Seneca

Apps: Designer
Platforms: All
A new vector flood tool has been added to Affinity Designer. This is denoted by a paint bucket icon in the Tools Panel (on iPad you can find it nested with the gradient fill tool, on Windows it will currently need to be manually added via Customising the Tools Panel).
This tool allows you to automatically fill areas created by overlapping / intersecting shapes and open curves in your document. This tool requires you to make a selection first of the curves / shapes you want the tool to consider. You can then choose a colour from the colour or swatches panel, and tap within any enclosed area to create a new shape with that fill colour. While in the tool you can also drag swatches from the swatches panel onto any area.

There are two insertion modes to this tool you can select from the context toolbar:
Inside. This will attempt to create the new shapes / fills and place them inside existing shapes where possible. In-between. This will break fills and strokes apart in existing shapes, and insert the new fills in-between.  The difference between the two is shown below. 


While using the tool you can hold Cmd (macOS / iPad) or Ctrl (Windows) to make new selections (also combining with Shift to add / remove items from your selection). You can also click-drag the tool to quickly fill many areas all at once, a simple example is shown below with some text:

The tool works with any type of fill - solid colour, gradient or bitmap. The options in the context toolbar for min, max and stretch to fit are relevant only to gradient and bitmap fills, and refers to the method used to scale the fill to the new shape.
For bitmap fills you can select a bitmap fill swatch to use, alternatively you can create bitmap fills on the fly by dragging a texture file or asset directly into the active colour in the toolbar. Below is a video showing that in action with using assets to create bitmap fills:
Texture Fills.mov
For bitmap fills if the texture has any transparency then the fill will be added as an additional fill to the shape. This allows for overlay style textures to be easily added on top of an existing colour fill. We will look at a way to make this behaviour optional.
Finally it's also worth pointing out that when you are in the tool you can also drag swatch from your swatches panel directly into any area in your selection, to quickly add multiple different colours to areas without having to select them first.
We would love you to try this new tool out and let us know what you think or if you encounter any bugs or unexpected results.

Apps: All
Platforms: Windows, macOS and iPad
We have implemented some analytics within the apps which you can optionally choose to share with us. These are fully anonymous so we cannot identify anything down to an individual, but it just gives us some top-level data about our apps usage and stability on different hardware, languages and operating systems. This is incredibly useful to us, and ultimately helps in being able to produce better and more stable apps - so we would really appreciate it if you do choose to share analytics with us, but also of course understand if you choose not to. You will be prompted about this on the first run of one app in the suite on each platform, and you can also change your preference at any time in settings.

Below is the list of all new features and improvements included in the 2.1 beta. This new functionality is in addition to the many bug fixes and stability improvements in this version (currently 2.1.0.1790).
Depending on how the beta goes / how many issues there are to fix it's possible some more items will be added to this list before 2.1 is officially released - follow this topic if you want to be notified if that happens.

To learn more about these features please click on the link to go to each feature's dedicated post. To give feedback or report bugs against any of these features please reply to that same post (also check out bug reporting and feedback tips).
Features and improvements affecting all platforms
Balanced dashed lines and other stroke improvements (new in build 1730) Running headers in Affinity Publisher (new in build 1730) Show special characters added to Designer and Photo (added to iPad too in 1730) Adjusted Mask Behaviour (new in build 1730) Auto-select options in move tool (new in build 1713/1714) Square bracket stroke width adjustment expanded functionality Blend mode keyboard shortcuts Alt / Option - drag to duplicate in Layers panel Alt / Option click to expand / collapse all in Layers panel Crop tool improvements Auto clean added to paint mixer brush Paste inside picture frame Vector Flood Fill Guides improvements Vector warp nodes now obey snapping Brush panel improvements Raster perspective and mesh warp live filters added to Designer Search bar added to your add-ons (new in build 1713/1714) Analytics Windows and macOS features and improvements
WebP and JPEG XL now available in batch export (new in build 1736) Migrate retail version content and settings to beta version (new in build 1730) Cross references available in Affinity Publisher (this has now been pushed back to 2.2 as announced here) "Close All" added to File menu Asset panel reordering improvements Rename... added to Layer menu & tab behaviour Mask to below... added to Layer menu Measure tool now available in Photo and Publisher Place tool now available in Affinity Photo Drag / Drop bitmap fill to colour and swatch panel Zoom tool context options in Develop persona iPad features and improvements
New left swipe options on iPad layers panel (new in build 1736) Redesigned edit menu (new in build 1730) Some file management changes to iPad (new in build 1730) Style picker added to iPad apps (new in build 1713/1714) Drop down menus with checkable options no longer auto close New keyboard shortcut options added Reset rotation in navigator with double tap Pencil double tap option to open quick menu Long press geometry operation to create compound Tapping warp group thumbnail now selects node tool PDF options now exposed when opening Modifiers now available for Select Object Hide Layer type icon now available Main view rulers added  
If you have not enrolled into the beta program yet and would like to take part, you can do so here. This will immediately give you access to the latest 2.1 beta builds to try for yourself.

