Patrick B

Great: so, now a free gift has been mentioned, I suppose we’ll have endless complaints about it not being good enough, or (depending how it works) some people not getting better free gifts than others! 

I can't get my head around the enormous fuss being made in some quarters about V2 pricing. Let's say there are two issues, money and principle.

1. Money. A discounted universal licence gets you 9 apps for €120, or €13 each. Pro users will almost certainly be able to claim the vat back, reducing the cost to around €10. Individual upgrades cost €49 (€39 ex-vat). Amazing value.

Even if Serif were able offer an additional  discount to V1 upgraders, it would not amount to much more than a tenner or so. In absolute terms, the sum involved with additional discounts would be very small.

Not enough to justify the fuss.

2. The principle. This seems to be that V1 upgraders should get preferential treatment. Right or wrong, app store policies prevent Serif from doing that. So they have two options: everybody gets a discount or nobody gets a discount. As a V1 upgrader who got a discount, I'm glad they chose first option. It's sign of generosity, not disloyalty to customers.

I wish this forum could get back on track to being a more reasonable space.

Hi All,
Well, it’s been a pretty crazy week since the launch of V2!
This has been a real labour of love for us over the last year or so, and I can’t even begin to describe how hard the development team have worked on it. Not only getting the V2 apps launched, but also of course finally bringing Publisher to iPad. 
With this being our first paid-for upgrade there has understandably been a lot of feedback / questions around future updates and our pricing policies. I thought it was worth addressing / clarifying our position on some of these personally...
Updates to V2 moving forward
Buying V2 not only gets you all the new features you have seen, but we have various updates planned – including many more new features and improvements – which you will get for free. This will continue until such a time that V3 is released. We’re not sure exactly when V3 will be, but I can confirm we are not going to move to anything as regular as an annual upgrade cycle as has been speculated.
It’s worth saying too that V2 does include many under-the-hood changes to our underlying technology, and we have also been investing in several new areas of research recently. Some of these haven’t manifested themselves into new features yet, but overall V2 does give us a better platform to develop on moving forward and I’m sure you will be pleased with the updates V2 will receive.
Updates to V1 moving forward
While we did say on the FAQ that V1 would no longer receive any updates, I want to clarify that was about new feature updates. We will be updating V1 to fix any critical problems caused by operating system updates in the future. So if the next version of macOS breaks V1 we will endeavour to fix it. There will be a point in time when continuing to maintain V1 in this way will not be tenable, but certainly for the foreseeable future we will continue to patch. In fact, we have an update to V1 queued up for release very shortly with some fixes for Ventura and issues caused by a recent Windows security / quality update. 
We will update our FAQ shortly to make that clearer for everyone.
Offer period
In case you didn’t see, I’m pleased to confirm we have decided to run this initial launch offer until 14th December to give everyone the best chance possible to get it if they wish / have a decent amount of time to trial it. 
Upgrade pricing
It’s been really hard to see some of the comments about us not looking after our existing customers – we’re pretty devasted that anyone feels like that to be honest. But the fact is we felt our hands were tied somewhat with being able to offer upgrade pricing in a fair way. The main reason for this was App Store customers (which make up around 35% of our userbase). The problems with that are two-fold: firstly, we didn’t have a way from within V1 to validate an App Store purchase receipt to reliably ensure customers who were entitled to an upgrade could get one; and secondly, we could not find a good way for people to get that discount via the App Store. Us pushing upgrade customers to go exclusively via our own site (including customers who were previously acquired via the app stores) may also have put us in violation of App Store Ts & Cs which we were obviously concerned about.
I’m not saying that these issues were completely insurmountable, but any solutions we came up with would be messy, and most importantly could have resulted in some bona fide V1 customers struggling to get validated and claim their discount. We certainly don’t have the support resource here if we ended up needing to manually validate tens of thousands of receipts for example.
The only option we felt was safe to move forward with was a general launch offer, which would guarantee that every V1 customer could get the discount, whether they purchased directly through us or the App Stores. We knew a side effect of that would mean some new customers would end up receiving that same discount – but we felt that was a better option than V1 customers missing out. It’s also worth saying that while there has been some good press about V2, all our main marketing has been via email and through social media to our followers. In other words, we felt ok about it because we knew the vast majority of people who would find out about it or take advantage of the offer would be existing customers. I would be surprised if over the offer period customers upgrading from V1 didn’t make up more than 90% of our sales.
Overall I do believe us giving a 40% discount, along with the addition of the new Universal Licence of course, is offering fantastic value for money for those who want to upgrade. 
However, taking on board some of the feedback there is something extra we can do – we will offer a new free bundle of content exclusively for V1 customers upgrading to V2 as an extra thank you for your support. I’ve seen this suggested by a number of customers and it’s a great idea as it does remove the App Store conflict entirely. 
We’ll need a little time to put something together, but all customers who previously registered or purchased V1 and have since upgraded to V2 will receive a voucher code for this via email as soon as we can.
A comment on no subscription
I do want to say that some of the points above are exactly the reason why software companies move to subscription. Whatever you do with upgrade pricing, you still have the issue of customers who bought the previous version 3 months ago vs. those who have had it 2+ years. Offering perpetual licences also gives the additional overhead of needing to maintain the previous version longer than you would if everyone was on subscription / generally always on the latest version.
We are a small team so some of these complications are not ideal — all we really want to do is focus on developing our latest codebase, push out regular updates and continue with our mission to make great creative software accessible to everyone. 
But it does need to be funded somehow. We know you love our no-subscription model, but there also needs to be a level of appreciation that the alternative is having paid-for upgrades from time to time. That unfortunately comes with its own problems.
All of that said, I have to say we have been blown away with the response to V2 - around 3 times as many people have upgraded in the last week than we expected - and we really can't thank you enough for the support you have shown. More than anything the success of this upgrade puts us in a great place to continue investing heavily in development which is ultimately what it's all about, and we’re super excited to crack on with some great updates coming next year!
All the best,
Ash

