Bryan Rieger

They're the Astute Graphics plug-ins which I've found are indispensable when using Illustrator. Find And Replace, Vector First Aid (clean up geometry) and Phantasm (non-destructive, full vector colour adjustments) are the main plug-ins I use, but I do often find myself using many of the other tools as they're just better (especially the drawing tools) than many of the Illustrator ones. The lack of Astute Graphics type features in Affinity Designer is one of the main reasons I still use Adobe Illustrator—that and compatibility when working with others.

Please note I have hidden a few recent posts in this thread as they are against our Guidelines (specifically point 1) here on the Affinity Forums.
We appreciate any and all constructive feedback that our users have for the Affinity apps as it continues to help us to improve and update the suite - no matter how small or trivial the feedback may seem to some.

I stumbled upon this YouTube link where some areas for improvement are discussed.
I think it’s worth a watch for the developers and I also tend to agree with him….
 
cheers

I've only ever been able to get that to reset everything and revert back to 12pt Arial, at which point I then have to go back and reformat everything that was in that block. If you essentially have to redo all of your work, it's not much of a solution.

I actually need you to bring the icons back for all of them from v1. Yes. All of them. I know I sound crazy, but I really loved how they looked in v1 where its was the icon followed by the word. It was a formula that you followed and it was consistent all through out the edit menu. Now, this formula is only applied for insertion, isometric, and planes. It looks off. Its not balanced. I feel like theres something missing with these solo words. These words are naked. There needs to be an icon next to them. Iconography will help users more than just reading a solo word. A scissors icon tells me cut, two puzzle pieces together tell me group, and a circle overlapping a square tells me insert behind. Its helpful. Very helpful. Its just too many words that Im looking at here that I honestly DONT want to read anything. My eyes are flooded with so many words, and I need some balance. I need balance. Balance these words out with icons next to them. It will look nicer and be more helpful to users. Please, please 🙏consider adding icons to all of them. Bring back the v1 icons from the edit menu and revamp their designs. 

Not to mention the annoyances with native modal windows (ie. Save, etc) often being obscured by various Affinity palettes and panels on the Mac. I find myself constantly having to shift panels around to actually find and interact with the modal dialogues. Add to that how dragging panels often results in inadvertently undocking a panel, rather than actually dragging the combined panels. Adobe for instance has a small bar at the top of their undocked panels which enables dragging without inadvertently triggering a drag on docking/undocking a panel from the panel group.

Can we please have the align panel promoted to a top level panel on the right side toolbar on the iPad? Having it buried at the bottom of the transform panel is so unintuitive. If you're stuck for space as where to put it might I suggest moving the stock panel into a submenu of assets, or maybe doing something similar with the symbols panels? I assume you, more folks will want quick and easy access to the align panel than any of the others mentioned.

Unfortunately, Serif rarely comments on their plans. As to whether or not they are aware of them, or plan to remedy them, who knows?
Personally, after 8+ years (yes I started with Designer v1 when it launched), I've stopped waiting for Affinity to fix the long-standing issues, and 'professional' feature requests, as going by their actions (the underwhelming, overhyped v2 release, along with the upcoming anaemic v2.1 release) I think Serif are quite content simply remaining in the hobbyist, casual user market. As much as I like the Affinity suite, I'm very reluctant to commit to working with it due to all of the bugs, workflow issues, missing tools/features, and uncertainty that my work will remain accessible into the future (with their proprietary, 'non-standard' file formats). 

Um, not as much as they should. If they would as they should, the whole UI would be scriptable on Mac. Which it isn't. And boy did I try…

Thanks for sharing this update! Exciting stuff.

Hi folks,
I thought I'd give you a quick progress update and let you see some of things we've been working on at Serif Labs.  We now have a scripting core that we're reasonably happy with and have put together a little test area where we can run Javascript code, so I thought I'd show you some of that. Things to note:
This is all VERY early, like pre-pre-pre-alpha. The JS API is extremely fluid and is constantly changing. This is not how the Affinity suite will run scripts and plugins; it is just a sandbox window for internal testing. There is still a huge amount of work to be done. I can't provide any timescales for when scripting will be publicly released, for Beta or Retail. Constructive feedback is welcomed, but I won't be able to answer all questions - see previous points. I'm not claiming any of these examples are particularly useful on their own; they're just to demonstrate some basic scripting functionality. Re Javascript async - yes, we support it, I've just not recorded anything yet. The sleep calls are there for screen-recording purposes only. Here are some demos as low-res gifs. If you want to take a closer look, movs are attached.
Create a Mandelbrot image

Some dodgy physics

Insert a dragon curve

"Emojification" (translation?) of text

Create a grid of colours
 
Select and hide based on hue

Replay a document's edit history

mandelbrot.mov
balls.mov
dragon.mov
grid.mov
hue.mov
replay.mov
emoji.mov

One suggestion with regards to the brush names. Left align them please, as it makes them far easier to visually scan.

