far am very impressed by what I see, feature-wise. There's a lot to like here.
 
However, I DO NOT LIKE dark user interfaces, and I was dismayed when I found that a dark interface is all that's on offer here. Maybe it's a feature of my eyes, but I find the dark colours extremely difficult to resolve and focus on, especially if I'm working on fairly bright/pale artwork (which is invariably the case).
 
UI designers seem to be under the misapprehension that having dark user interfaces is helpful because the tools 'get out of the way' and don't distract from the content. In fact, that's not true (or, at least, it's missing the point). The key thing is contrast: for ideal working conditions, every part of the screen that contains active content (i.e. artwork and tools) should be of a similar brightness to the overall intensity of the artwork. So, if you're designing dark/predominantly black artwork, your eyes need to adjust to that darkness, and hence having dark tools is helpful in that situation. But in the vast majority of cases (particularly when you're designing light artwork for use in print, typically on a white background), your eyes have to accommodate the glare of the bright colours, so the tools need to be similarly pale too. If there's a mismatch between artwork lightness and interface lightness, your eyes are constantly having to adjust as they move between the two areas, which is incredibly tiring.
 
Maybe I suffer from this more than other people, but I'm very conscious of it – and it's the reason why I hate dark user interfaces. It's not that I'm against them in terms of their looking good; it's all about usability. Ideally, the lightness of the user interface, in a design application such as this, should be adjustable on a per-document basis, because – as noted – for the best experience, its overall lightness should be similar to that of the artwork itself. (So maybe it could be tied to the document background colour for any given document.) But at the very least, given that most artwork is either printed or viewed on-screen against a light background, a light user interface should definitely be the default.
 
Frankly it amazes me that Adobe has got this wrong in recent times. It seems to be insisting on dark user interfaces itself, by default, which is barmy. But the fact that Adobe's started doing this doesn't mean that other developers should blindly follow its lead. Dark user interfaces may look cool, but they're actually a really bad idea, especially if enforced. Please, developers, THINK about such things! Take design decisions for the right reasons, rather than just to follow the current trend.
 
At least Adobe does still offer the full range of dark to light in its user interface preferences, so it's still possible to make them look like they used to look (black text on pale grey) – which is massively better than the dark default.
 
Unfortunately, Affinity Designer doesn't have this feature. OK, at least I can set the UI gamma. I've put it up to its brightest possible setting and it helps a little bit, but it's not nearly enough. At minimum, there needs to be a similar alternative to approach from the white end of the scale: i.e. to start with a very bright interface and darken it down.
 
Please think about acting on this as a matter of urgency, Affinity developers. Much as I'd love to see more 'real' features being developed for this excellent-looking product, this UI issue is, to me, surprisingly important because it impinges on the usability of the entire application. While the interface continues to be excessively dark and overly hard to read, it's going to materially hamper my ability to use the software.
 
We don't need skins and alternative icons. The basic look is fine. We just need to be able to lighten it right up so that the tools and buttons use dark text on a pale grey background. Thanks for listening.

+1
 
I can't understand why do some designers do not attent to just a possibility or optional way of having the color in the interface when a dark mode can't be seen well by some people.

I'd also like to see a "Yosemite" style UI. 
 
I appreciate the darker UI is better for some situations, but not always.

Yes, I know this - but this is not enough - there are not that big different with the gamma-slider x__x

Hi there,
I'd like to see a lighter/brighter mode for the whole UI. Sometimes it's much better to work in a lighter/brighter UI as in a dark mode (which I also like much!).
 
I think your UI is a lil bit to dark. I like more the dark-look of the native Apple Pro Apps. It feels a lil bit better :)

Hello Affinity,
 
I'm so glad to see an app like this in the marketplace. However, I can't use it for digital painting and illustration yet because of one MAJOR missing feature: Tablet pressure controlled opacity with the paint brush. As it stands you can set pressure on brush size and flow (among other things) but for digital painters opacity is the most important pressure control you can have. I'd say it's pretty darn important for retouchers as well. Please add this feature soon, because as of now Affinity Photo is unusable for me.
 
Thanks!

Another suggestion, not a very important one: Under OS X, most document-based applications support right-clicking the titlebar, which would open a menu with the parent folders of the document. I use this quite often in other applications to open the containing folder. It would be nice if AD and AP supported this, and it would be more OS X-conformant, too!
 
Cheers
 

This is an issue I touched on a long time ago.
As a technical illustrator I use ellipses almost all the time it the nature of the discipline. When deciding on what proportion of ellipse to start with in AD one simply draws an ellipse that looks OK. It is very unlikely that the illustrator will enter a height and width. The problem is that there is no way to repeat that ellipse if you have not made a note of its minor and or major axis. If there was another box in the Transform tab that told you what degree the ellipse was then it would be easy to remember and repeat.
 
By degree I mean the angle that a circle makes with the horizontal plane. e.g. a circle viewed on its edge ( a straight line) would be 0deg and when viewed full face  (a circle) would be 90deg, a circle tilted 45deg would a 45deg ellipse and so on.. As you increase either the height or width the 'new' degree box would show its angle.
 
