befehr

M. Connor,
By spending 4000+ USD on an 8-core 5 Ghz machine, I expect a substantial speed-up of my workflow. You can’t just tell people that « there is no need to bump this thread » and call it a day. This problem was introduced by Serif when Serif decided that it was a good idea the change the welcome screen. So, there is a solution, but Serif doesn’t want to acknowledge it. And this thread is almost 2 years old.
You might think that the problem is just happening when people open your applications, say once a day, which is acceptable. But it’s not and here is why.
I use all Affinity products mainly for corporate publication. I produce periodical complex reports with Publisher involving data merge. Here is one use case.
The reports are produced using a 10 pages layout for 200+ entities. Each record has circa 250 linked fields pointing to SVG icons and plots. As Publisher always crashes after 15 records (apparently the number of open files exceeds a limit somewhere), I have to manually create batches of 15 records, manually export the PDF, then close Publisher, open it again, then set the new batch for the next records, on so on. So, I have to manually do it myself instead of taking one step (that would already last almost 2 hours just to generate the merge). And as Publisher has no scripting capabilities, it must be done by taking the time of a real human that has to click everywhere for hours because of your bugs. Of course, this has to be repeated every time the customer asks for a modification.
It doesn’t stop here. These reports are produced in 6 languages. And all this $hit has to be repeated. In your opinion, how many unchargeable hours are wasted because of this, M. Connor? In this case, the total number of Publisher reboots and manual interventions is 214!!! How ridiculous does it sound to you? That's almost 1.5 hours of waiting time, not including the manual interventions.
So now, M. Connor, stop insulting your customers by:
saying that there is no solution (because the problem was created by Serif itself), minimizing the problem (because you apparently are unaware that some customers don’t produce only basic documents) Ruining the performance of expensive machines with poor software development decisions. SO YES HAVING TO WAIT 30+ SECONDS EVERY TIME YOUR APP CRASHES HAS AN IMPACT.
In the use case I mentioned, there are several bugs (usability, performance, and plain bug old bugs😞
There is no reason that the merge process is not fully multithreaded. My CPU is used at max 20-25% during the whole process (8 cores, 16 threads available). Why is there a limitation in the number of opened files on a 64 GB RAM configured machine having more than 3.5 TB free disk space (which can be used for swap)? Why do you want us to wait 30+ seconds every time your app crashes ??? As I was considering upgrading to Affinity 2.0, I also read another thread regarding the new software packaging policy (using apps on Windows).  People are not so happy with that.
So far, I bought all your apps 3 times: for macOS, for Windows, and iPad. I also bought your books. That tells you how involved I am in your products. But the Serif attitude is ruining the Affinity experience in professional use cases.
The time for excuses is now over, as it becomes more and more painful to use your apps in a corporate environment. I also had to convince management and colleagues to use Affinity instead of Adobe products. That wasn't easy, but at that time I was convinced that it was a good idea to support Serif instead of the same big techs. They won't make the same mistake, and Serif's attitude is largely contributing to this.
Listen to your customers.

Would be wonderful if Affinity Designer provided user definable object association lines (or nesting boxes) to indicate (parent/child/sibling, system/part, ontological associations between objects) allowing for flow chart and network and parts diagrams. Same functionality might be built into a particular display mode such that object functional associations could be displayed independent to other layouts including instances of these same objects.
Such affordances could be the basis for all sorts of "smart" or "semantic" functionality that would be impossible to implement in the current version of Affinity Designer. 
Thanks, Randall

A little late to this one but I thought I’d post what I got in AP on the iPad. All I did was adjust the highlight slider in raw edit. I was pretty impressed with its ability to recover highlights.

Technical illustration of a carburetor from a small Subaru engine. 
The pressure profile for stroke widths makes thick/thin transitions easy.

While using the Pencil Tool in AD for iPad, is there a way to change a setting to automatically close a path, where the nodes of end and beginning of the that path join. Or will I have to switch to Node Tool and close each of them manually?

The instructions provided by @stokerg are only for Affinity Photo for iPad which uses a touch based interface which is different from the desktop apps.

Hi Affinity iPad Student,
 
Affinity also has it  
 
Just go into the settings, select Tools and enable Touch for gestures only

Per suggestion from @Alfred
Affinity Designer on the iPad Pro...my go-to software/hardware combination.
Thanks Serif.
IMG_0195.MOV

Per suggestion from @Alfred
Affinity Designer on the iPad Pro...my go-to software/hardware combination.
Thanks Serif.
IMG_0195.MOV

Per suggestion from @Alfred
Affinity Designer on the iPad Pro...my go-to software/hardware combination.
Thanks Serif.
IMG_0195.MOV

Per suggestion from @Alfred
Affinity Designer on the iPad Pro...my go-to software/hardware combination.
Thanks Serif.
IMG_0195.MOV

Per suggestion from @Alfred
Affinity Designer on the iPad Pro...my go-to software/hardware combination.
Thanks Serif.
IMG_0195.MOV

Per suggestion from @Alfred
Affinity Designer on the iPad Pro...my go-to software/hardware combination.
Thanks Serif.
IMG_0195.MOV

Per suggestion from @Alfred
Affinity Designer on the iPad Pro...my go-to software/hardware combination.
Thanks Serif.
IMG_0195.MOV

Per suggestion from @Alfred
Affinity Designer on the iPad Pro...my go-to software/hardware combination.
Thanks Serif.
IMG_0195.MOV

Per suggestion from @Alfred
Affinity Designer on the iPad Pro...my go-to software/hardware combination.
Thanks Serif.
IMG_0195.MOV

I get the importing of hand drawn art, but I’ve never had an auto trace work well enough were I didn’t spend more time fixing it than just drawing it outright over the imported image. Especially when you need to be concerned about specific colors and the number of colors. 
Then again, I am a bit of a control freak and I like to keep my anchor points to a minimum.

Yeah, I do the copy/paste dance for simple illustrations but dealing with multiple layers can be time consuming. I guess my point was, which is something I always seem to miss on my original posts, is that it is interesting that DRAW can open EPSs seemingly more reliably than Illustrator. That is about the only thing I like about Corel these days, especially since the price has really gone up.
Sadly, EPS is still required for sites stock sites that sell vector files. 

Has anyone seen any discussion of including some kind of line erasing tool like Corel's Virtual Segment Delete tool (see attached video)? I believe that I have mentioned the need to this tool at least a year ago but I have not seen or heard any serious talk. 
The more I use AD as my go-to software the more I am running into simple tools that I wish it had that would make my illustration life SO much better.
 
VertSegDelKey.mov

Per suggestion from @Alfred
Affinity Designer on the iPad Pro...my go-to software/hardware combination.
Thanks Serif.
IMG_0195.MOV

Per suggestion from @Alfred
Affinity Designer on the iPad Pro...my go-to software/hardware combination.
Thanks Serif.
IMG_0195.MOV

Per suggestion from @Alfred
Affinity Designer on the iPad Pro...my go-to software/hardware combination.
Thanks Serif.
IMG_0195.MOV

Per suggestion from @Alfred
Affinity Designer on the iPad Pro...my go-to software/hardware combination.
Thanks Serif.
IMG_0195.MOV

What the heck!?! That’s awesome! Well done! 

It needs an Oreo dunked... Would love to see the wirework on that.