Fixx

It should not be necessary to think about pixel alignment or resolution differences (as long as there is resolution enough).
The document should look the same before and after merging. Layered document creates a merged look on screen on the fly anyway and it should be true. If the look changes upon merging it is up to devs to correct behaviour, it should not be up to user to adjust layers.

Story editor was mandatory when computers were so slow that editing text in layout was not practical. Nowadays editing layout text is no problem.

Sometimes the bleed in imported documents is needed. There should be an option to make it visible. Minimal solution would be to import document as cropped and crop tool would reveal hidden bleed when needed.

I just bought Motion yesterday. Would love to have vector import from AD  :rolleyes:
 
I think it would be nice if Serif would add Motion XML shapes export to AD. Third party solutions or opening AD file format to Apple are not very probable so far.

It is useful if you need to maintain original scale (like in architectural drawings) or stretch it to some common scale. This is more about vector images of course.

or you can place discretionary hyphen in front of the word. That is cmd-shift-hyphen in mac keyboard.
But, it is all manual. Maybe you can find-replace specific words with no-break attribute?

Not available. You can use a clumsy workaround presented here: 
 

Well, CAD apps are great for design but AD is needed for presentation and making press ready documents. Scale function would be nice as it would take away one headache... when I have a rectangle 83 mm wide it would be in 1:50 scale.... ummm what...? It is not difficult but I always have to check I am not doing 1:200 scale instead... and repeat that with every object..

Yes, transform each is a feature I miss from other A-software. Transform each/in place/separately would be very useful. It should regard groups as objects.

Story editor was mandatory when computers were so slow that editing text in layout was not practical. Nowadays editing layout text is no problem.

Ok here it is as request :-)
 
1-bit bitmaps are used as line art (printed cartoons, illustrations), in silk screen printing and copydot printing systems. They also can (should) be used in coloured comics, where colour plates are overprinted with 1-bit black key colour. Possibly there are other technical purposes also (please list them in this thread!) There is not many apps that support 1-bit but for these uses 1-bit is crucial. 1-bit ensures that black image is NOT rasterized, resulting fuzzy outlines.
 
Technically 1-bit colour space should be easy feat. You can convert greyscale image to 2 tones (b & w) by thresholding image where light areas convert to white and darker to black.
 
Threshold should be adjustable so you can select how black or how white image is. (Scanners can scan directly to 1-bit but I think it is much better scan to greyscale and set the threshold manually.)
 
Alternative to thresholding is dithered image – that is, using something like grain mask or stochastic raster or Atkinson dithering to build the greytones. I am not sure that is so much needed as it is just a special effect (imho). Besides, there is excellent HyperDither app available.
 
There are some angles that are worth considering. Colour images are best at about 300 dpi when printed. 1-bit images display jaggies in that low resolution, optimum res is 1200-2400 dpi. Ideally 1-bit pixels would map 1-1 to device pixels but above 1200 dpi that is academic.
 
Details are not needed in that high resolution range, meaning that true 1 pixel resolution is not needed. Resolution is needed for avoiding jaggies, making lines and shapes smooth and clean. That also means that you can upsample image to smooth jaggies out. It is perfectly ok (even when not really hi-fi) to take 300 dpi greyscale image upsample it to 1200 and convert to 1-bit. In photoshop you can upsample in convert dialog (doing 300>1200 AND 8-bit to 1-bit) but I think Photoshop did it wrong and resulted jaggies. I do not know if they have corrected that bug (I use PS CS5). I hope AP would upsample and convert at one go and do it right.
 
There are some massage you can do to makes 1-bit appearance better. You can play with local contrast to make darker parts lighter so there will be more meaningful black and white areas in image. You can do it manually, or you can use filter (I think high-pass filter is used here?) I am hoping Affinity team would find some quick and easy slider here to apply in convert dialog to reveal more detail in final 1-bit image.
 
Tools: there is not much need for any special tools. (Or is there?) You can paint pixels black or white and that is it.
 
One simple effect/usage mentioned also in Affinity forum is that 1-bit image is placed in page layout app and coloured with front and back colour tools.
 
