Caius Nocturne

Something else to add - I wonder what the Competition and Markets Authority would have to say about one creative software company buying out another?

This is not something that you can guarantee us. The only people who can guarantee whether or not this continues to be a mission-led project are the people who own it. And in this case it is Canva and its investors. The investors of Canva (and soon the public investors as it eventually tries to IPO) want what any investor wants - money number go up. This will happen regardless of what any other stakeholder around this product (including us) would like. This is a JPEG for PR, not a legal agreement. At best, this will be the case for a few years and this will absolutely change as soon as it becomes inconvenient for the people who are actually in control - the ones who own Canva. Big tech companies never turn the screws immediately. I would also like to remind everybody in this forum that about a year and a half ago, Serif made a tweet saying that they would never sell. And yet the owners sold. I would also like to inform people that subscriptions are just one way that tech companies can make a product worse. Affinity could remain a simple paid product and the investors will still try to bleed it dry, annoy and shake more change out of you another way. Or they could make too many stupid decisions trying to get more money out of it and destroy it in the process. One way or another, there is no way that this is a decision for the better for this product, because as in every business with shareholders, the money number has to go up.

In addition to my previous post, I would like to congratulate the management and owners of Serif for making a fool out of me for vocally promoting this product to others all these years and taking the time to submit bug reports to try to make this better. I guess I was only lining your pockets by doing that, huh?

Canva is a VC-funded company, so they're not going to be running Affinity with the intention of making a product people like at a reasonable price, because I guess that's just something losers do nowadays. In other words - welcome to the Enshittification spiral. It may take a few years, but it will get there like literally every other VC-backed product. I'm sure Serif's owners got a juicy exit though. I have been a user of Affinity Designer for almost 10 years, and it helped me make so much that would have been really hard with FOSS and the business stability that Serif had made it wonderful and reliable because I knew that it wasn't going to have multi-tier funhouse subscriptions dropped on me or other price-gauging elements. That's gone now, so I will be treating this product and this business accordingly, with a 50 foot pole, until a stable business makes an alternative.

Ah, I missed that one, thanks for letting me know ^^'

Initial stuff Using Affinity Designer. Using the latest version as of time of writing (2.3.0 from Affinity Store). Can be reproduced. Pre-existing documents seem to be unaffected. Software details Windows 11 Home (22H2 - 22621.2861) OpenCL HW acceleration off Issue is unaffected by whether this is on or off. Some hardware details Ryzen 3600, Radeon RX 570 8GB, 16GB Memory. My computer has 2 Monitors in action during this test. I also have a Huion Kamvas 16 2021 connected (with screen disabled) I think this bug emerged after I updated to Affinity Designer 2.3. How to reproduce The attached video demonstrates these steps: Make a new document where the preference is to embed images. Add an SVG to the file. This SVG will be described as 'Embedded' in the toolbar. Save the file. Close Affinity Designer. Reopen Affinity Designer with the file. The SVG will now be described as 'Linked' and will behave as such. If the source SVG file was deleted between sessions, the SVG is now gone from the document. Something I also show in the video is how even if you go to Resource Manager and tell Affinity Designer to embed the SVG explicitly, it will still behave as linked the next time the document is opened. And the next time it is opened is an important distinction here in the way this bug works - when I keep the session of the file going after adding the SVG, the SVG will behave as embedded, even when I delete the original file. It's only in the next session of the file that it will behave as linked, and the SVG in the file will be gone. Not that it should matter, but the SVG I used in this example and have attached (1f635_etc_dizzy_face.svg) was itself made and exported from Affinity Designer 2.3. 1f635_etc_dizzy_face.svg test1.mp4 A larger test with more files In the attached screenshots, I have performed another experiment with more than a hundred SVG images produced by differing earlier versions of Affinity Designer and found similar results.

@Dan C Thanks! I've tried making sure the zoomed in one is the last updated view but its still not working 100% - the Node Tool isn't snapping to grids properly. Once I close the zoomed out view, it starts working fine.

