[Performance: are CPUs of AMD slower compared to Intel in Affinity?]

6 hours ago, cgidesign said:

Strange. I hope others find this thread and can test as well.

The mainboard of my workstation is faulty and I now need to decide if I try to find a new trx40 board to keep my old AMD Threadripper alive or switch to a new system with Intel.

I assume you checked the board's warranty status.

Other considerations on switching from AMD to Intel (and sometimes just switching mainboards), and vice versa:

• It requires an OS reinstall, and getting it back "just so" is always a bigger pain than you think it will be.
• If Windows, you'll have to deal with activation. Make sure you have your bitlocker keys/passwords backed up.
• Many websites, such as banks and health insurance companies, authorize access to your account to a specific "machine". This can be an unbelievable hassle.
• It will necessitate dealing with TPM, which holds encryption keys and protects your machine from every conceivable threat. Or it does nothing. Nobody knows...
• You'll forget to save all your presets from Photo, Photoshop, etc... Goodbye custom palettes and brushes!
• Windows use a Möbius file hierarchy in c:\users, and you will go bugf*** trying to copy the whole thing, especially if you have DropBox.
• When doing time-consuming, mass Windows file operations, it will proceed normally until the moment you leave the system, whereupon it will stall with: "thumbs.db is system file...", causing you to scream obscenities when you return. This cycle repeats indefinitely.
• You'll be stuck with a new BIOS setup written by the criminally insane.

[Performance: are CPUs of AMD slower compared to Intel in Affinity?]

15 hours ago, TheFlow said:

My board only supports PCI-E 3, not 4. So I doubt a newer SSD will bring much of a performance boost.
I have found multiple threads in different sources (twitter, gaming forums, here etc) where the 1700X is shitty and the newer AMD 5000 series CPUs just work fine.

It takes about 35-40 seconds every time. Nothing in the task manager spikes besides the CPU, but only a bit, nothing comes close to 100%. AD and AP always hang for at least 10-15 seconds until anything responds and on my new work machine with Intel CPU exactly this part is not present. It loads, then loads 2-3 seconds when the initial Logo of the App goes away and bam, I can start working immediately.

SSD has been checked with Magician and also CrystalDiskInfo.

Samsung Pro -> I have had many SSDs failing on me over the years, but I had nothing but great experiences with Samsung Pros while Crucial, Kingston and Seagate died on me. Never had a fully broken Samsung SSD. So that is my "why". I know it is always a shot in the dark.

Ryzen 5600X, 1TB Samsung 980 Pro nvme (my 256 always needs to be freed up) and 16 GB more RAM on the way, (needed the Ram anyway and figured I upgrade). If all goes to the trenches I can still build a decent Intel System with the parts and sell or send the Ryzen back. I'll let you know...

Dude, the Ryzen 1700X isn't a shitty processor, it's... um... artisanal.😕 But seriously, I've got your same CPU and MB, an aging GPU and not terribly fast RAM, with nothing overclocked. Affinity Photo V2 load time is less 5 seconds, including the time it takes me to fumble through the Trial popup. And since one, single -- not-well-debugged -- program is an outlier, it makes no rational sense to blame the 1700X.

I'm not saying that it's as fast as new processors, far from it -- and I don't mean to be a dick, but you seem more interested in justifying an upgrade than identifying the actual issue. And most people who build systems, on Twitter and everywhere else, don't know WTF they're doing. OK, well, I do mean to be a dick to them.🤬

[Extremely disappointed that this installs as an "App" and not regular software program]

While we're waiting, lets' try a little Occam's Razor, shall we: Which takes longer for a software company that's been in business since 1987: "Engineering" industry standard installers for software that is not only their primary source of revenue, but already works when you unzip it; or weaseling out of an agreement with Microsoft?

[Why Are V2 Apps Constantly Connecting to the Internet?]

