Jump to content
You must now use your email address to sign in [click for more info] ×

AndrewJJP

Members
  • Posts

    14
  • Joined

  • Last visited

Everything posted by AndrewJJP

  1. I think this is good news. Affinity knows the change has had caused unfortunate problems, and they are going to make things easier. I think it’s a bit premature to request a refund. I looked at some alternatives yesterday, and Affinity is still by far the best option for me. Thanks for the hard work guys. You have my sympathies at what must be an insanely busy time.
  2. It struck me that this is just moving the support burden. People can’t do the things they expect the installer to do out of the box and they have to go through a lot of workarounds to get a sensible system. They don’t get icons, they don’t get file associations, they can’t choose where to put the application, and it doesn’t integrate into their workflows. The fact this has workarounds is irrelevant. The fact that workarounds are needed inconveniences users and moves the support burden… but support can answer the questions more easily so maybe it’s reduced overall? I wouldn’t like to say, but it’s not an experiment I would conduct on my user base. I think this move was made with good intentions, although, being charitable, I feel the technical arguments are flawed. My feeling is Affinity made a mistake, but I want to support a British company, and I like their overall philosophy. I will continue to support them, and in the end, I paid for the product. I’m not installing it though. I can’t be bothered to faff around with all these workarounds to get a working system again, and I hope we see a solutions soon. I don’t care whether it’s an MSIX or not. What I care about is whether the installer sets up the system, or whether it makes a partial attempt and then leaves the user to pick up the pieces. It seems we currently have the latter.
  3. Sorry, as a software professional working in this area, almost none of this is accurate. You do not need to use MSIX, with its multiple drawbacks, to solve these issues as evidenced by my development team. It’s especially misleading to state that MSI does not support deltas. I have shown you the MS documentation. Please at least remove that claim and the one that people will interpret as saying that MSI files cannot be signed.
  4. Oh I just read the reasons for the switch. As a professional in the software industry responsible for a large, complex Windows application, I’ll give you my view on the most of the reasons. “MSI had an installation success rate of ~85% (and we have many requests to our tech support team for v1 install failures). MSIX promises a 99.9% success rate.” We have an MSI installer. Sure, it fails sometimes, but it’s probably less than the 0.1% claimed for MSIX. We are not flooded with “it doesn’t install” support calls. Maybe we just have an amazing installer? “MSI requires admin privileges to install.” Whether admin privileges are required or not depends on what the installer does. Our MSI installer does not require admin privileges, providing it’s installed into a directory that doesn’t require admin rights for write access. We offer our users a choice. “MSI apps are not sandboxed from other applications.” You do not need to use MSIX to sandbox an application. We’ve successfully sandboxed our EXE / DLL / MSI desktop application. It can be done if you keep dependencies local. “MSIX can perform in-app delta updates which are smaller and faster.” Windows Installer supports deltas, or did I misunderstand? See “Delta Patch” in the Microsoft documentation. https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/msi/d-gly “MSI cannot guarantee that an uninstall will leave your machine in the exact state prior to install.” Again, it depends on how your application works. Our install is registry-free and installs into a single directory. It can be uninstalled by deleting the folder or via the uninstall. “MSI does not require a digital signature. MSIX does (this means any MSIX that appears to be from Serif, will be guaranteed to be from us and only us).” Technically true, but misleading. Surely what matters is that MSI files can be signed. Presumably the v1 MSI files were signed? My guess is that this is more to do with the fact that developing Windows Installer installations is a pain, and nobody wants to do it. But we do it because it’s what customers want. Having said all this, I have paid for the whole lot as it is a staggeringly good offer. I just hope it installs!
  5. My summary of this thread: ”You’ve changed to use an installer that doesn’t let me do some perfectly reasonable, common thing.” ”This is how you work around it.” It isn’t creating a good impression, on me for one, and I hope you will reconsider. People want solutions, not workarounds and there is a very obvious solution. If it ain’t broke..,
  6. Thanks, this is a great help FYI, there a kind of workaround that approximates the effect, or, as my use case is processing 3D renders, I can add hours to my render time and bake it in at that point, which is destructive and annoying if you want to change it, as you have to re-render everything! I’ve to bake it into the render because it’s accurate. But why this is so helpful to me is that it means I now know that the only way I’ll get it is by paying for it. Pay for Affinity and keep hoping they add it, or pay for something I really don’t want, that I have to keep paying for, but at least has it already. Decisions, decisions… Thanks for taking the time to get back to me. (I requested it a few years ago but I totally understand that 3D is not the target market, and for most people, this is niche at best.)
  7. Can someone explain why an app is better for the end user? I always thought it was for “toy things” like games, not for software that wants to be taken seriously, but I must admit, that’s just the perception I have, it’s not based on any evidence, except for the fact that none of my other professional applications are apps (including MS applications, 3D applications, video editing applications and music applications). But regardless of perceptions, I’m not clear on how it helps me and I’m reading a lot of drawbacks. I don’t even want to risk installing the trial, it’s looking like a lot of hassle.
  8. Hi there, I wonder if anyone could tell me if v2 of Photo supports depth maps in the lens blur filter? I know this is niche for most users, but for a 3D artist, it’s a shame not to have this. I didn’t spot this on the new feature list. Thanks.
  9. Thanks for trying it Thomas. That's quite similar to the result I saw. I thought that was behaving as expected (setting the opacity rather than the intensity), but maybe it's not? I'd also be very interested to know if it's actually a bug might could be fixed one day.
  10. Thanks so much for your help, I took a good look at both suggestions, hence the slight delay in replying. Unfortunately, I think the plug in may be something slightly different, more to do with extracting depth information from an image to make something that you'd look at with 3D glasses (or that was my understanding). The forum thread is the workaround I came up with as a workaround but unfortunately, it's not doing quite the same thing as the Photoshop blur is doing. Thanks so much for replying, I really do appreciate it.
  11. Thanks Thomas I think that's very similar to what I was doing, although you added the curves so I will give it a try. If I understand correctly, it will still blend in a uniform blur rather than apply depth-dependent blur, but it's the result that counts in the end of course. The compelling reason is that that's the tutorial I was following. It's gone now. I'd hate to think I upset anyone. I have just had a hunt around and I have failed to find a better example.
  12. Hi there, I use 3D software that produces a depth map. This is a greyscale image that in Photoshop, you can pass to the lens blur filter and the level of blur is controlled by the map. Basically, the image is darker where objects are closer to the camera. According to the tutorial, "Now it is a simple matter of using the image as a depth map for Photoshop’s Lens blur filter." I cannot see anything like this in Affinity. The closest I can see is the depth of field blur, but that's quite primitive. The best I came up with was... Blur the image uniformly Use the depth map as a mask to blend in the blurred image. It doesn't produce realistic results. I would imagine that's because the level of blur is constant, and blending in a constant blur is not the same thing as varying the level of blur. What's important is controlling the level of blur using a "Depth Map" and that doesn't appear to be a supported feature as far as I can see. Is this feature available and I'm just not seeing it, or is there a better workaround that I could use, or maybe even a third-party plugin? Thanks very much.
×
×
  • Create New...

Important Information

Terms of Use | Privacy Policy | Guidelines | We have placed cookies on your device to help make this website better. You can adjust your cookie settings, otherwise we'll assume you're okay to continue.