meh

thanks for the rec! shall look into it. The issue is the up front cost- not monetary, but cost of losing access to all .ai's (properly anyway, I know AD can open them but some things dont' carry over), cost of time to learn a new workflow, find all these workarounds- I don't doubt that it's possible, you're right, but it is more appealing when one alternative can offer an interface and features that are similar enough (or better!) to make it not such a hassle.

yeah, valid point, and I do not regret buying it at all even though I've not used it much, in large parts because it was in my budget and because I'm happy to fund an adobe competitor out of spite. While I'm not able to stretch my budget as much as the true pros on here, but I'd pay about 3x the price (with expectation that it'd be updated for a few years, low-key supported for another few years like bug fixes, compatibility with OS updates and the like). There's a demand there, and people willing to pay, and idk, I know this stuff is complex, but that potential is being left on the table. To take the blend tool as an example, if they put a crowdfund goal on the site and anyone who wanted could contribute to make that feature a priority, I bet it'd get funded. And everyone would get the feature and benefit, because people aren't paying in order to be the only ones to have access to it, they just want it to get developed, so it'd also drive purchases at the regular price. I see a real potential for an actually symbiotic relationship where the software users actually like the company, as opposed to adobe which at this point feels like living with a toxic ex because you have nowhere else to go and they know it. /rant edit: that said, the CC shortcuts are so native to me at this point that it's a bit of a hurdle, le sigh, so i can't say if I'd fall off the learning curve..

Just popping in here for my yearly check on if I can ditch Illustrator already. Apparently not yet. You raise a good point here- AD's affordability is surely one of it's big selling points. It was for me. Probably wouldn't have gotten it if it was more expensive. But there are big-league designers who make a lot of profit on the tool, and for them it could cost way, WAY more and still be worth it. I wish there was some way to meet those. Like hey, pay more and get the shiny new stuff like a 6 months before it rolls out to the rest of us, so it remains equal and not too fragmented, but those who would like to can contribute to development as long as they get assurances that certain features are being worked on. Everyone benefits. Idk, just thinking out loud. I really don't like the idea of splitting into elements-vs-full-version kind of thing, in part because I selfishly want to have the shiny stuff, but I think also because you want folks learning on all the features, and then if they make it big, they can decide to pitch in to help drive development faster. More communal, sort of? anyway, end of rant.

maybe I'm not understanding something about how duplicate works in AD, but I'd like to see you make something like this in 10 minutes in Designer. Blend tool may be crude but it gets the job done and fast. I feel like gradient meshes SHOULD be doing a lot of this work, but they just don't. But then, maybe I just don't get it as I haven't used meshes much. I'd be pretty screwed if I used Designer and a client asked for long faded shadows, for instance.

so a while ago I tried out the Affinity Trial (1.3.2) and I wrote down what I was doing and thinking, and then the trial ran out and I kinda forgot about it, but I came across the txt file just now and thought I might share in case it is of any use to anyone. I don't know if the bugs I found have already been fixed, and seems since you only get one trial I can't find out. Here it is: Running commentary while I was opening the Affinity Design trial and messing about in it for the first time: Looks great, like the colourful tool icons. I dislike this trend where all icons become grey and normed to the point where it is harder to tell them apart. Niiiice standard shortcuts, space/cmd/alt panning/zooming! P for pen, T for text, V for move, M toggles through the shapes, thank you, thank you thankyouuuu. Ok, let's make some shapes. Clipping masks? .. oh.. you just drag one shape under another? That's nice.. but.. what if you just wanted to drag a to be below or above another and not create a mask? OH. I see, it depends if you position the layer to the left or right a bit. I love the corner tool, and even more so if it worked on rectangles. Ok, go to Affinity design and make a square. try to apply rounded corners to it.. the px radius number just flickers and nothing happens. when I click and drag with the direct selection-- er, excuse me, the Node Tool / white arrow -- over some paths.. I expect those nodes that are within the area that I dragged over to be selected, unless they're in a locked layer.* This doesn't not happen. In fact, nothing happens!.. only.. sometimes it does work? depending on if you already had that curve selected? I couldn't figure out the rules behind this. Why can't the Node tool just always select the nodes it's dragged over? What is the benefit to doing it this way? In fact, sometimes it doesn't even show a box when you're dragging, and sometimes the blue box that is created when you click and drag just disappears mid-drag. This feels buggy. *in fact.. how do I lock a layer... ? oh I see it. Funny how you can unlock a layer by clicking on the lock, but not lock it by clicking on where the lock was. In illustrator, when you click with the path tool on a path.. it gets a little + icon and adds a point to the existing path. Affinity design instead creates a new path. Okay, that has an advantage too, it didn't take long to figure out that you hold command to get the path tool to add a node to the existing path. However, the node tool does the same thing- you wanna drag or adjust a path or part of a contour, and instead you find yourself creating extra nodes. I don't like that at all. The align functions are alright.. but.. is there a way to access them without clicking on the dropdown menu, and then on the alignment you want? also.. where is align to artboard? It took me forever to figure out that in order to modify the nodes of an ellipse, I had to "convert to curves" first. Okay, maybe there's a benefit doing it this way but then how about when people try to use the node tool to select parts of a ellipse or indeed another standard shape, have a little text or notification or something to let the user know where to convert the shape to curves so that they can edit this. It's kind of like when you click the brush tool into a smart layer in photoshop, it doesn't just do NOTHING while the user becomes frustrated and unsure, instead it tells you hey, would you like to rasterise this thing? That is a much better flow. SHORTCUT CONFLICT when dragging a curve handle, it can snap into alignment towards another node. Now when you hold alt, it ignores snapping.. but it creates a cusp (broken node handles). You should use something else for "ignoring snapping".. like say, control? I do lovelovelovelove how the relevant shortcuts are displayed along the bottom. Holding shift to constrain a path along it's existing angle is nice. However, what if i want to get it back to a 90° angle? How about a function where if I drag roughly along the existing angle, it constrains to that angle, but I can also get it to constrain to vertical/horizontal/45° angle in addition? I suppose if the existing angle is very close to the standard angles it might be confusing.. but.. there must we a way to do this. Um..also, SLOW. Just playing around with simple paths, the frame rate was atrocious. Not remotely as fast as an illustrator file with way more complex shapes in it. –––––––– well, I was going to write more but then my demo ran out. But, maybe this feedback helps some. I do hope one day you can actually compete with illustrator. At the moment though, close but no cigar. Keep going!