4 hours ago, rvst said:

I use Comodo firewall in custom ruleset mode. This means that literally every single connection attempt from any software on my system (even the OS itself) pops up an authorize dialog from the firewall unless I authorize the application permanently (obviously, this isn't something most users would do, since a wrong choice could block a system application - I use it precisely because certain apps phone home gratuitously and I tend to block network communication for those apps if I think the vendor is collecting too much telemetry).

So I just turn off that permanent authorization and then every time Affinity attempts to make an outgoing connection, it pops up the authorize dialog box. 

It's horrifying how much stuff connects to the internet, isn't it?  Like, everything all the time.

As for V2, it could be that I've accessed the stock images in V1, and while my Stock Images tab was visible, it wasn't active. I don't think I've used it in V2 at all.

Although I suspect it's something to do with being a trial, it's curious it stopped when this thread became active. There's only two logical conclusions:

1. They quickly shut down the data collection when their conspiracy was uncovered.
2. Elon Musk is a lizard person.

[Performance: are CPUs of AMD slower compared to Intel in Affinity?]

21 hours ago, rvst said:

Your system could nonetheless benefit from a current gen PCIe 4.0 nvme SSD (which I imagine your X470 board supports).

They are several times faster than your SSD. My Samsung 980 Pro gets 7,000MB/s of sequential read speed and around 5,000MB/s sequential write (writes slows down a bit after the turbo write cache has been filled, but even the slowest is still several times faster than 770MB/s).

Considering that the files we work with in Affinity are pretty large, such a speed up in read and write speed would be quite noticeable and contribute to a much snappier feeling system.

Maybe two years ago there was an issue with a 1TB Samsung 980 <something> nvme. It acted like it was thermal throttling at around 50, and Samsung Magician didn't seem to recognize it properly. Others noted issues with this particular model, so it wasn't just me; it could have just been MB compatibility. I actually sent it back and got a 970 EVO and it's great, although it's not any faster than my 500GB 950 EVO SATA. At that time, the 970 EVO was $20-$30 more than the 980.

Of course, there may have been just one, single bad 980, and Amazon kept reselling it every time it was returned...

I also always recommend Samsung, but he should be aware of this and be suspicious of any 980 "deals". And always make sure he can return them.

[Performance: are CPUs of AMD slower compared to Intel in Affinity?]

On 11/21/2022 at 11:51 AM, TheFlow said:

Prices for new AMD Ryzen CPUs are a bit higher in Germany (5600 goes for about 140€, 5600x for 180€), so I keep an eye on the bay right now, maybe a 5600 or 5600X pops up that seems trustworthy for way less compared to new.
Benched my SSD today, it writes with up to 770 MBPS and also reads with about 2400MBPS. So that should be good. I'll let you guys know what happens next.

I have the same CPU/MB as you, and I'd advise you to increase your RAM above 16 GB. It doesn't matter the speed of every other component when Windows starts thrashing the swap file, which could cause thermal throttling on an SSD. Hence, I prefer more RAM to faster RAM. I also prefer more cores to faster cores. It also kinda matters what you actually use the computer for.

Beware of benchmarks. As you edit increasingly larger files, the most RAM will ultimately beat the fastest CPU. A half-empty mechanical drive will beat a 95% full SSD in real world performance no matter how much faster it benches.

I'm not against upgrading, I'm just a little lost as to what issue you're trying to resolve, as you originally said it took 40 seconds to load Affinity Paint V2. You gotta use a little logic here; do you really think it would take a CPU TEN TIMES faster to load V2 vs V1?

So anyway, here's some benchmarks. The Affinity benchmarks were the second run. The Host is running unzipped MSIX, the Guest is running installed normally. Note how Paint V2 handles Consolas monospaced font by default in "Affinity Photo v2.0.0".

 

[Why Are V2 Apps Constantly Connecting to the Internet?]

Thanks to everyone who replied. For those unaware, the Amazon server it connects to is, in itself, perfectly innocent. It's not a direct line to the store. The issue is that the user is being surveilled.