That might be something we can look at in a future update. In the meantime if you hold alt when you select the brush it will ignore the associated tool. So you can have eraser and alt-click a brush which is associated with paint brush but you will remain in eraser.

After trying the new Brushes panel some more, there is one new feature that kind of bothers me. Switching tools now automatically shows the selected brush on the list, even other brush categories, which is fine most of the time. Other times however when I am using shortcuts and wish to select a specific brush that I already have visible (i.e. Smudge Tool, Blur Tool, etc.), I switch to a completely different list because that is the one that was selected for that tool.
Personally I would like it if there was an option to turn off the auto-find brush selection feature so it works like how it used to, at least when it comes to switching between categories. To me I find it disorienting switching to new categories automatically for certain projects, so being able to choose functionality would be much appreciated.

Hi Harry,
Currently, when we Export, we generate the image in the background and then move it to your specified location which was our reasoning for using Move instead of Save however as far as I'm aware we are currently looking at possibly changing this back to save to avoid confusion.
Thanks
C

Just to confirm:
This may be by design as the specific value input field was likely considered unnecessary for baseline grids opacity as you've mentioned, but I will be sure to check this with the team and log as required.
This is logged with our devs, I'll 'bump' this for you now.
I can see the Noise slider doesn't have an input value box here, which I assume is what you're referring to - I'm getting this logged with the team also

Unfortunately, Serif rarely comments on their plans. As to whether or not they are aware of them, or plan to remedy them, who knows?
Personally, after 8+ years (yes I started with Designer v1 when it launched), I've stopped waiting for Affinity to fix the long-standing issues, and 'professional' feature requests, as going by their actions (the underwhelming, overhyped v2 release, along with the upcoming anaemic v2.1 release) I think Serif are quite content simply remaining in the hobbyist, casual user market. As much as I like the Affinity suite, I'm very reluctant to commit to working with it due to all of the bugs, workflow issues, missing tools/features, and uncertainty that my work will remain accessible into the future (with their proprietary, 'non-standard' file formats). 

Hi, I am an advertising graphic designer with 25 years of experience. I have been using the Affinity Suite for 3 years (starting with Photo and Designer and then adding Publisher as soon as it was in beta). In Italy, I have created a course dedicated to Affinity Publisher and numerous Live sessions to help other users understand the differences between Adobe and Affinity workflows. I have helped some graphic studios to make the transition. Unfortunately, I have repeatedly highlighted the significant technical limitations present in both the V1 and V2 Suites, which, from my point of view as a Senior professional, are extremely frustrating and cause significant workflow time losses for graphic agencies. This text will be a bit longer, unfortunately, but I hope effective and understandable.
These are essentially the points you will find below, primarily related to Affinity Publisher:

    •    PDF export is not currently reliable. Depending on the values entered, there is a risk of obtaining terrible unintended effects without realizing it. This includes text rasterizations (which automatically transform a Black K-100 into a Rich Black in part of a text), knockout black instead of overprints, and unwanted effects when certain types of FX are applied at the layer. Not to mention what happens if I work with a text with an FX shadow on a Pantone color (the Pantone becomes a CMYK where the shadow is present, instead of remaining a Pantone and accepting the shadow in overprint).

    •    Color management is terrible. If I assign Fogra39 to a file and then I have to print it at a printing company that uses a different color profile when I load the new color profile, all the colors in the file will have to be reassigned because they will completely lose their real composition (the K100 black will become a rich black again and so on, as if the entire color flow passes through RGB and then returns to CMYK).    

    •    There is no internal control system in the Suite that allows the user to understand in advance when these problems occur. Nor is there a tool to understand it after creating the PDF. An Export Persona is necessary for Affinity Publisher that gives the possibility to see exactly what happens in Color Separation when a certain combination of values is chosen from the PDF export menu.

    •    Swatches management is too slow. On the palette, I have to build my Global Colors, otherwise, I won't be able to modify them intelligently later on. But what happens when I copy an object from one document and bring it to another document? Its color palette is not added to the existing palette (each color has to be manually added one by one), and this creates a considerable loss of time.

    •    Why is there no way to transform a Global Color to which I have given the Spot value into a normal four-color process? It doesn't make sense. Often, in the workflow, the same color is changed several times, from Spot to Non-Spot, and only in the end is it decided what to do based on the printing. Here you cannot. The color must be remade and reassigned to each object.

    •    Why is there no way to replace one color with another? A "replace color" function would be excellent. As well as a function that asks me if I want to replace it with another color when I delete a Global Color from the palette. 

