Mark Ingram

What version of Windows are you running?

I've been involved in discussions with Microsoft since the inception of this, and I can tell you that their intentions are to increase the stability of Windows and improve the experience of end users. There is no maligned conspiracy to "take away control". They want a nice isolated experience for application developers so that they can guarantee their applications won't be affected by other third parties (which we have seen in v1). That does simplify things, which some users may not be happy with, but generally people just want their applications and their machine to just work. Tim Sweeney is great, but he is also in the business of running an App Store, so he's hardly unbiased here. I fully support the idea that third parties don't share customer data with us. Privacy is important. We allow customers to purchase from Apple or Microsoft because those users trust them with the personal details and their credit card details. You may not like those companies, but that doesn't mean that all of our customers feel the same way. ---- And with that final point, I would like to say, these forums are not representative of our overall customer base. The forums are a location that people come to when they have problems, or when they want to be actively involved in feature discussions or partake in the beta tests. They are not the place where our average user goes to say "Everything was fine, thanks.". I feel like a lot of discussions here are skewed by the belief that some percentage of users on the forum represent the overall feeling of our customers.

I really don't understand how you are arguing about this. You're talking about a UI framework and an installer. UWP is not a precursor to MSIX. They are completely unrelated technologies. You can continue to repeat yourself but that does not make what you're saying true. MSIX can be used to install Win32, WPF, WinUI, or UWP apps. Your argument is equivalent to saying "MSIX is a precursor to Win32".

Great. So you need to go back to the Affinity Photo 2 app, and go to the Account panel. In there it should prompt you to register your licence against an Affinity ID. Once you have done that, you will be able to log in to all of your other apps. I will remove your screenshot from the post in case it's got any identifiable information in there.

This is not true. You're conflating two different technologies here, MSIX (a packaging / installation technology, nothing to do with design or UI frameworks, or tiles or tablets, or touch screens etc) with UWP. The latter was their failed attempt at a new design metaphor and UI framework.

The Mac App Store? Did you do an in-app purchase of the licences? Or did you purchase from the Affinity Store? I've looked on your Affinity ID account and I can't see any licences attached to it, so I'm going to assume that you purchased via in-app purchase? After you purchased the apps you should have been prompted to register the licence with your Affinity ID, did you do this?

No problem. You can reinstall on the same machine again.

We aren’t responsible for Faststone’s code. We can’t change it, and if they fail to launch our app, then the bug is in the code they have written to launch the app. We have code that works, such as the “Edit In Designer/Photo” capability, or the “aflaunch” app I provided. It should also be noted that other DAM applications do correctly open our apps via App Execution Alias. RawTherapee is one such example.

As well as doing our best to work around the problems (such as providing MSI installers, or launcher apps) with other applications such as "Fast Raw Viewer" it would be a good idea if customers could also contact them to let them know of the bug in their software that prevents the "App Execution Alias" from being launched.

And App Execution Alias are provided by Microsoft as part of MSIX deployment. So while the launcher is a good work around for now, it would be worth reporting the issue to the developer of the other app.

You can use the app execution alias, mentioned in the FAQ:

Do you have a firewall? It will be attempting to communicate with our server at this point.

Did you enter the organisation name in the Affinity ID field? And the activation code in the password field?

Hi, you put the organisation name and activation ID into the text boxes that are presented when you download the app from our site (or if you download from a third-party app store, you click "Activate" first).

Do you get any error messages at all? Or is it just that you cannot click the "ACTIVATE" button?