CodeExplode

Regarding #1 for blended objects, you might be talking about compound paths, where if you hold Alt (on Windows) and click 1 of the 5 Boolean operation buttons in the top right, it creates a dynamic object made up of sub-objects which can still be individually edited. I only found out about it because of a youtube video I happened to click on, but it's very useful for say creating speech bubbles where you might want an oval and a curved speech pointer object, combining them together into one shape for filling & outlining but still being able to move the pieces around. The downside is that you can't seem to put other objects inside compound objects to be masked by and scaled with them like you can with normal shapes, though perhaps grouping would at least allow them to be transformed together more easily.

I might just need to update my process for Affinity Designer, but I frequently find myself hitting escape to say exit text editing and then pressing escape again intending to select a text object to copy and paste and then move, only to find that I still have the text tool selected and can only re-enter text editing. Would it be possible to change it so that pressing escape once exits text editing, and then pressing it again (perhaps with any tool active with no objects selected) then reverts to the move tool, so that it's quick and easy to escape any active tool and move things around? Truth be told I could try to learn to press V, but haven't been able to get my head around the A and V tools having different behaviours which are combined in other softwares yet, and escape feels very natural to me to get back to a 'default' tool either way.

Image tracer in Illustrator is a major part of my workflow, though the main reason I use it is to actually smooth raster lines and give the impression of line weight to them due to how Illustrator tapers the traced lines. Even if it's not an artistically chosen line weight like an artist would do with pen pressure, it's still a nice effect rather than lines of all the same width with no tapering, and the actual vector output doesn't matter so much to me. While the usual tracing features (which also exist elsewhere) aren't so useful to me, I'd love to see a smooth & tapering effects pass which Illustrator's tracing somehow manages, which no other tracing implementation does as far as I know. I don't have many good ideas for how it would be implemented though, perhaps first removing speckles of certain sizes, breaking all continuous blobs of colour into vector objects, and then doing a tapering effect on any end segments which follow a long stretch of roughly equal width shape outlines running in near-parallel.

Affinity Designer is fantastic value for money, but there's just a few things which I'd love to see to make the workflow a bit easier. I've made an art tool in the past which had a rotation & scale tool which worked like AI, and IMO it makes the workflow a whole lot snappier. On keypress for say R or S (I'm unsure if these are bound to anything yet) 1. The currently selected tool is switched to Rotation or Scale (and probably changes the cursor to indicate it) 2. The transformation centre is set to the average location of all selected items, and is drawn as a small indicator (as is done now in some more manual modes) On Cursor Down with the Rotation or Scale tool active 1. The original translations/rotations/scales of the selected objects are cached (rather than incremental rotations & scales, items will be reverted and updated on each cursor move) 2. The cursor location is recorded as cursorStart (how far the cursor has moved from this location defines the effect) 3. A variable hasUnsavedTransformation is set to false (until a minimum threshold has been passed, the cursor will behave differently on mouse up) On Cursor Move while cursor is down and rotation/scale tool is active 1. Call the rotation / scale method below with the cursor position On Mouse Up 1. If hasUnsavedTransformation is false, the transformation centre is moved to the cursor location (allowing fast positioning of rotation and scale centres) 2. If hasUnsavedTransformation is true, call the rotation / scale method below, and now consider it applied (i.e. creating an undo/redo state) On keypress Escape 1. Restore all selected items to their cached original locations/rotations/scales 2. Release the rotation/scale tool Scale Method: scaleX = (cursor.x - transformCentre.x) / (cursorStart.x - transformCentre.x) scaleY = (cursor.y - transformCentre.y) / (cursorStart.y - transformCentre.y) threshold = 0.02 if (hasUnsavedTransformation || Math.abs(1-scaleX) > threshold || Math.abs(1-scaleY) > threshold): Restore all selected items to their cached original locations/rotations/scales For each selected item location.x = (location.x - transformCentre.x) * scaleX + transformCentre.x location.y = (location.y - transformCentre.y) * scaleY + transformCentre.y Set hasUnsavedTransformation to true Rotation Method: xDiff = cursor.x - transformCentre.x yDiff = cursor.y - transformCentre.y rotationStart = Math.atan2(cursorStart.y - transformCentre.y, cursorStart.x - transformCentre.x) (atan2 differs a bit between languages, this is the javascript implementation) rotation = Math.atan2(yDiff, xDiff) - rotationStart threshold = 2 * (Math.PI/180) (i.e. 2 degrees in radians) if (hasUnsavedTransformation || Math.abs(rotation) > threshold): Restore all selected items to their cached original locations/rotations/scales s = Math.sin(rotation) c = Math.cos(rotation) For each selected item relativeX = location.x - transformCentre.x relativeY = location.y - transformCentre.y location.x = relativeX * c - relativeY * s + transformCentre.x location.y = relativeX * s + relativeY * c + transformCentre.y Set hasUnsavedTransformation to true