Last, you might want to consider comix artists' work flow. Old school draw black&white, scan b&w original (1200 dpi) and hand a copy to colour artist for colouring. Colouring is done to separate layer (well, sometimes physical "layer" with brush and paint). Coloured version is set in place in page layout and higher res lineart version is set in register with it and overprinted. Should colour image be CMYK? Or would it better be CMY, resulting brighter colours and less ink coverage, considering there is still black key 1200 dpi image being overprinted? How do you do CMY separation? Also, there are artists that draw with colours so that final artwork is coloured physical art board, and the either take the easy way out and do normal 300 dpi art production, OR filter out the 1200 dpi black key from full colour scanned original (not easy process..). Possibly Affinity can troubleshoot this process to simple and easy colour sep system for comix artists.

If you want to do your graphic novel in traditional way, separate 1200 dpi lineart plate and separate colour layers; 
check that Publisher supports placed lineart. Formerly Affinity apps did not support lineart but converted to RGB or rich CMYK. I did a quick test which seemed to indicate placed lineart retain 100K (great!). Printing a piece out would reveal if Publisher would halftone 100K lineart or keep it fully sharp.

Exactly my feelings. I'm backtracking on paying for version 2 at the moment. I'm out there conducting a serious review of the alternatives before I do so, and it shouldn't be like that.
I'd advise this company to develop a robust process for gathering 'professional workflow' knowledge (Forums are not it), and clarify really diligently who their target market is, or it's never going to reach the heights it set out to at the beginning. It's THE critical thing for their future right now (I've 10+ years experience helping big brands grow bigger, btw).
I'd love to know how sales of version 2 are doing, and whether they're on target with expectations. I'll be surprised if they are. They'll be blaming cost-of-living which will be wrong.
Here's how wide they are - I use ProCreate on the iPad for the quick n dirty photo work - cut-outs, basic adjustments, simple montages. Five minutes and I'm done. Affinity Photo comes nowhere near. And let's face it, quick n dirty photo work is the bulk of photo activity for design professionals who buy the full suite.

V2 is just disheartening. It's like coming from the great, original Star Wars Theatrical, being sold tickets to Empire Strikes Back, and forced to watch A New Hope: Special Edition -- the vast bulk of features are a hodge-podge of stuff the maker wanted, neither understanding nor caring what the audience wanted -- while being 99% the original. Serif could also learn from the various Death Stars down through the ages, it doesn't matter how numerous or fancy the features, if it keeps blowing up.
It's not so much that V2 isn't an Adobe killer now, it's that at this rate, it's so amply clear that it will never even be a contender. There's just so much wasted potential and time, so much missed opportunity, I'll likely just go back to an old Photoshop when my V2 trial expires.
And don't get me started on those of us with the MSIX bug being forced to watch Star Wars: Holiday Special, Clockwork Orange style.

While I was nodding along to the UI frustrations, the big thing I see Serif seem incapable of grasping is colour, which manifests most obviously in the management of swatches.
During the apps early development - as soon as they added the utterly useless 'recent' colour feature, I knew they had no clue how important colour is to designers... Scenario that plays out again and again if you attempt to use it is: "ok, which of the last five shades of red sitting in the recent colour thingy is the red I actually used on that object? Errr, last one in the recent series, as in most recent?  Hope it's the most recent recent colour. Uh-ho, no. What now, there's 4 really similar shades of red!!!" Yeah, there's lots of other things to do to overcome it, but that lives in to my point that there is little point to the recent colour thing.
The colour features in the affinity apps always give the impression that, like so many in this world, they see colour as just a pretty, random, inconsequential thing designers and illustrators haphazardly muck about with, and they can't compute anything beyond that. When actually, colour is one of the most disciplined and important areas of designing anything.
It does not surprise me that you report @kal that version 2 appears to demonstrate minimal improvement in their understanding.

Only used Freehand at school, but we were taught to use find & replace. InDesign’s links panel could do something like it but not seamlessly. To be honest, I preferred InDesign over Illustrator for basic vector work.
 
With this 2.0 update of Designer, I feel kind of homeless again, it’s such a letdown that they let all these UI issues slide. Maybe they got hit hard with covid or something, they haven’t said. Maybe this is just the way Serif is going to be. But there is no alternative really. Seems there is no money in going against Adobe, otherwise we would get actual competition. I’m just floored with how disappointing this is. 