Apps: All
Platforms: Windows, macOS and iPad
A number of suggestions have been taken on with guides...

1. When you move a guide by dragging it on a document you will now see both the position of the guide relative to the ruler origin (as before) as well as the distance from the guide's previous position. So this means if, for example, you just want to move a guide 10mm you can achieve that easily without having to change the ruler origin.


2.When dragging a guide, holding Shift will now snap the guide to ruler marks. As this is based on ruler marks this also means the further you are zoomed the granularity of the Shift-constrained snap increases. Shift will snap based on the distance from origin, Shift-Alt will snap to the delta distance.
3. If you hold Alt or Command (Ctrl on windows) before dragging a guide that will now create a copy of the guide.
4. If you drag a new guide from rulers then guide visibility will automatically be toggled on (if it was set to off).
5. Alt-clicking on any guide will delete the guide.
6. Double clicking on an existing guide will now open the guide manager dialog (with the guide you had double clicked having focus in that dialog.
 
Please note: on iPad you will need to use an attached keyboard or use the command controller (if not visible you can toggle it on from the document menu) to access the modifiers. Also worth bearing in mind that Alt is the global modifier for ignore snapping, so if you create a copy of a guide using Alt while you still hold Alt snapping will be disabled.
Please let us know what you think or if you spot any problems with this new functionality.

@Piktom Designbüro I just did some experimenting, and if I have "Allow JPEG compression" checked in the PDF options, I don't get the issue. Odd. I'd rather not have extra compression applied on output, but I'm leaving it very high at 98, and can't see any difference in quality. Hope that helps… but also hope they can resolve the bug!

