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Seneca

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Posts posted by Seneca

  1. JGD,

     

    Your logic would work if the Affinity products were on an equal feature-set with Adobe.

    At the moment that's not the case so there is no need for any secrecy, etc.

    That may change in the future of course.

     

    An early community feedback on certain choices taken by the developers might prove to be of great benefit to them and us, who end up using the software.

     

    But, this is only speculation on our part. But it does require bold thinking.

  2. I would very much like to see the Affinity products put on a 2 tier cycle.

     

    1. Beta releases for features that are baked in but not yet ready for the public consumption. Here, the community members can report bugs, etc. 

     

    2. Alfa releases or bleeding edge releases for features in development cycle.

    That way the community members can comment quite early on the features proposed by Serif and hone in on how they expect these feature to work.

    Basically, it gives Serif a very early feedback on the features being developed.

     

    My 2cents.

  3. Hi peterdanckwerts,

    If you use inDesign professionally, a monthly subscription is rather cheap. It pays for itself in an hour or so of your work.

    It will be very hard for Affinity Publisher to get anywhere near the features inDesign offers now, and this list will only increase by the time the Publisher will finally show up. I'm not bashing the Publisher here. It's just how I see things in the near and not so near future.

  4. Hi,

    The way I look at this is as follows:

     

    1. Scripting is for automation.

    2. Plug-ins are for adding new features to the software, ecosystem.

     

    Certainly, there are areas that these overlap in but as a general rule they have different purpose in life.

     

    We need both.

    Users, should be able to string together commands to automate repetitive tasks.

    Programmers, should be able to use languages like Objective-C, and hopefully Swift, to extend the software in ways not foreseen by the developers.

     

    For scripting, I would like to see JavaScript, but preferably Swift. Yes, Swift has been pitched by Apple as a Scripting language too. That would be terrific. AppleScript would be a welcome feature but looking at Apple's ambivalent position on it leaves me a bit cold. Not all applications written by Apple itself are AppleScript'able. 

    I would not like to see Python in any shape and form, but this is only my opinion.

     

    It would be great for someone from Affinity to give us a clue whether this is even on the cards.

    They are usually very upfront about features but in this particular instance they are still moot.

     

    Let's hope they have something great up their sleeve.

    Regards

  5. Hi william7,

    I'm convinced they definitely have a running version of Publisher. They used it to create 2 issues of the Affinity Magazine, etc.

    What they might have realised though is that it falls extremely short of the community expectations.

    So they have taken an executive decision and postponed it's beta launch while improving or re-evaluating its requirements specification.

    Of course, nobody blames the developers here.

    What I wanted to say in my earlier post was that AFFINITY might have missed this window of opportunity to compete with inDesign.

    I hope I'm wrong here.

  6. Frankly, I was very surprised that Affinity didn't think of implementing scripting in their applications from the beginning, particularly, since they developed common engine for all applications (Designer, Photo, Publisher) over the last 5 year. Surely, they know how popular it is in Adobe products. I don't want to second-guess why this happened. These guys are smart and know what they are doing. Having said that I would hope/expect/pray, (add your own words) for the following to happen:

     

    1. DOM accessibility through a scripting language like JavaScript

    2. Affinity to open up their APIs so that other small companies, resourceful users can fill the gap with features that Affinity doesn't want to support.

  7. I hope that one day Affinity will open up their APIs so that these things can be implemented by others.

     

    While this particular request may be added by Affinity soon, there are other requests, that may not be on the Affinity's radar but could be done by other resourceful users or smaller companies trying to extent the Affinity ecosystem.  :)

  8. Hi Bauke,

    I hope you read these articles yourself before posting them here.

    Here's a quote from one of these articles putting in doubt the validity of this approach:

     

    "The particular technique of condensing and expanding characters (glyph scaling) which is an essential part of the Hz-program, and which is now an option in Adobe InDesign and pdfTeX, has aroused critique from well-known designers like Ari Rafaeli. Typographer Torbjørn Eng has raised serious doubts about the validity of referencing the glyph scaling to Gutenberg."

     

    Regards

  9. I would love to see the Affinity developers getting involved in the development of Open Source libraries that can import inDesign and Adobe PageMaker files.

    I'm sure that the developers of Scribus would welcome that. Scribus for those who don't know is an open source project that tries to compete with inDesign as a publishing platform. They already have a rudimentary support of opening inDesign and PageMaker files and a slew of other formats as well. Nothing is stopping the Affinity developers to use these libraries and in the process improving them. That would not only benefit the Scribus fanbase but also Affinity Publisher users.

    To be able to open inDesign documents natively, however imperfectly, is immensely better that opening PDF documents alone. 

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