1 hour ago, loukash said:

On Mac:

1. get Little Snitch
2. block all traffic to amazonaws.com for all Affinity apps

Don't ask me what the consequences will be, I haven't blocked this particular server.

I always forget Affinity is available for Mac. My bad. I'm using Windows 10.

The program I use is TinyWall, which can block programs/connections the user chooses:

https://tinywall.pados.hu/

Once upon a time, I think I did block that server (in Window's hosts file), and it messed stuff up.

1 hour ago, ATP said:

This might be a coincidence but I noticed Photo 2 was slower at starting when my internet was down.

Telemetry should always be possible to completely disable if the new apps have it.

I haven't noticed, but I might test that.

Absolutely it should be possible to disable. Everything should be fully disclosed: What's collected, what's done with it, how long it's kept, etc.

My policy is to block software from companies that do it secretly and allow it from, well, honest companies.

2 hours ago, thomaso said:

Are you connected via "My Account" (Toolbar)?
If yes, does it make a difference to logout there?

Also, do you have set Affinity to show the "Welcome…" window on app launch which offers links to Serif website(s)?

26 minutes ago, rvst said:

I just checked this and my Affinity Photo V2 only connects at startup, not when opening a file or changing persona. My account is logged in. 

Logging in/out doesn't matter, I haven't downloaded any content, and don't display the Welcome... window.

What are you using to monitor connections?

More info:

• I noticed this because it hits my TinyWall firewall.
• Allowing it through the firewall during startup and then overnight doesn't matter. It starts hitting it all over again.
•  
• I've tested two Windows 10 installs. One is unzipped in, and the other is the installed MSIX in a fresh (although unregistered) Windows 10 VM. They both behave the same.
• This is all three program/apps installed as a set.
• I'm using the Trial Version. I won't purchase it until there's industry standard installers available.
• I was a user of all three V1 programs, hence my real name is displayed in the Help->My Account... page.

3 minutes ago, myclay said:

For the internet connection stuff:
Within the Preferences> Miscellaneous is an option to untick automatic uploading of crash reports.


Edit; the Affinity Suite is checking once per Startup (or day?) if a new update is available that too could mean that low traffic is happening.

The box is unchecked, and it's not just checking daily, but continually, like when I open & close files.

And now when I went back to test, it's not doing it on either installs. Unfortunately, TinyWall only displays the last 5 minutes of blocked apps, so I have no log screenshot. Now I gotta photoshop a fake one, anyone know a stable image editor I could use? *BaZiiiiing!*

Thanks again to all who responded. There was definitely something going on, I'd just like to know what. Even in the literally impossible event that I made an error (which I will ultimately correct in the thread title, if possible).

[Colours changing on exporting]

I cannot replicate this. Are you using File->Export, or the Export Persona?

The only bug I found was in the File->Export panel, down in the Advanced selection.  If you don't use a preset, the ICC Profile box can display a random profile. I got AnimePalette, a profile I've never used. Perhaps it used AI to choose the profile? I mean, those flower tendrils resemble some pretty sexy tentacles. 🥰

I don't know whether Affinity Photo V2's ICC Profile box assigns the profile, performs a conversion, or something else. Reopening the exported file produced "The Embedded ICC Profile cannot be used because of a program error. Ignoring the profile." pop-up in Photoshop CS6 for me. Although the image wasn't corrupt, the profile is. I couldn't replicate it.

So... Um... I guess that makes two bugs...?

One possible fix for you is to make sure you explicitly set the ICC Profile box in export settings.

Disclaimer: I'm somewhat colorblind but this preview looks OK to me, even though the resulting file choked Photoshop:

(CTRL+Mouse Wheel zooms the preview window. Zoom all the way out and then back in you can get 101%. Not exactly 100%, but good enough -- A phrase evidently uttered frequently during the development of V2.)

[Why Are V2 Apps Constantly Connecting to the Internet?]

Why are the V2 apps constantly connecting to the internet?

This is not local network, but to an Amazon Web Services server.