My memories of early OS X are actually pretty positive. (There were plenty of issues, but I think they did an amazing job of making it more-or-less Mac-like.) I know we look at OS 9 and earlier with rose-coloured glasses, but let us never forget…

Yeah, but I never bought the Freehand 10 upgrade because it was just that: a port without any significant improvement worth the cash. And at that time I also switched to InDesign 2 (not CS2!) which ran just great on Mac OS 9, so there was no reason to fully migrate to OS X yet. For a few years I had OS X installed – since the public beta – but booted the Mac from OS 9 for any serious work. I didn't fully switch to OS X before Apple finally re-added labels to Finder. Tagging files and folders with labels always was a key part of my workflow, and it still is.

Macromedia Freehand was (and still is) the best vector app that has ever existed. There is one feature alone in that app that was better than anything I’ve ever seen in any other app. It was the Graphics Find & replace panel. Apparently, no one else ever used it but me, because no one is submitting feature requests for it to Adobe. You could use it to find anything in your Freehand doc and replace it with anything else. It was amazing. I will never forgive Adobe for buying Macromedia and killing that app. I have to use Adobe software at work, but I will never again install their apps on my home computer. 
I also cannot ever get used to having more than one arrow tool. It seems so dumb. The one arrow selection tool was able to do everything that multiple arrow selection tools do in all these other apps.
I also share in the frustration of the UI elements, especially the new poorly drawn icons compared to V1. The UI was fine in V1. What we needed were things like a blend tool. Hopefully, those other things that have already been requested before will be added in a future free update and not 5 years from now.

Sigh. I thought it would be obvious that this wasn’t a new ‘feature request’. It was a one-off review off the first major upgrade to Affinity‘s ‘pro’ apps, pulling together a bunch of missing features that I happen to think are most important. 
Yes, these features have been requested more than once already, over many years. (I’ve linked to some of those discussions). That’s kind of the point—they were things we might have expected to be in V2, and their omission is a signal to me that Affinity’s software designers don’t rate the importance of these things highly.
If this isn’t the place for an overall review and discussion of V2 and its most glaring missing features, how about being a little constructive and telling me where the right place is? I did look at all the options, and the ‘Feedback for the Affinity V2 suite of products’ certainly seemed like the best fit.

Exciting times. With precious little in the way of recent updates, some users wondered if Affinity was dead—but no, we were promptly told that they were just focused on the next major version. And four months later, here it is!
A common expression amongst users has been 'hopefully in version 2', so here's my list of hoped for changes. I'm about to fire up my new V2 apps for the first time and see if all the hopeful waiting has been rewarded. I've divided my list into two main categories: 'UI frustrations' and 'Missing or broken features'.
 