To simplify the process: please ask first the print shop how they want to have the job, and whether they accept directly an RGB based PDF and do the necessary conversions themselves. It is possible that they can handle a pure RGB job without any problems and will make e.g. the necessary conversion of RGB-based black text to K100 (black ink only) right from an RGB file. 
If the printshop wants a CMYK PDF, and you have the RGB version of the publication already finished, it is a good idea to make a copy of the publication for the print project and make the necessary changes to the copy.
Do the following changes to the copy:
1) Change the color mode to CMYK/8. Use the CMYK profile recommended by the print shop. What to choose mainly depends on whether you are going to print on coated or uncoated paper, and where you are located. In the US (and many other parts of the world) the default CMYK profile of Affinity apps (U.S. Web Coated v2) will be fine for most projects. In Europe something like Coated Fogra 39 or close "relatives" ISO Coated v2, etc. are common. 
2) Once that document color mode is changed, all colors are shown simulating the target CMYK profile, which means that some of the saturation of colors is lost. But your RGB definitions are still there so there is absolutely no need to change your current color definitions or relink any images or change their color mode. The conversion will be done by the CMYK target profile to give you the best possible result when the job is exported to print PDF. There is basically zero need for making any changes to linked images or to use CMYK color libraries or to redefine colors in CMYK. 
3) Except for usage of black color, and specifically in text. That needs to be changed from the RGB black (R0, G0, B0) to CMYK (C0, M0, Y0, K100). You should be able to do that relatively easily if your text is formatted using text styles, or by using Find / Replace feature and looking for formatting where the color of searched text is R0, G0, B0 and then specify that the color of replaced text should to C0, M0, Y0,  K100). It might also be necessary to do similar change for graphic elements containing pure RGB black to avoid excessive use of ink since pure RGB 0, 0, 0 black will be printed as rich black (using all four inks so that the ink coverage will be somewhere around 300% depending on the CMYK color profile you are using). Ask the print shop if they think this kind of conversion is needed -- in large graphic objects use of rich black is often wanted to produce deeper black but this really depends on details so ask the printer. Four-color-black in e.g. thin lines might print slightly blurred due to small registration errors. [This MIGHT be an issue if there are lots of placed vector graphics like charts in the publication since if they are in RGB format, it would be ideal to have RGB black in them to be redefined in K100. But that is a special situation.]
4) If there is need to define colors for any (new) objects, you can continue to specify colors in RGB, if you wish. The visual appearance on screen will be that of the document target, but if you export to RGB, the actual RGB definition of the color will be used. For CMYK exports, an automatically converted CMYK value will be used. The purpose of the lock in the Color panel is to make sure that the actual object specific color definitions do not change depending on the color model chosen in the Color panel. The default is that the lock is turned on (it is a document setting, so the lock is turned on or off as per document, not as per object). As long as the lock is turned on, you can freely switch the color model of the Color panel and check which color values any object will have when exported using RGB or CMYK color model. The underlying color definitions are not changed. But if you turn off the lock, the Color panel will show the actual color definitions objects have, and if you now switch the color model while an object is selected, the color definition will actually change without touching the color value controls, at all. You should be careful not to do that unless you really want to make redefinitions of color values since after having changed an RGB color definition to CMYK (just by switching the color model in Colors panel), the saturation of the color is lost, so if you subsequently wanted to prepare an RGB export from the job, CMYK to RGB automatic color values would be used instead of full-RGB-gamut original colors. When the lock is on, redefinition of the color value only happens when you touch the color value controls or manually retype the value in color composite boxes.
5) How realistically your display simulates the target colors in CMYK depends on how well your system is color managed and whether your display is calibrated. Use of CMYK color libraries might be useful in such situations, but then you should also have printed color swatches since in poorly managed system you could not trust in what you see on your display when choosing colors from these libraries. So in practise, if separate publications need to be prepared, it is wise to finish the job in RGB color mode and then prepare the CMYK publication. Note that as long as you do not have pixel layers in the publication, you can freely switch back and forth the document color mode between RGB and CMYK without changing the color definitions, just to see how colors look in either mode. If you do that, just make sure that you never manually change the color profile at the switch time since change of color profiles results in converted color values unless you choose to use the Assign option (in File > Document Setup > Color).   
6) When exporting a CMYK PDF, you should basically choose to use the document color profile and not change the profile in this stage since if you do, the exported colors will be recalculated and e.g. the K-only black would be converted to four-color black. So make sure that the profile stays, and use the PDF production method recommended by the printshop.
EDIT: As long as you are going to use Redbubble, please read this:
https://blog.redbubble.com/2017/05/designing-in-cmyk-vs-rgb/
If this really describes their process accurately, then my advise is that do not change anything when sending them "print" jobs since they can only use RGB raster files (JPG, PNG and GIF). The colors will be converted in the process but their production method is non-professional in terms of color management and recommendations given here are provided just to avoid customer dissatisfaction when seeing how an RGB design will (inevitably) become less vivid and bright in final products. So when you switch to CMYK color mode in an Affinity app, you can approximate "realistically enough" how your design will look like in the products you are creating using Redbubble. In this context most of what I mentioned above is not relevant. The process they describe would basically mean conversion of an RGB design to CMYK raster image and then converting it back to RGB to produce the final RGB/PNG or GIF file, which is basically waste of time (this conversion will be produced by them, anyway, and inevitably better than the designer could do, without knowing which exact CMYK profile needs to be used in conversion.)

Hello @Neil22th,
Welcome to the forum. Sorry to hear to have a problem with this.
You don't need to switch to single pages in order to export your work to PDF. I assume you are exporting your work to PDF to send it to the printer.
Just select Export from the File menu and choose All pages from the Area pop-up menu and you should be good to go.

I also printed your page on VersaLink C400 Xerox Laser Printer and it prints fine.
So the product is just fine. I think you should check your printer.

Hello @chapolote,
I can reproduce it.