And I do mean constant. Every time you load a file, or even go between RAW<-->Develop, it's connects.

I'd REALLY like an OFFICIAL answer on this: EXPLICITLY what's being sent, why, where is it disclosed, and how do we opt out?

[Affinity Designer ICONs showing up on Affinity Photo files and Affinity Publisher]

Sometimes Window's icon cache becomes corrupt, and there's a simple fix. Go here and follow the "Automatically Rebuild the Icon Cache" instructions:

https://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/49819-icon-cache-rebuild.html

Don't let the word "tutorials" make your eyes glaze over, it's really just downloading a .bat file and running it. I right click and "Run as administrator...", but I'm not sure it's necessary. Don't forget to reboot, then let everyone know whether it worked.

[Extremely disappointed that this installs as an "App" and not regular software program]

Ahhh yes, GIMP. The program everyone praises, but nobody uses... 😝It's a joke, don't get your delicates in a twist.

For those unfamiliar, there's a quite excellent free program called Paint.NET. Despite the unfortunate name, it's not web-based, just a program.

⚠️!!! DANGER DANGER WILL ROBINSON DANGER DANGER !!!⚠️

It doesn't install as an app, so it lacks the security, functionality, telemetry, and wondrous benefits that an MSIX provides. The website is here:

https://www.getpaint.net/

They want to you to use the Windows Store, where they charge $7.99 for the convenience of not having to hunt around to find the free hidden download link. It's almost like nobody would use the Windows Store, so they gotta be tricked into it.

Here's the direct link, which itself is a .zip containing a downloader/installer which downloads/installs the program, so you gotta let it trough your firewall to install. These nonstandard, extra steps are solely for the benefit of the customer. You're welcome.

https://www.dotpdn.com/downloads/pdn.html

NB 1.0: This isn't really alternative to Affinity Paint, but some people could find it useful.

NB 1.1.0.5: I just installed from that link, and it works fine. But use you own judgement.

NB 2.0: (NB 2.0 is currently only available in Visual Braille. You're welcome.)

[Very very disappointed with Publisher 2]

25 minutes ago, Gianni Becattini said:

WARNING, DON'T USE PUBLISHER V2 if you have serious work to do. It is absolutely unreliable. I lost an entire week of hard work. The file passed from 500M to 5G and now it is no longer editable.

I was already late with my work, now I go into big troubles.

The only solution is now going back to rev. 1, comparing line by line each of 410 pages of graphics and re-converting 59 images by hand. Another week, if I am lucky.

Very, very disappointed? Believe me, the point is not the price, I would pay 1,000€ now for having not trusted Affinity.

Thanks, Serif.

 

You probably already know this, but Affinity Photo can open .afpub files. You go spread to spread via little arrows on the lower left. Could be helpful, depending on the exact problem.

Releasing final versions before public betas also speaks to management quality.

[Very very disappointed with Publisher 2]

11 hours ago, Medical Officer Bones said:

And no matter back in 1991 or now in the 2020s: development takes time. It's not a matter of merely throwing more developers at a project and expect faster development, because that is not how it works in practice.

While true to some degree, it isn't entirely the case, else Adobe would have little advantage. When you look at the development rate of something like DaVinci Resolve Studio in the past two years alone, it makes Serif's development look positively glacial.

At any rate, I lay the blame entirely at the feet of management. It doesn't matter if you have a first rate engineering team, if you have fuzzy-minded management that's not only inept, but has misplaced priorities. Think how much dev time they're wasting on this MSIX fiasco, and they still can't even manage an ETA for industry standard installers for V2. They act like some Kick-Starter Startup, rather than a real company.

What's actually in Publisher V2 is great, I just can't wait 'till they finish it.

(Slight correction: Wikipedia places the intro year of InDesign at 1999, but it doesn't change the discussion.)

