amyas

How would the software (or the user) decide which was the inside or the outside of an open path?
For example, take a single straight vertical line drawn from bottom to top; is the inside to the right or the left of the line?

@bobdobbs, 
If the effect applied on my screenshot suits you, you can try the "Afans Filters" assets that @Belot kindly shared in the resources, the whole thing is still vector-based.
Here is the link to these assets:
https://forum.affinity.serif.com/index.php?/topic/82517-the-coolest-filters-for-ad/#comment-434378
My example is made with "Diffuse" from the "Noise" category, with the intensity at 0.3px. 
I hope this will help you.

First beta improves this:

This set of icons in the stroke panel is quite hard to identify, compares to version 1.0. I know it will break UI consistency if you kept the v1.0 icons here, but these are a bit confusing.

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.

I am not arguing your request to turn off the splash screen but I think you are wrong in thinking turning it off will speed up the start of the application. The splash screen is displayed while several things are performed that are neccessary to run the program. This will take the same amount of time, wether the splash screen is visible or not.
Cheers 
d.

Hi macalienx,
Go to Affinity Designer ▸ Preferences..., Tools section and uncheck Enable Canvas Rotation with Trackpad.

Buy lottery tickets.  You have a better chance of winning the lottery than Serif/Affinity fixing the app. 

Hi @Bikr,
Welcome to Affinity Forums
Thanks for your feedback. We are investigating these issues. Meanwhile, duplicate the Affinity Photo.app file, delete or the original app file to something else, then rename the duplicated app file (remove "copy" from its name) and launch the app. This seems to fix the slow start/bouncing until we find out what's causing the issue.

Hi Richard,
Welcome to Affinity Forums :) 
No. Can you please press and hold ⌃(ctrl) while launching Affinity Photo then select Clear from the dialog that will appear?
This will reset the app. Does it still takes that time to launch after the reset?

We have made fixes/improvements to this area (Changing any attribute on text is slow) of the program in the latest customer beta. If you would like to try these changes the beta software is available in the forum posts listed below.
The latest beta builds are downloadable from links at the top of each of these beta forum posts.
Affinity Photo 1.8.2.174 for Mac Affinity Designer 1.8.2.4 for Mac Affinity Publisher 1.8.2.619 for Mac These betas install parallel, next to the release version (they do not overwrite your release) and so the fixes can be tried in the beta without affecting your normal workflow in the release version.
Once these programs have been through a full beta process the change will be released in a future free 1.8.2 update/patch to all customers.

The 1.8.1 Affinity mac builds cannot filter by typing in any font selection UI reliably (often crashes), sorry. The 1.8.2 release patch builds fix this and will be available shortly, but for the meantime please scroll only to select fonts.

Hi, this is currently a bug and will be fixed in the next update

Hi amyas,

Thanks for letting us know, this is a known issue that is with development to be fixed. I will get your comments passed on.

@Sean P @MattP Thanks for noticing! I'm downloading the beta.

Hi @amyas - if you take a look at the Beta mentioned above, you can see that it is recommended to be used instead of the official release version as it contains nothing that would cause an incompatibility with files and just includes improved functionality and bug fixes. This version will very shortly be released at 1.8.2 so it should not pose any issues

As markw has mentioned this issue has now been fixed in the 1.8.2 beta:
 

There are improvements to Boolean operations in the latest beta version of Designer.
 

Hi Vladimir Krstic and amyas,

This has now been fixed on Mac and is available in the beta below. It was being caused by the issues with boolean operations.
 
 

Hi StraightFromSpace,

This is a known issue that affects users without Retina screens. I'll get it bumped with development.

Go to app Preferences (Cmd + ,) -> Performance -> Set "Undo Limit' to anything that is not 0 (I use 1024).

Hope Publisher could add the support for Chinese soon. This is the only thing that could stop me from using Publisher completely, since the the layout would be wrongful with Chinese letters filled in.
Adding these could help a lot!
Avoid putting punctuation marks in the beginning of a sentence. (Needed the most.) Widow and orphan control. Ability to control the padding between East Asian language and other language when they are mixed in a paragraph.

Hope Publisher could add the support for Chinese soon. This is the only thing that could stop me from using Publisher completely, since the the layout would be wrongful with Chinese letters filled in.
Adding these could help a lot!
Avoid putting punctuation marks in the beginning of a sentence. (Needed the most.) Widow and orphan control. Ability to control the padding between East Asian language and other language when they are mixed in a paragraph.

In the Decorations section, set the Relative to field to Column instead of Text.

And span columns isn't just useful for headings. They can also be used for pull-quotes and more.