UI frustrations
Window management (Separated Mode)
Ever since MultiFinder appeared on the Mac in 1987, we've been able to run multiple apps and see their document windows side by side. Over the years came other improvements like drag and drop between apps and documents. You lose some of those benefits when an app takes up the whole screen with a solid background. For this reason, many of us preferred a separated workspace (turning off Application Frame in Adobe apps), but after switching to Affinity, quickly discovered that Affinity's Separated Mode was pretty broken, with document windows and Studio panels seemingly having no knowledge of each other's existence.
After much criticism, Affinity finally responded in June 2020 with a help article titled 'Increase your efficiency with Affinity’s Separated Mode'. There was no admission of any issues though, and I parodied the unhelpful article in this forum comment.
Changes in V2
Affinity seems to have finally acknowledged the issues with Separated Mode. Their solution? Remove it altogether! The new 'Float View to Window' command kind of gives us the worst of both worlds… separate windows that still aren't aware of your Studio panels, and a big old solid-grey app window obscuring every other background app. It looks like Affinity might have just put this one in the too hard basket.
Panel management
Resizing Studio panels in V1 is somewhere between painful and impossible. To be fair, this was never a perfect experience with Adobe either, but Affinity takes the pain to a new level. Can't see most of your Paragraph panel? Hover your cursor very carefully over that one-pixel hairline between panels… Nope, there's the 'no entry' cursor telling you the panel can't be resized (for some unknown reason). Double-click to minimise a panel or two to make more space… only to find that it added several inches of completely empty space to a different panel instead. Try to resize that one. Nope, there's the 'no entry' cursor again. Start double-clicking ALL the panels until you can finally see the one you want. Utter frustration.
Changes in V2
After playing around with panels for just a few minutes, the results are mixed. Firstly, I can resize panels (without seeing the 'no entry' icon all the time)—great! Secondly, the hover-zone seems to have expanded from one pixel to around two—I'll take it! Beyond that, things are still quite unpredictable. For example, I currently have a massive Swatches panel full of mostly empty space, and a tiny Text Styles panel below it which is showing me only two lines. I can resize the Text Styles panel to my liking, but if I then minimise and reopen it, it's right back to the way it was—tiny and useless. Whatever algorithm is determining these panel sizes is clearly not fit for purpose.
On a positive note, on the Mac the Studio panels are now listed under the Window menu—exactly where they should have been all along!
Oh one other thing… I lost the Swatches panel in Designer. As in, it just totally vanished. 😳 I can hide it and unhide it again from the menu, but it does not reappear. Restarting the app doesn't bring it back either. This could be a bit of a problem!! (Edit: Found!)
Working with guides
Creating a simple guide the normal way, by dragging out from the ruler, works fine. Unfortunately though, Affinity apps lack the power and flexibility of other drawing apps like Illustrator, which let you select and manipulate guides like normal objects—positioning them numerically for example, or hitting delete to remove then. Illustrator even lets you convert normal vector objects into guides.
With Affinity apps, you have to drag a guide off the edge of a page to remove it. The issues with this approach are (1) you have to be zoomed out so that you can see the edge of the page, and (2) it's inconsistent with the behaviour of other objects, which can be safely dragged and positioned beyond the edge of the page. This creates confusion for users as discussed on threads like this one.
Instead, Affinity gives us the Guides Manager. It's a useful tool, but it would be less necessary if guides were more flexible in the first place.
Changes in V2
There appears to be no changes to the way guides work in V2.
Working with colour swatches
In my opinion, Affinity seriously dropped the ball in V1 with the way colour swatches are handled. Here are some of the features that are missing or broken:
There's no obvious place to put your custom colours. You have to find the 'Add Document Palette' command first, which then creates something called 'Unnamed'. Other actions may trigger the app to add a second palette named 'Document'. Once a swatch is created, you can't convert it to or from a global or spot colour. You can't select more than one swatch at a time. You can't drag and drop colour swatches between palettes or between different parts of the UI. There's no obvious way to add a Pantone swatch to an existing document palette. (You need to apply the colour to an object on the canvas, select the object, switch back to your document palette and click on one of the two 'Add…' buttons.) New global colours are given generic names (Global Colour 1, etc). Pantone colour names are not preserved when added as global colours (the most common requirement!) and need to be typed in manually. Global colours are not transferred between documents when copying and pasting objects. (You need to explicitly export a palette from the first document and then import it into the second document.) Global spot colours are not added to a Publisher document palette when placing a Designer file (unlike InDesign and Illustrator). There's no search field in the 'Add Global Color' panel or edit colour pop-up, making it almost impossible to select the one you want from a large list of swatches. (They aren't displayed as a list, even if you set the panel appearance to 'Show as List'.) There's no command to find and delete unused swatches from a document palette. There's no option to merge two global colours. When deleting a used swatch, you're not asked what to replace it with. (If you delete a global colour, all instances just get replaced with a non-global version.) Yes, colour swatch management in Affinity V1 is bad—really bad. In one forum comment I wrote, 'That's one thing Adobe got right, and something the Affinity devs would have done well to replicate, rather than trying to get clever and do their own thing. Gosh I hope version 2 starts to take this seriously.' Well let's check out V2 and see…
Changes in V2
(1) The 'Add Document Palette' command now displays a pop-up which asks, 'Please enter a name for the new palette.' It still defaults to 'Unnamed', but it's a small improvement over the previous behaviour.
(9) Both the 'Add Global Color' panel and the edit colour pop-up now feature a search field, making it much easier to select from a large list of swatches. (They also now respect the 'Show as List' setting.)
Aside from those two improvements, very little seems to have changed with colour swatches across the Affinity suite. That's a big disappointment, and seems to communicates that the Affinity team don't share the view of many users, that this really needed an overhaul.
Undo/Redo
In Affinity apps, the action of selecting or deselecting an object gets added to the undo/redo stack. This is counterintuitive, goes against years of established practice, and (if the user is not familiar with it) can lead to data loss. Only an action that alters the artwork in some way should be added to the undo/redo stack, as discussed here.
Changes in V2
Nothing has changed.
 
