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There are massive numbers of people using Photoshop and Illustrator who hate Adobe because of the switch to rental software. Many are working in very fast-paced, high-pressure situations, are highly task-oriented and facing a daily stampede of deadlines. If they are to jump onto the Affinity bandwagon, they need a quick and easy way to do this without risking any delays regarding their daily workload. Setting aside a large block of time to learn a new app poses a challenge for such professionals. I’ve been using Photoshop and Illustrator for a very long time and I can fly through tasks very quickly. While I have both Photo and Designer, as well as the Designer Workbook, in the intense rush of day-to-day business, I can’t put on the brakes and work my way through doing an entire project in a new app as it causes a huge hit in productivity. When the day is over, the thought of setting aside an additional block of time after hours is a bit much. It’s a cycle that keeps me from making the transition. When Adobe cut off permanent licenses after CS6 it was a major expression of disregard for long-time users such as myself, which is why I have purchased Photo and Designer. Taking the next step of actually using the apps is a huge hurdle. I know that I am hardly alone in this. Other pros I’ve spoken with have said the same thing. It all comes down to balancing workload, impetus to switch, and avoiding burnout while changing horses midstream. Having been on the creative side of marketing for a long time, I know what I would do in order to facilitate such a changeover. I would hire someone to take the ten most common tasks in Photoshop and Illustrator, create 60-second tutorials, then promote the heck out of them. After this, I would take the next ten most common tasks and repeat the above, then do the same until you have around fifty of each. Affinity already has tutorials but what someone in my situation needs is training that is quick, in-and-out, and which can be done on the fly whenever a small task comes up in the workflow; not project-stype tutorials or references to steps within projects. In an intense, high-pressure situation, the way to make inroads in prompting a transition is to provide a fast, brief and easy, guerilla-style tutorials so that the user can pull this off without blowing deadlines. Examples of quick, in-and-out tasks: – Adjust color balance and crop – Convert text to vector logo with gradient and outline – Open photo and save as optimized JPG / PNG – Import vector into Photo, then add fill and stroke – Select pixels, create a mask, and output with transparency – Create a nested object then duplicate this on a grid – Slice a photo for optimal web output – Isolate a foreground object, clone the background, and output layers for parallax responsive Affinity already has something similar in place. Refining this for pros in high-pressure working environments would speed adoption.

Thanks. I'll see how far it tips toward advanced capabilities.

Not all web designers are jobbers or with agencies; generating their bread-and-butter income from creating dozens of sites a year for paying customers. Many of us are with in-house departments of mid-sized or small corporations, with only a few sites to manage. These days, there are thousands of such companies who may still be struggling with overcoming the impact of the tough economy of the past decade, and who are so focused on product and sales that marketing is treated like a poor relation - and they set their budgets accordingly. This is particularly true in the manufacturing sector.

Same here, but I actually started out with Adobe PageMill, which was a great starter app for the time, then went through the GL > DW route. With Freeway currently in limbo, new licenses are not currently available (although you can probably buy a license and software on eBay). In any case, I have found Freeway to be an excellent app and, while trying everything else I can find, I am still using FW for my web work. While it can be very powerful, it can also be extremely easy: Draw a box anywhere on the screen, click in it and start writing. Go to the Styles pallete and use drop-down menus to create all your styles, then apply them by selecting the desired text and clicking on the style name. Draw another box, select it, then draw another box inside it to create nested content or you can drag a photo into a text box, set it to float and off you go. You can also drag photos right onto the page and adjust them as you like. You can also draw a text box, click on the layer and place it over a photo or whatever. Creating menus can be handled automatically. The only issue I have is that the responsive setup is a little quirky but it does the job. Here's an example of a Freeway site I created. As for the limitations of Blocs, there are other options available. They work differently but they do a good job. If Blocs wants to grow up and actually become a means of earning the author a living, the guy needs to gather some investors, hire a programmer to assist him, and get to work. I have an idea that pulling together $150K or so for development and marketing in exchange for a share in the company would make an enormous difference. Otherwise, Blocs will never be anything more than a hobby for evenings and weekends until he becomes bored or people jump ship for something better.

It is an interesting app but potential users need to review things carefully. The subscription fee is $420 per year (plus additional costs) for serious users. If you want to use their tools to promote a web design business you could end up paying $120 a year just to replace their logo with your own and there are a lot of other fees that can be piled on. Regardless of capabilities, this is clearly designed to drive revenues for Webflow. I will take some time to seriously evaluate the platform. One thing that most WYSIWYG web design apps have in common is that they offer permanent licenses and I respect the people behind these companies because of this. The same goes for Affinity. When Adobe went to a subscription basis, it left us (my employer and many of my friends) cold because of the issue of intellectual property. From our perspective, the structure of a complex PS doc or project in Premiere or AE (and I tend to do some elaborate work) constitutes intellectual property and for us, the notion of allowing Adobe to require payment to have access to this property is problematic. The upside is that this is what brought many of us to Affinity in the first place. I continue to use Master Collection CS but am transitioning to Designer and Photo. My experience with these apps is why I would love to see a web design app from Affinity.

