FlintHillsSky

These feature has never really worked. Is anyone at Affinity actually working on this? It would be very helpful to be able to use Affinity Photos to edit my photos but this bug just causes it to fail. I guess I will have to try doing it in Pixelmator though I prefer the Affinity product. Or is this a bug in Photos that external editors don't work reliably?

Have you tried the workaround where you copy the app out of applications to another location. Then you move that copy to the applications folder and replace the original. Once I did that, startup times went from 20-30secs to 2-5 seconds. Something seems to get messed up when the App Store installs the app and this copy/replace process clears it up. I did see the note from Affinity Dev saying that they have found the cause and hope to have the fix in 1.9.2 so hopefully we won't need these kinds of workarounds much longer.

1.9.1 did not fix it for me. Prior to 1.9.1 startup was about 5 seconds installed 1.9.1 (after initial verification step) startup was around 30 seconds Copied AF Photo and then moved the copy to Applications replacing the original. After that, startup was again back to 5 seconds. Something seems to happen (or not happen) when the apps are installed that causes it to be slow to start.

that would be expected. When apps are started, there are usually caches of code created and stored in the user cache that help the app run and make it faster to start the next time. When you clear that out you are resetting those apps back to zero. clearing the cache may open up some disk space but it does not speed up your computer's operation.

Hve you tried the technique mentioned on this forum where you copy the app files out of Applications to your desktop. then copy them back and overwrite the originals? That brought the startup time back to nearly normal for me.

Won't that remove data from those app?

If you just need a few barcode, you could use a free generator like this one http://online-barcode-generator.net It lets you enter your value, choose an encoding type, and will export in SVG vector format. that was just the first site that appeared when I did a web search for "generate barcode vector"

I use both Photo and Designer on a Mackbook Air with no problems, so you should be fine on your Mini. :)

It would be a manual PITA but you could add a matching color stroke to each object to fill in the gaps.

Would SVG work better for you as an exchange format?

I have just been using Inkscape for tracing. it does a passable job. then I transfer the results to AD to work in a less clunky environment. Only downside is that I cannot get Inkscape to work on OS-X so I have to run it in a Linux VM. Its never just easy. :)

I'm not sure but you might want to run Disk Utility and "repair permissions". this sounds like a permissions problem and doing that repair helps with a lot of file problems on Macs.

With such a simple image, you might end up better off if you recreate it in Designer. That will let you handle the transparency layers of those blue ribbon things and have much cleaner edges to the image than the bitmap will allow.

One thing that throws people off when exporting to bitmaps is the "resample" method. The default is "nearest neighbor" and the produces a very jaggy result. If you choose Lancos 3 the results are smooth. https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/2186143/Screen%20Shot%202015-08-11%20at%204.18.58%20PM.png

Would a font aimed at musical notation work for you? I haven't worked with any but in doing a search, I see plenty available. https://www.google.com/webhp?q=music%20fonts#newwindow=1&q=music+fonts In regards to your original question, Affinity Photo is closest to PhotoShop. Affinity Designer is closer to Illustrator but with considerable ability to manipulate bitmaps, too. You might start with Designer and only get Photo if it turns out you need the additional features. Both AD and AP could work with a design using a musical font.

thank you