[Very very disappointed with Publisher 2]

1 hour ago, LondonSquirrel said:

The first statement is wrong, the second is correct. A small company like Serif will find it hard to compete with a large company like Adobe, for example, on sheer development capacity. They can only do so much, while the larger company can do more. Adobe evidently have development cycles too, hence their list of "new features" in CC. This year's features were not there a year ago. And the same for a year ago. Development cycle?

Comparing the development cycle of InDesign starting in 1991 vs. Affinity Publisher starting in 2019 is patently irrelevant.

[Performance: are CPUs of AMD slower compared to Intel in Affinity?]

rvst:

Thanks for posting that. I'll post some not-quite-as-impressive benchmarks when I get the chance.

Bitchin' system, too.

 

[Very very disappointed with Publisher 2]

51 minutes ago, Medical Officer Bones said:

Oh, come now. Let's be realistic, and compare Publisher's development progress with InDesign:

InDesign 1: Everything new! (1991) <--> Publisher R1: Everything New! (2019)

Both were products developed from scratch by companies with a deep understanding and experience developing design software.

Either first release lacked footnotes or book support. But Publisher R1 offers a wide range of features that were only introduced in InDesign by version 2 ~three years later in 2022: transparency, TOC, indexes, glyphs panel, tables - to name but a few things.

And MANY features that are part of Publisher R1 only became available after years and years of development later in subsequent InDesign releases: multi-page PDF placing, bullets and numbering, dynamic spelling, IDML format, multiple page sizes in a single file, primary text frame, Hunspell dictionaries, anchored objects, data merging tools, doc info fields, hyperlinks (pdf), smart guides, effects, and so on and so forth.

InDesign 2 <--> Publisher R2

InDesign became somewhat usable compared to QuarkXPress three years later. Rather lacking, but it was the first release that professional users (including myself) began testing the waters with. SO MUCH was missing compared to Publisher R2. But one thing InDesign 2 had going for it: OS X was supported. QXP only supported that OS much later, and it was one reason why Mac users installed it.

The InDesign developers also inexplicably removed useful features such as SVG export in 2008 with CS4, however. (Publisher has been a gods' end in this regard: I have converted quite a few InDesign publications by opening the IDML, fixing a few things, and export the pages to SVG! 🙂 )

Version R2 of Publisher is a far more mature product compared to InDesign 2, 3, or even CS2 (which was released 8 years after version 1).

I am aware it is not possible to compare the development cycles of the two programs directly. Affinity Publisher started development in a time when dev tools have become easier and more efficient to develop with. But still, to state that development is lagging or slow is rather out-of-touch with the realities of complex software development.

In fact, I am quite impressed with what the Affinity devs have accomplished so far with Publisher. They are far ahead of the curve compared to InDesign's development cycle.

All that said, I do agree that there are a few inexplicable omissions in Publisher that seem so foundational to publishing in general that prevent myself from using it - because I simply cannot produce a press ready PDF. My personal pet peeve is the lack of 1bit bitmaps and support to output these properly in a PDF. The lack of spreads beyond two pages is another one. And reflowable epub export would be grand.

Yet as it is said: Rome was not built in a day. Neither was InDesign, and the same holds true for Affinity. Even though I cannot use Publisher yet for much of my work and still rely on InDesign, I position myself as a pragmatic person. I trust these issues will be tackled and solved in the not-so-long term. I am patient. And there is no need to flip over in anger over software or what could have been.

(I continued to use QuarkXPress till 6-7 years later after InDesign's first release).

Development cycles are irrelevant. They need to compete with the contemporary market just like every other product.

[Performance: are CPUs of AMD slower compared to Intel in Affinity?]

4 hours ago, RPC said:

Interestingly you have an AMD video card where as the two people with issues have Nvidia cards. You wouldn't happen to have a Nvidia card to test in your computer would you? I'm just curious since I know with my own tests affinity seems to heavily favor AMD over Nvidia.
 

I do not, sorry.