Initial stuff Using Affinity Designer. Using the latest version as of time of writing (2.1.1 from Affinity Store). Can be reproduced. Happens for both new and existing documents. Software details Windows 11 Home (22H2 - 22621.1992) OpenCL HW acceleration on Issue is unaffected by whether this is on or off. Some hardware details My computer has 3 Monitors, one of which is a screen tablet (Huion Kamvas 16 2021). All of them are 1920 x 1080 resolution, and all are set to a system UI scale of 100%. The same issue occurs whether or not the Huion Kamvas tablet is connected. The issue doesn't require multiple monitors to reproduce. The same issue occurs whether selecting geometry with the tablet's stylus or a relatively standard trackball. Ryzen 3600, Radeon RX 570 8GB, 16GB Memory. How to reproduce: Make an Artboard and put some vector geometry in it. Make a new view for a file (Menu bar > View > New View) Break out the tab for the new view (<Untitled>:1) out from the main window. It doesn't have to be in a new display. Zoom out <Untitled>:1. Go back to <Untitled> and try to reliably select geometry on it, with either the Node Tool or Move Tool. It seems to happen on any view as long as one view is zoomed out. I also tried reversing the views - making the zoomed out one the original view and the 'new view' (<file>:1) the editing view, and the same results happen. I also tried selecting on the non-editing window while the main editing window is zoomed out and had the same results. So it seems like no matter what, if one of the separate views is zoomed out, the selection tolerances of all views are behaving as if it's zoomed out. And the selection tolerances progressively get worse the more zoomed out the zoomed out view is. The zoomed out view needs to be in a separate window If the zoomed out view is in the main editing window in another tab, then this behaviour doesn't seem to happen, it happens only when the views are in separate windows. This separate window can be minimised, on the same display, or in a different display. ---- I recently got a screen tablet so as an icon designer, I wanted to try to do multi-view editing where one screen shows a zoomed out view for pixel previews and my screen tablet has the zoomed in view for detailed editing, but this turned out not to be possible because of this bug. This is also a problem in Affinity Designer 1, which I could also reproduce in the exact same way. I know you're not accepting bug reports on V1, but i thought it would possibly be helpful information since it seems to be a holdover issue. I've decided to attach two videos - one of me recreating this from scratch in a desktop recording of two monitors above and below each other. The recording software wasn't capturing cursors for some reason so I decided to also record a video of myself recreating the selection issue on my screen tablet, with the two windows side by side. It should be relatively obvious in this one how I am not able to select the object next to the other one when one of the views is zoomed out. yBwayI8yrj.mp4 IMG_4725.MOV

Yeah, I'm also experiencing much degraded brush performance in Affinity Designer V2 versus V1 : Windows 11 (10.0.22621) Ryzen 3600, Radeon RX 580 8GB, 16GB RAM, running on PCIe 3 NVMe drive. I found that turning OpenCL Acceleration off improved brush performance in V2, however: I have not needed to turn it off in Affinity Designer V1 to improve bad performance. The performance still isn't as good as in Affinity Designer V1 with OpenCL on. I tried this technique below and found that it didn't make any difference for me:

Latest version of Affinity Designer 2 (2.0.0 from Affinity store, no updates available when checked) I have not had any difficulty reproducing it Happens for both new and existing documents Example document attached Other details: Windows 11 (10.0.22621) OpenCL HW acceleration on Issue is unaffected by whether this is on or off I use a drawing tablet, but the behaviour is the same whether I'm using a trackball or a mouse. How to reproduce: Make a curve with 4 points (so, 2 in the middle and 2 at the end) Attempt to use the corner tool to the max on both points in the middle - one will stop shorter than it should go (before the center of the corner tool reaches the tangent of the end point). As an icon designer who uses this specific case a lot, it has made using Designer 2 impossible for me right now. This unusual behaviour also breaks the geometry on existing Affinity Designer 1 files where the corner tool has been used - when these curves exist, one corner will stop short where it didn't before. Here's video capture of the same geometry being worked on from Designer 1 and 2 to further illustrate the difference: Designer 2: dhwoyS63X9.mp4 Designer 1: 7wGohi6EVp.mp4 corner example file.afdesign

I've also noticed that this behaviour applies to scaling pixel layers too. When you scale a pixel layer, drawing more inside that layer maintains the same pixel density as it was at it's original size unless you rasterise it, so I'm beginning to think it's not a bug and that both of these are part of how Affinity works to preserve pixel information and avoid unnecessary resampling. If that's the case, I think that's good but it's just very unusual behaviour when it comes to digital drawing and painting (and it's not explained at all in the app), and maybe there should be a something in the UI to make this kind of behaviour explicit?

I've had similar accuracy issues with the Divide operation that have made it unusable for me with both the Windows and Mac versions of Affinity Designer for at least several years now. I think this is a problem that should be addressed if possible because I do a lot of iconography work that involves a lot of these operations, and I have to work in small sizes in order to preview and export my work correctly. My workaround was to duplicate objects and perform individual Subtract and Intersect operations on pairs. For some reason, Subtract and Intersect have not given me trouble at small sizes, it's not ideal because it can get quite time consuming and convoluted, but that works.

Computer details: Affinity Designer Version: 1.10.4.1198 OS version: Windows 11 Home (21H2 - 22000.376) OpenCL compute acceleration is on To the best of my knowledge, my computer is not running any of the software on the list of things that can interfere with AD. How to reproduce: Make a document with an Artboard. Put a Pixel Layer in that Artboard. Draw in that layer with the Brush tool. Expand the enclosing Artboard without expanding its contents. Draw again in that layer in the new space that expanding the artboard has created. When I do this, the brush stroke will be clipped as if the Artboard was at it's previous size. The only workaround I've found is to make a new Pixel Layer and merge it with the original layer, but as you can imagine, this is far from ideal. I've only been using the raster feature of Affinity Designer for the past year and I have not noticed it be any different version to version or with any changes to my computer's software (my hardware did not change throughout this time). unknown_2021.12.20-12.19_1.mp4