I set up a responsive template document in master pages with a range of elements that I turn on and off by breakpoint and that removes the headaches. The capabilities are still pretty darned good, plus I use Hype for the cool stuff. Last week I received a note from one of the people behind Softpress who said that there would be some news in the near future. I assume that is in regard to the disposal of company assets, which includes Freeway. I would imagine that the app is in the process of being sold and, if so, perhaps it will be bought by someone who is willing to spend the time to bring the app up to date and not end up passing through a series of owners that focus on facelifts. We've seen what sometimes happens – examples being how a series of companies turned such apps as Ray Dream Designer (Carrara) and Retrospect into the messes that they became. Re: Blocs – it's good for basics and, for a consumer or mom-and-pop business that needs a web presence without any special capabilities, it is a decent choice. but the company is a one-horse operation and the app has the feel of being a personal pet project (How many users actually need to display images framed in an iPhone or Apple Watch?). Hopefully the author will recognize what needs to be done to make it competitive but it may take years before this happens.

If you are talking about Edge Animate, you betcha. Tumult Hype is a fantastic app - It fully supports JS and is very powerful for beginners and intermediates who are not up on JS. I am a major fan. Here's a site that uses a lot of Hype - An inline responsive site created using Freeway with page content either alternating vertically between Freeway content and Hype content, or in many cases, having Hype content on a layer over a background placed in Freeway: http://mobile.lightbenders.com. The Hype content is fully responsive and works great on all sorts of websites. I come from a background in Macromedia Director (big brother of Flash, used mainly for game development) and am used to intense control over everything. As a Flash replacement, Hype tends to set the bar. The shortcomings: limited control over content loading (can load individual elements by scene if desired) and they have not yet released a version that supports a shared resource folder (though rumor has this as being in the works). These are not deal-killers by any means. I've used Hype for everything from animated buttons to elaborate interactive animations. It can even be used for creating entire websites, if desired (but due to the tendency to get carried away with cool content I shy away from using it as a full-blown web design app). You can also use it for creating iOS apps and widgets (I've used it for creating interactive content for iBooks Author, including exploded product views, slide-shows, etc.) It also has a live-connect feature so that you can sync your iPad or iPhone so that they display the project live as you design it for instant testing.

I have a copy of everything out there, including Sparkle, RW, etc., etc., but there are no traditional WYSIWYG apps that have the power of FW. Like many others out there in the business world, I'm one of those who has to handle web as well as other creative/marketing tasks and on a restricted budget, which means I can't allocate thousands of dollars a year for web designers, yet I have to manage sites that drive millions in sales (go figure - it's the conservative nature of many businesses when it comes to web). There are a lot of apps for creating websites, but the apps for designing truly robust sites are not particularly friendly to non-specialists. Pinegrow (which is more or less visual) is an app that has a ton of potential but it is heavily focused on coding, it has an everything-plus-the-kitchen-sink interface, and tweaking items visually is very quirky. And unlike the popular WYSIWYG apps out there, it does not just generate the code, but it is 100% editable. If I were a major code-head I would jump to Pinegrow in a flash. It appears that there will be a long dry spell before someone comes out with a WYSIWYG web design app for creative professionals.

The tanking of Softpress Freeway created a ton of orphans - thousands of users who wanted a powerful, flexible and expansive WYSIWYG web development app (which Freeway was) and a modern app that moved gracefully forward with the times (which Freeway did not). If you didn't mind the finicky responsive tools, Freeway out performed the competition in many ways. This means that there is an enormous void out there for a truly powerful and modern web development app that one can learn without requiring a degree and which has a ton of expandability and headroom for advanced users. It seems to me that Affiniy is the ideal company to develop such an app - something that would leave all WYSIWYG web apps in the dust. (How about in 2018?) There is a gigantic void in this area and nothing that truly fits the bill.

I need the same thing. I often need to beef up a font by adding a stroke, then upgrouping and combining to create a fatter character for further editing (such as dropping into Photoshop for adding depth without eating up to much internal space.

Telling a user that their email address is already registered has nothing to do with downloading. It simply tells the user something they already know. What does that have to do with downloading any thing? Users are expecting a link. Instead they hit a dead end. If, on the other hand, there is some message that actually refers to the UI Kit (such as "check your email for download link"), that would make sense. (There is some degree of irony that the UI for the UI Kit download doesn't include a UI element for downloading something.) Regards

I click on the button on the welcome screen to download the UI Kit, I am taken to a page and prompted to enter my name, email address, etc., and then I am presented with a message saying, "You've already registered this email address." And that's it. No download button for the UI Kit. Nothing. Is there any other way to download this?

I am a pro running a one-man department working 50 hour weeks with a staggering backlog of work. I don't have time to play with the app trying to guess what things do and how they work. If I have to spend fifteen minutes poking around just to find an eyedropper tool (or equivalent) that is fifteen minutes I can't get back. I've owned Designer from the get-go. Many times I've fired it up, messed around with it and stumbled on all sorts of intuitive ways to do things I don't want to do (and in a totally over-the-top fashion), but in the end, I quit and go back to Photoshop so that I can get work done. The long and the short - six video tutorials and a busy forum is a less than ideal way to get up and running. Now that the app has won its award and customers are buying, perhaps you could take the time to provide formal documentation. Speaking from 20 years of experience in marketing departments, the one thing you don't want to do is make a ton of sales, have customers say it looks cool but they can figure it out, and then they tell everyone that the app is confusing and hard to figure out. It will blow up in your face. Speaking from 15 years of experience as a paid software reviewer, the same goes: It looks great. It is very powerful. It is extremely affordable. It takes a ton of messing around it can be mastered. Consumers and prosumers will enjoy spending the time to figure it out. Professionals will need to volunteer quite a few unpaid hours before switching. In terms of the app itself, I would award five stars but in terms of being able to get up to speed in any reasonable amount of time, take away two stars.