Thoughts:

Do you know anything about Resizeable BAR BIOS settings? My MB (Asus X-470x Prime) supports it, but either my CPU or GPU doesn't, so it's off. Perhaps NVIDIA cards handle this differently than Radeon cards on AMD MBs? Just a shot in the dark, trying to find the common denominator of failure.

Do you if there's a difference between people who installed the MSIX as an app, or Unzipped and ran it from that directory (like me)? Windows may allocate resources differently to apps, since it's "sandboxed", isn't it getting a virtual GPU device? So It's probably Affinity's choice of clumping cat-litter to fill the sandbox. That's my theory, and I'm sticking with it.

Keep in mind that the original post was about a 40 second load time, so it's not a performance issue per se, but a severe bug or bottleneck or incompatibility.

If you'd like to donate a shiny new high end NVIDIA card, I'll be happy to put it in my system, as a personal favor for you. 🙂

ALSO, for people with AMD systems, there's chipset drivers that should be installed in addition to the display drivers, et al. It's not uncommon for manufacturers to have additional drivers if the board has special features, usually enhanced USB or networking. Nobody seems to know this, for some reason:

https://www.amd.com/en/support/chipsets/amd-socket-am4/x470 .

That's for x470, for example.

 

[Performance: are CPUs of AMD slower compared to Intel in Affinity?]

To add to my previous post, my V2 installation was rename the MSIX to ZIP and extract it hack. It's possible that Windows treats programs installed as an app differently from programs when it comes to allocating resources, but I don't know.

Another thing to look at, V1 and V2 use scratch/temp folders, which go on your C:\, these can inflate rapidly, and when you have less the 10% space on drive, performance can fall dramatically, even on an SSD.  One should be able to specify these directories, like most other software, but it is what it is.

I use this program to analyze my disks, and it's a good way to see where your space is evaporating to:

https://www.diskanalyzer.com/

Needing a new CPU is the least likely issue, especially if you're happy with it otherwise.

EDIT: Affinty Paint V2 opens for me in about 3-4 seconds, which is what V1 loaded in. Just counting One One-Thousand, Two One-Thousand...

[Performance: are CPUs of AMD slower compared to Intel in Affinity?]

I have a Ryzen 7 1700X, and it's perfectly fine for most things, including editing 4K video in DaVinci Resolve Studio. Suggesting he needs to replace the 1700x for something like Affinity V2 is utter madness.

I have a Radeon RX580 with 8GB of RAM and 64 GB system RAM, and here's one problem I've found with AP V2: It horks up massive amounts of GPU RAM, and when Windows runs out of GPU RAM, it uses system RAM to swap (same idea as a page file). When this happens, the program starts to become unresponsive. This can make other programs run slowly, or even the entire Windows interface lag.

So my suggestion would be to DISABLE "Enable OpenCL computer acceleration" in all the V2 apps performance settings.

You can monitor this in the Task Manager, scroll down and select the GPU box an it will display a consumption graph.

 

[Very very disappointed with Publisher 2]

3 hours ago, captain_slocum said:

To answer the points one by one:

1. Professionally means earning the larger part of your income from DTP.

2. You may be right, but it doesn't feel like it.

3. (ignoring the insulting quote marks) we are not talking here about whether we like the colours of an icon or a hundred and one things that don't matter/have easy work arounds. We are talking absolute deal breakers that anybody who uses DTP extensively for technical reports, books, magazines, company prospectuses, exam papers, etc etc etc cannot do without.

4. I don't use it, because I can't yet, but I do support it because I believe in it as a worthwhile project that I want to see succeed (yes, I know that's old school, but then I'm very old).

5. No there are not - not for macOS anyway. Or does the ellipse signify sarcasm? In which case the implication is that there are not any other such options, in which case it is more important than ever to make sure APub is fit for purpose.

I agree.

I don't believe for a minute they have any disinterested professional consultants on staff, either that, or they ignore them. I haven't seen much evidence that they even listen to their users unless there's a firestorm that could affect their bottom line. Perhaps some consider taking bug reports and feature requests on V1 software that's long been out of development (in favor of V2) "listening"?