Missing or broken features
1-bit black and white artwork (line art)
Graphics applications have, since the beginning of time, supported true 1-bit black and white artwork, so many professional users were understandably shocked to discover that Affinity V1 apps offered no support at all for 1-bit files. The only workaround is to work with grayscale and manually compress your lightness levels. This is anything but reliable, as compression algorithms at export time will not recognise the difference between a faux B&W image and a grayscale one, downsampling line art to an unacceptably low resolution and adding unwanted antialiasing.
Changes in V2
Incredibly, there's still no support for 1-bit black and white artwork.
Turning off antialiasing
The ability to turn off antialiasing of exported graphics is an essential feature for any professional graphics application. Affinity V1 apps lacked this feature entirely in the beginning, but in response to a forum post in 2015, one of Affinity's developers added highly-customisable, per-object control of antialiasing. Then, in 2020, it got better, with a simple on or off option, which you can apply to multiple objects at once.
This is a huge improvement already, but some of us would still like to see a simple on/off checkbox at export for outputting something like a raster print versions of a logo. As I explained in the same discussion: 'it's about tailoring the artwork to different output media. That should be an export function, not something I have to hard-code into the design file.'
Changes in V2
Turning off antialiasing cannot be done globally at export—it must still be hard-coded into each object of the file.
Reliably exporting for print
Affinity Publisher's default PDF export settings for print-ready artwork ('PDF (press-ready)') turns black (K:100) to a CMYK mix (e.g. C:71, M:66, Y:66, K:76), which would be a disaster if not detected before your job goes to print (something which is difficult when there are no pre-press tools provided). There are other issues too, like line art being downsampled and antialiased (related to the previous two issues).
Changes in V2
This has not been fixed. The 'PDF (press-ready)' export preset still has an all-or nothing 'Embed profiles' option ticked by default, and still causes black artwork (like text) to get converted to a CMYK mix.
Previewing colour separations
Affinity has no alternative to Acrobat Pro. For print professionals, this means no way of previewing and checking colour separations before going to print. When combined with the issues mentioned above, the chances of poor quality artwork and printing are high.
Changes in V2
There are no new apps or built-in tools for checking colour separations.
 
Summary
V2 may have brought some cool new features, but it has only brought modest improvements to a few of the features which matter to me the most, while other issues have been overlooked completely. Having waited so many years for the first major update, I have to say, I'm pretty disappointed.
I'll still purchase all the apps, and I'll still recommend them to family and friends. They do a lot of great things, and you certainly can't beat the price.
Of course, this is not an exhaustive list of the issues I have with the Affinity apps—just a few that frustrate me the most. If I've left out some of your biggest issues, feel free to add them below with a note on whether V2 fixed them for you.

The ability to work directly with Apple Motion from the Affinity Suite would certainly add to the appeal of Affinity.
Also, how about the ability to work with video files? Pixelmator Pro now has this ability. 
Please move Affinity into the video realm!
 

You can use some other application like Preview to save the PDF to pixel format.

...and do you need raw developer or just a JPEG image organiser...
For light use many people like Apples Photos. It should work OK with AP.
More demanding users might use Adobe Bridge (free download). It has some caveats with Affinity files (no previews show). Some people like XnViewMP or NeoFinder. I like too ApolloOne though it is more a viewer DAM features being somewhat weak and it ignores Affinity files.
If raw developing and cataloguing is needed people tend to use Lightroom (despite it being rental), Capture One, DXO Photolab, or slightly cheaper alternatives like Exposure X6, Luminar or ON1PhotoRAW, or some free alternative.

Many of us keep using Mojave as long as possible to keep CS6 alive.