Thank you for this - it is very clear and I hope that those who are complaining all read it in order to understand the rationale. I think the vast majority understand the difficulties and that Serif is still a remarkably small outfit. I look forward to the V1 to V2 upgrade 'thank you' bundle. 😀

I agree, I think it would be great to have that quick option available. The downside of Adobe's implementation is that the warp mesh is not very editable — you can modify the outside points/curves but not the interior area. So having the flexibility of Affinity's Warp Group, with the added ability to conform to a shape as a starting point, would be remarkable!

If you move the child out of a warp group after deforming something, then move something else into it, there is currently no obvious way to reposition the deform handles over the new child object to get the equivalent of what might have happened had the deform been applied to the new child object originally.
It would be nice to have a "Lock Children" type of option on the warp group so that the handles can be picked up and moved in order to reposition the starting point of the warp.
When this is enabled, it should be possible to transform the shape as if using the move tool, so that it can be moved/scaled/rotated to match it up with the new shape being warped.

Oh wow, I didn't even realize that. 👍 Awesome feature!

This would be very useful
If you click the little brush icon on a layer you get a drop down window showing all brushes that have been used on that layer, just select one of them to reuse that brush

Another update, this time from the official Affinity account:
 

Another update, this time from the official Affinity account:
 

Display the names of the brushes as done on iPad, see this post for visuals: 
 

We will fix V1 if it breaks, and are planning a 1.10.6 update when we can
It is hard for some to accept that 40% is what we would have offered only to our upgraders if they could be reliably identified without a lot of complaints or breaking store rules. New customers could have got less than 40% if it were possible. To be angry that they did not get less seems odd to me. I am happy for them.
Here are some of the groups of customers we would not have been able to reliably offer 40% to
Bought only Affinity Photo iPad Bought only Affinity Designer iPad Bought Affinity Photo and Designer iPad Bought only Affinity Photo Mac App Store Bought only Affinity Designer Mac App Store Bought only Affinity Publisher Mac App Store Bought Affinity Photo and Designer from the Mac App Store Bought Affinity Photo and Designer from the Mac App Store Bought Affinity Designer and Publisher Mac App Store Bought Affinity Photo from the Mac App Store and Photo from the iPad Store Bought Affinity Designer from the Mac App Store and Designer from the iPad Store Bought Affinity Photo, and Designer and Publisher from the Mac App Store Bought Affinity Photo, and Designer and Publisher from the Mac App Store AND Affinity Photo and Designer from the iPad Store Tell me #12 & #13 do not deserve the full 40% offer because they are not loyal/valued customers.
 

Hello,
I've found a bug. The Knife tool doesn't work correctly with fonts, even after converting them to curves. As also reported by another user, the bug only happens when I use Shift for straight line. With freehand mode it's ok.
With the other shapes I haven't noticed any problems for now.
Thanks for your attention.