Well perhaps manage your expectations 😉
There's been 12 weeks of development time since 2.0 launch and 2 of those were Christmas/New Year and 2-3 were doing 2.0.3 and 2.0.4 updates so that list would be quite the achievement in a short time, but this is just the start of a 2.x cycle so it's time to tell our audience what they bought into. With no updates for 1.10 for a year and no new features for even longer we have lots of newish users who don't really know us as a company or know that they have bought into a product with free updates with features and improvement. It's been a while and we're excited, but please remember 2.1 is the START of that journey 

Make sure that your blue layer is a pixel layer, then this will work for you.

Yes, it is strange and yes, there must be something in the request for payment that goes to the card provider that triggers some sort of check for approval of a recurring payment and when that approval is NOT present, the transaction is declined.
Meanwhile, I am pleased to report that @Patrick Connor went way, way, beyond his job description and although he couldn't fix the failed transaction, he has waved a magic wand and I do now have an activated copy of Photo 2.

Not the end of the world but misalignments in the Style Panels should be sorted out.
Also spaces between each entry across all the panels in the Text Style should really be standardised to one size.

 

Any chance of posting a screen grab of that misalignment.
My personal take on copying all presents to a new system is that you may end up wasting more time trying to figure out why things don't work rather than just recreating them from scratch.

Hello @Saro,
I will only share my view on the last 2 points – DPI and Colour Profile.
DPI
1200dpi produces best results.  But the higher the dpi the more disk space you need and for comic books 600dpi is more than enough in my opinion. But as always consult your printer first.
Colour Profile
The best way is alway to consult your printer. They will be able to advise on that. And that's why there is really no right or wrong answer regarding Option 1, 2 or 3.

Not the end of the world but misalignments in the Style Panels should be sorted out.
Also spaces between each entry across all the panels in the Text Style should really be standardised to one size.

 

I followed your steps and I'm getting the same readings as you.

You don't have to do that.
On creating a PDF just select Text as Curves in the Advanced Tab, Embed Fonts option.

Thank you @Seneca. It seems the step I missed was opening the apps from my Applications folder. Functioning OK now. Thanks so much. Regards, Robyn

Believe it or not, a rudimentary vectorizer has been included with Affinity from the very launch of Publisher 1!
Before you get too excited though: it only works on images with transparency, for example 1-bit images with alpha channel.
But hey, better than nothing, right?
Place your image into a Publisher document, the more pixels the original image has, the better Select the image and click the Edit Wrap Outline button in the main toolbar Copy Paste = Curves object: there's your image (roughly) vectorized, traced based on the transparency outline Apply fill and stroke as you see fit Optionally convert all the sharp nodes to smooth or smart nodes to make it appear less jagged, clean up as you see fit Tested in APu v1.10.6 Mac and APu v2.0.3 iPad.

Hello @flyleaf,
Please see my attachment. You don't need to do anything except resize the size of the caption according to your needs.
When resizing the caption please use the text handles and not the size handle (the sticking out handle at the bottom right of the text box)
Caption.afpub

I expressed my opinion about it before but I will say it again.
To me being able to export to IDML from Publisher is extremely important. Nobody should expect a perfect match between applications. Even Adobe doesn't guarantee that. But the fact that I can open an IDML file in Publisher, inDesign or QuarkXpress is very reassuring.
Just have a look at  how many people want to open PagePlus files in Publisher and they can't.
To have a common denominator export such as IDML is just great.

Well maybe from some usage point of view, aka once carved in stone. - Though keep in mind that you are cutted of/away from newer apps and technology that have come along. To give you an idea of what I mean is, no more Firefox/Chrome/Safari ... webbrowser updates, Mail.app doesn't support/fullfil >= TLS 1.2, a bunch of interesting apps don't run under El Capitan at all any more (since they are build/compiled for much newer MacOS versions). Xcode 8.2.1 & Swift 3.01 & clang 8.0 are long time outdated and don't support newer build projects etc. And so on ... the list gets long and longer here! - With other words, time goes by...!
RIP. - There comes a time when you need to cut old hardware/software braids whether you like it or not, time and evolving hardware and software technologies dictate this. - And unfortunately for El Capitan, that time has long since come.

Hello @Dukerino,
I tried to reproduce your issue and am unable to. I am on MacOSX.
Are you on a Mac or Windows?
Are you in a position to record a short video that shows the problem?

Hello @AndyV,
Did you manage to solve your problem?
When I select something in Affinity Photo and want to transform it I need to select the Move Tool in order to achieve that.
Selecting the Move Tool will give you the corner nodes you need to perform the transformation.