ajay.ganapathy

Here's a trick I use to get around lack of protect alpha. I make an alpha mask super fast, by holding the command key and double-clicking on the layer thumbnail where I want to alpha protect. That gives me a selection of that layer. Then, I make a new pixel layer, fill the selection with a color, and then nest the layer as a mask. See the attached video (1 minute long). I hope this helps! make_alpha_mask_fast.mp4

Serif is putting more detailed text layout options, constraints and symbols into designer. I don't know if they are still planning on making a publisher beta. It seems like they are trying to put publishing features into designer.

It would also be great to get multiple fills + strokes, like sketch has. It's so useful to be able to layer and blend fills on shapes with sketch. AD technically lets you do multiple fills, but only if you make the outer shape a mask. There's no way to do multiple strokes, shadows, etc.

I'd say take it a giant leap further - straight up make AD available on iOS. It IS already tested and developed on iOS.

That's an interesting request, but affinity designer isn't an animation tool. It would be neat to see serif make an 'affinity animator' ... however, part of the appeal of affinity designer is that it doesn't have the feature bloat characteristic of adobe apps. Additionally, unlike the teams that make adobe apps, the affinity designer team is focused on getting just a few features right, rather than piling on new features without fixing the bugs in old ones.

The software should not be combined. Affinity already makes a file format that can not only be shared but embedded and simultaneously updated in both softwares.

I think the real problem comes down to the fact that it's difficult to round-trip files between apps. As a front-end developer I firmly adhere to the unix philosophy of software - that individual pieces of software should do one thing well, rather than many things poorly, and that software should be composable. It's more important that affinity designer can import and export files in industry-standard formats so that users can switch to their preferred apps for specific tasks like painting. The affinity suite does a great job of implementing the unix philosophy - you can seamlessly open an affinity photo document in affinity designer, and add all sorts of pixel and vector brush effects. Software should only have features that improve the workflow for a majority of use cases. That being said, I think rotate canvas would be a great addition to affinity designer because it improves three key use cases: 1) digital painting 2) transforming objects (i.e. instead of transforming along the x and y axis, you can rotate the canvas, and then transform by an angle) 3) snapping objects (i.e. instead of snapping to the nearest neighbors on the x and y axis, you can snap along a diagonal axis) also, If this helps, you can customize keyboard shortcuts from the OS X keyboard preference pane. As for the hud, perhaps that can be bundled in with force touch as part of the brush tool. That way, it only pops up when it's relevant.

I totally agree with being able to snap bezier handles to nodes, objects, and other 'snappables' for example, here's an image I'm working with and having quite a bit of difficulty trying to get the left and right handles to mirror each other is almost impossible. I could duplicate the shape, delete the parts of the curve I don't need, and then assemble the curves anew using the join curves tool, but I'd have to do that process over again if I wanted to modify even one handle. I'm really hopeful for affinity designer's snapping tools. It's about time a vector editor got the same granularity of snapping control as a 3d polygonal modeling tool.

Snapping to text baseline is a must ... especially for Affinity's upcoming desktop publishing solution. I hope the code for that can be used in designer as well

Regarding suggestion #7 - affinity is hiring an iOS engineer to port the affinity suite of products to iPad. No need for mirror if iPad has a full featured editor. However, if you want to mirror stuff today why not try xScope4 from icon factory?

Although the software ships with sane defaults (i.e. 'show snapping candidates' is disabled), it's too easy for a user to toggle it on without understanding what it does. And when the user does click the check box, they might not notice the magenta outlines show up in whatever document they've got behind them due to change blindness. An improved UX for this feature might be to fade the magenta outlines in and out when snapping. Because snapping-related information is only relevant when an shape or node is being transformed, it makes sense to fade the magenta lines in when a 'snappable' object handles a mousedown event. Snapping guides are the visual equivalent of autocomplete for code. Just as an autocomplete tooltip doesn't persist in an IDE window when a developer isn't typing mid-word, the guides don't have to persist when the user is not snapping shapes or nodes. The snapping confirmation rulers for bounding boxes already have a pleasing ~100ms fade in/out. (by the way, AMAZING UI animation. I absolutely LOVE the way the guide fades in radially from the point of snap. It's that attention to detail that make front-end devs like me very happy). This transition could be used on snapping candidate outlines to keep the canvas free of clutter, while still conveying relevant information at the time when it's most needed.

The magenta lines appear if you have 'show snapping candidates' enabled. Even though the software comes with sane defaults (i.e. 'show snapping candidates' is disabled), it's so easy for a user to toggle this on without really understanding what it means. I totally agree that the UX on this feature could be a lot better. Since snapping is only relevant when moving objects or nodes, the guides should fade in/out with a 100ms transition. This animation already occurs when snapping to bounding boxes, and it works great for keeping the interface simple. You can keep the toggle, but use animation to make it show up only when it's relevant.