Knife Bug 1.mp4 Knife Bug 2.mp4 Knife Bug 3.mp4 Knife Bug 1.afdesign Knife Bug 2.afdesign Knife Bug 3.afdesign

Hi François R,
Thanks for your feedback. We are aware that the Vector Warp feature still has some limitations/room for improvement in this first implementation. More improvements will come as development moves forward.

I am disappointed to note that this bug continues to reproduce in Affinity 2 for Windows and iPadOS (on the 30 day trial).
However, I became curious why this is not a larger issue for other users. Further testing revealed that this behavior will not manifest if your uppermost (root) layers has a fill layer, which expands the rendering bounds to the whole canvas. You can have further nested layers or groups without strokes failing to render for this reason. This fill layer can be a white+multiply layer to have no visual effect, but as long as it's set to visible, it will fix this specific rendering fault.
Which is to say that this issue can be avoided by always working inside a single top-level "main" container layer with a fill, rather than having multiple layers or groups at the root level. If you want multiple root siblings, then you'd have to give each of them a fill layer child to avoid this rendering flaw.
Example attached to this post.
nested layer pixel bounds.afpub

I tried making a mockup and noticed images don't warp either. They should definitely adjust that and allow pixel warps in Designer as well.

+1
I was also hoping/expecting variable font support in v2. As a typeface designer, my main use of this software is to make specimens and test my variable fonts. It's frustrating how low of a priority this still is for Serif (ironic that with the name 'Serif' they don't care more about the fonts 😂).

I agree that a dedicated Rotate Tool will greatly benefit us illustrators. People who draw with a graphics tablet are kinda being left in the dark there. I've tried the keyboard shortcuts, and mapping rotation to the tablet touch ring, but both options are inferior to a Rotate Tool if you keep one hand on the keyboard while drawing.

I'm very happy that there are finally perspective and warp options in Designer, I'm going to use it a lot.
Unfortunately this feature completely lacks snapping - I see for example that neither corners nor tangents snap to grid or other objects.
It's really important that this works, so you can accurately adjust your objects to the perspective established with a grid or other objects.

(Copied my response in a V1 thread here for visibility in V2.)
It's very useful for freehand warping, but anything structured, (like for typography when you need symmetry & verticals/horizontals to stay true,) it is a bit of a chore to use.
We need more behaviors and tools:
1. The nodes to be able to snap with modifier key like a regular node. Vertical, horizontal, 45 degrees.
2. Have a toggle or modifier for symmetrical node behavior both in same direction and opposite directions.
3. Better presets that are easier to edit. Employing a special node like the shape tools use would be extremely useful for preset use. This way we can make flag, raised edge, and warps that need symmetry with ease. (See Vector Styler).
Vector Styler easily remains the gold standard for best implemented vector warping, especially for type, IMO. There are so many options and they take literal seconds to employ. It is still faster to copy from Designer, warp in VS and paste back in Designer than it is to manually move every node for an envelope distort where you need to ensure vertical/horizontal lines stay true, (ex. for a raised edge or flag type effect). I urge the Affinity devs to give it a close look and see about employing similar usability.

Been playing with the vector warp and its great!  I do have a couple of suggestions to make it even better 
warp a gradient fill  allow us to select a node with in the mesh and apply a colour or a transparency 

3. More presets with sliders for different classic envelope distortions - typically those used for typography like; flag, rising side warp, etc.
4. Add modification key to allow symmetrical warping (ex. pull nodes on left and right side toward center at same time). 
5. Allow option for node snapping (ex. level with another node,) when editing mesh. 
6. Allow options for 45 and 90 degree movement lock when moving nodes or handles while holding SHIFT. 

As a graphic designer how would you react if a client would ask you to work for free on their 2023 commercial brochure because they already paid for their 2022 brochure you did last year?
Sorry but this section of the forum has become a spoiled brats playground.

I agree that a dedicated Rotate Tool will greatly benefit us illustrators. People who draw with a graphics tablet are kinda being left in the dark there. I've tried the keyboard shortcuts, and mapping rotation to the tablet touch ring, but both options are inferior to a Rotate Tool if you keep one hand on the keyboard while drawing.

The layer names in the layer panel are cropped when the Font UI Size is set to Large. The descenders are not visible.
Steps to reproduce:
Enable Preferences > User Interface > Font UI Size > Large Create a new layer named 'typography' Result:
'typography' is shown in layer panel, but descenders are cropped off, see screenshot