I actually prefer working in Affinity programs to anything else, and I'm not a DTP guy, but the lack of footnotes, et al. until this year is literally incomprehensible to me. It speaks volumes to the "professional" consultants they have on staff -- I mean, they couldn't even write a their own Shareholders' Report without completely unacceptable "workarounds"😮. Footnotes have been a core feature in even simple word-processors for home computers since the 1970s. I honestly don't understand Serif's thinking here, as this feature should have been in it before even the first line of code was written.

And now we have footnotes, but since they're a new feature, the user will have to babysit them to make sure they work properly -- although forcing customers to be beta testers is pretty standard in the software industry today these days.

 

[Extremely disappointed that this installs as an "App" and not regular software program]

Specifically, what page/site/thread/link should I monitor for the upcoming announcement/DL link?

 

[Affinity 2 beta testing failures stopped users cold in first five seconds]

28 minutes ago, Granddaddy said:

I've not written to XnView, but I've written to Faststone a few times asking them to support APhoto files like XnView MP does (display the thumbnail retrieved from the .afphoto file). They haven't responded. I'll write again soon pointing out the many Faststone users in these forums who have contributed to Affinity's decision to provide an MSI installation package. The programs are free for personal and educational use so there is little financial incentive for Faststone to provide additional functions. Who knows what else the developers are doing? I can't find much about the company, if it really is a company and not just a dedicated programmer working from home.

 

In FastStone, In lieu of supporting the actual thumbnail, just an icon to show that an .afphoto exists would be extremely helpful. That's been about my only complaint about FastStone is it's not always explicitly clear if a folder is empty, or merely has no image files.  It's a great program I've used forever.

They are a donation based freeware, so maybe if we got people to pledge donations that might encourage them? I dunno. Serif could make it happen, if the management wasn't vapor-locked in a strategic vacuum, where the Real World is never heard.

They should just license FastStone, skin it, and call it "Affinity V2 DAM powered by FastStone" and include it with every V2 sale.

[Affinity 2 beta testing failures stopped users cold in first five seconds]

But, but... Serif Techs determined that 99.9% of the people would be able to install without issues. Remember, they determined it and independently came to the same accurate-within-a-tenth-of-a-percent statistic that MS did in their marketing materials. 🙄

Seriously, there's some fundamental disconnect between Serif and their customers that is incredibly frustrating.

While their products aren't feature-for-feature replacements for Adobe's, they could be a credible alternative for many, even professionals. But they have no clue how professionals (or advanced "creatives", etc) actually work, and worse, DON'T CARE. I mean, one of the official reasons given for their exclusive use of MSIX was that it integrates better with Microsoft Photos. That's the one "workflow" they expected you to use, (had the installer worked, that is.)

They solved the MSIX fiasco, but they really need to engage with real world use cases. Not just with proper betas to kill bugs, but to improve the usability of their products within the customers' workflow.

[Extremely disappointed that this installs as an "App" and not regular software program]

6 minutes ago, Gremnosh said:

I did get both an announcement in APhoto start window and an email about v2 being out even though I'm not on the marketing list. So at least for some of us those things did happen.

 

Wonder why you didn't get notified.

Most of the time I keep everything blocked with a firewall, however I would specifically disable it before starting the V1's to check for updates. That must be the reason, so maybe it's a fairly isolated case.

I did see an email in my junk folder well after I saw the V2 was available.

[Extremely disappointed that this installs as an "App" and not regular software program]

This is very good, as soon as I can install it properly I'm gonna buy all three. It's exceptional software.

There's one issue for Serif to consider: I didn't actually know V2 existed until I visited the site to see if they were even still alive. I was in the habit of starting V1 programs daily to check for updates, and it had been a long while since the last one. I understand there's a difference between updates and upgrades, but a "V2 Is Now Available!" pop-up would have been helpful, as there may be customers who don't realize V2 is out.