Deciding to start with say a 35deg ellipse is much easier than trying to remember a width and height for a given proportion. The width and height boxes come into their own in specifying either major or minor axis.
I have attached a drawing which I have submitted before and think it won't do any harm to resurrect it again. 
 
I would suggest that the degree of an ellipse would simply be calculated by AD using the tangent of the minor axis divided by the major axis or the smaller size divided by the larger size size as height and width boxes would be interchangeable.
 
Since more people are now using AD than when I last mentioned this suggestion I would be most interested in how many 'Likes' it gets.
 
Ellipse proportions.afdesign

Hi pentool,
Welcome to Affinity Forums :)
Thanks for your feedback. As you said there's no way to offer everything other software has been implementing during the last decades in just one year. But, the published roadmaps refers to just part of what's coming, and that part will be made available as free updates. The development will not stop there. Next major versions will be paid upgrades and naturally will have new features and continue to improve on what's already there, otherwise we couldn't support the development costs...

When I look at ADesigner or APhoto (...and I have to admit I did not try APhoto yet since there's no trial, so I only watched the videos), what worries me is that both of these apps will just become another Pixelmator, Acorn, iDraw, Sketch, or whatever else. These apps basically all the same. Sorry, don't get me wrong, they are nice, and offer a feature here and there that stands out. But that's it. They all use (I assume) the same Apple libraries, so they implement the same features. With the exception being that one has a dark, or light interface option, different icons, bigger this, smaller that, etc. But none of them REALLY stand against neither PS or AI.
 
Adobe's apps (PS/AI) were released, what, around 1990 or so? That's over two decades of maturing!!! So yes, I know it's hard to beat that overnight. I'm still frustrated over Adobe's greed not to implement simple, common sense features in AI for which I have to rely on using plugins.
 
I despise Adobe's new subscription based pricing and I still use CS5. However, I'd LOVE for someone to come along and offer a TRUE alternative to those apps. And I don't mean creating a feature set that already exist in Pixelmator, Acorn, Sketch, etc, etc. But offering MORE. At this point, I think all those apps offer one or two features the other don't have. So it's like I have to have all those apps and switch between them if I don't want to use AI.
 
What features would I like to see? Well, take a look at PS and AI. When you have those features implemented in APhoto/ADesigner then I can suggest more features. But until then, well, that's the road map. So to speak :-)
 
In ADesigner, I simply LOVE the corner tool. For year after year Adobe had the face not to implement anything like that, and people had to rely on using plugins for such common sense, great features. Those are the ones I'd like to see.
 
When I read the description for ADesigner that future updates are free, I immediately thought, that's it. It's just another Sketch, iDraw, or whatever with a basic toolset. That's all it will become. Without extra revenue, I just don't see how the development team will keep yanking out more and more new features for free.
 
I'd love to see the Affinity apps mature close to (or preferably surpass) the PS/AI feature set. Just take a look at the plugins for AI from Astute Graphics (goggle it). There. Right there is a whole slew of features you guys can implement (since you won't support AI plugins).
 
However, I'd be happy to pay MUCH more for an app with insanely awesome features. You can even implement some sort of licensing where people can buy different licenses, which offer more and more features. So if you want to spend top dollars, you get all the top features, which would make it a full fledged real AI/PS killer - and more.
 
So that is my single request. Just keep adding features that you see implemented in AI and its plugins, until I can comfortably and completely abandon Adobe's products. And yes, I'm happy to open up my wallet for such apps - provided they exist. Until then, it's just yet another Pixelmator, iDraw, Sketch, Acorn, etc.
 
Hope I didn't offend anyone. That was not my intention. I truly appreciate the Affinity team's work and effort they put into their apps. All I was trying to say is that I hope to see that one day someone creates an app (or two) that will be a REAL contender to Adobe's apps.

I'm sorry, but I completely disagree. I think it would be a waste of time to concentrate on features that are already built into the OS and you can easily do yourself. I'd rather see features implemented that is geared towards improving or adding features specific to illustration and workflow.
 
For batch renaming and moving files you can use Automator. In the article, scroll down to method #3, which will feature the Automator solution (so don't pay attention to the first 2 programs they mention):
http://computers.tutsplus.com/tutorials/3-easy-ways-to-batch-rename-files-on-the-mac--mac-46999
 
If you are running Yosemite, this article features how to use its built-in batch renamer. Video included.
http://www.idownloadblog.com/2014/10/18/how-to-batch-rename-files-in-os-x-yosemite/

I love the possibility to stretch a curve directly (no need to control both handles). And I like the “organic forms” we can achieve with that options.
 
But there are situations where we would need to stretch curves maintaining handles direction (even if that handles are not horizontal or vertical)
 
My suggestion is:
 
— Direct manipulation of curve ---> actual behavior
 
— SHIFT + direct manipulation of curve ---> modify curve maintaining handles direction
 
Next capture shows a practical case maintaining HV handles (very useful for corners):
 

Just a BUMP to this :-)