These are the most important and limiting things for me. Although one could list a whole series of minor bugs that have existed for years and have not been resolved.

After accepting that none of this was done in V2, my idea is that I am not part of Affinity's true target audience. I am a professional with extensive experience. I worked with Quark before, and then with Adobe for decades. Why should someone like me switch to an "economic" system like the Affinity Suite? My answer is that I appreciated the great effort made by Affinity to invent a new workflow that is non-destructive by default, more modern, and suitable for the hardware available today. I was bored of using Adobe.
However, after this first step, made years ago, it seems to me that there has been a change of direction. Not surprisingly, most of the Affinity users I talk to are students, enthusiasts, or even mid-level freelancers, but not high-level professionals. This makes sense. It would be a bit absurd to go to war against one of the largest software houses on the planet, we would come out of it with broken bones. Yet I still hope. I hope I am wrong and believe that Affinity can make it.
I have 3 copies purchased of V2 in the drawer. I don't use them because I don't need them, and my workflow now works well on V1, while on V2 I immediately ran into bugs that weren't present in V1. It also happened in Adobe, I'm not scandalized.

But the question to Affinity is: do you plan to address the points mentioned above? Are you aware of them? Do you have any ideas on how to remedy them? Or is it not in your plans?

The answer to these questions would certainly help thousands of professionals like me understand how to orient themselves.
Thank you and sorry for the length.
Sincerely, Beniamino (PS: translated from Italian with ChatGPT)

I agree with @jbmanos when he says we're talking about two different things.
1. is creating scripts within the Affinity applications themselves to extend or enhance the existing functionality of the apps. These 'scripts' are also sometimes referred to as macros, extensions, tools, plug-ins, etc. I think this is what most people are referring to when they talk about scripting with regards to the Affinity applications, and are similar to those scripts, extensions, plug-ins found in other applications such as Adobe Illustrator, After Effects, Blender, etc.
2. is automation of the Affinity apps from the host environment, using tools such as AppleScript (macOS, OSA Open Scripting Architecture) and Shortcuts (iOS/iPadOS and macOS). This type of scripting is often involved in creating complex automation workflows between applications, such as those used in the printing and gaming industries. This type of scripting requires app developers to provide a 'Dictionary' (API) with commands accessible via OSA, which is what @jbmanos is asking for. It's not in place of in-app scripting, but an addition that allows the Affinity applications to be utilized within much larger workflows.
Also, the newer 'Shortcuts' feature that is available on iOS, iPadOS, and macOS is a bit of a reimagining of how these workflows could not only be created, but utilized. AppleScript/OSA scripts are also supported within Shortcuts. 
It's also worth mentioning that many apps support both scripting extensions within their own application, as well as providing automation features that can be utilized to chain together much larger automation workflows between applications (including those from other companies). Adobe Illustrator, InDesign, etc. all provide an OSA automation 'dictionary' in add to their own internal scripting capabilities, which has made them indispensable to many industry workflows. 

That’s missing the point also. 
 
When I started the reply here, I was trying to explain that applescript is not the same thing as what people are asking for when saying “scripting”
 
I understand what you guys want is a way to - only as a means to give example here - program macros WITHIN the program.   Let’s call that scripting.  Adobe uses JavaScript for this, MS uses Visual basic, etc. 
 
As @walt.farrellsaid above -  this sense of scripting IS cross-platform.  I agree with what he said in this context and for that use of scripting (ie within the program)
 
What I poorly explained above is that AppleScript dictionaries are a fundamental of macOS apps and Affinity has not provided even a basic dictionary for any of its apps.  Applescript is not scripting as the term is being used here.
 
in other words, let’s say tomorrow that Affinity adds scripting and it is everything @walt.farrell wants.   I’d be happy because we all can share programmatic macros and what not and those would likely not be platform dependent.   But there would still be a deficiency on the macOS apps - my complaint that the apps are half-baked would remain.    
 
we really are talking about two different things here.  

+1. This would also be super helpful for those times in publisher when you need to export all of the pages in a Publisher document as images (not a single PDF). Currently it uses the name of the Publisher file along with a page number, but being able to specify a page name to be used instead would be really useful.

One suggestion with regards to the brush names. Left align them please, as it makes them far easier to visually scan.

+1. This would also be super helpful for those times in publisher when you need to export all of the pages in a Publisher document as images (not a single PDF). Currently it uses the name of the Publisher file along with a page number, but being able to specify a page name to be used instead would be really useful.

One suggestion with regards to the brush names. Left align them please, as it makes them far easier to visually scan.

One suggestion with regards to the brush names. Left align them please, as it makes them far easier to visually scan.