Seneca

I don't think anyone is implying the software is perfect, nor that you're totally at fault. It's the type of reaction and how it will be received / perceived. I can understand the frustration -- I've been there many times (in this case not with Affinity but certainly with others), but to complain in this manner will just look like whining. At best your readers will wonder why you continue to use such "bad" tools. Or even worse they may wonder whether they can trust your expertise when you're "obviously" having issues using the same tools others apparently use without problem. I'm not saying that's literally true, but it's the perception.
Part of being professional is dealing with problems and moving on. The problems are real, but they're not your customers' fault so there's no reason to complain to them. 

This tells me that you must have switched vertical text alignment to middle earlier in your work.
Select the text box with the move tool. Go to Text-> Vertical Alignment -> Top.
That should fix it.

Let me confirm, there will not be any additional discount for Black Friday - it so happens that our launch offer will continue over it, but we will remain at 40% off until 14th December.

Sometimes I get the feeling that some people just want to try to find as many problems to complain about that they can. They’re not really interested in using Affinity software and discussing it in a rational way. If it’s so bad, I don’t get why they don’t just stop using it, rather than endless criticisms, and insulting anyone who disagrees with them.
I suspect the only thing that would make them happy would be to ban everyone from these forums who actually uses the software, likes it and dares to say so! Genuine, reasoned criticism is fine, but people with a different point of view should be allowed to express their views as well!
 

I thought that this forums was open to everyone, even to an unskilled person like me.
But it seems that my post has offended you deeply so I offer you my sincere apology.

@Seneca Or, it could be you and François disagree about what constitutes "taking off." 

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
This is a duplicate post of a thread that is now locked and moved to the questions forum

Remember 'The Mythical Man Month' . It was a book published in the mid seventies about the development of an IBM operating system. The project ran late and IBM threw more and more people into the team. Progress slowed.
Much later Pro-Engineer, a CAD CAM company was founded by a very small team of software engineers who were fed up with their large employer. They produced a very successful innovative product which became more popular than that of their previous employer. I expect that there are many examples where small teams successfully challenge big teams.
A small expert and enthusiastic team in which everyone knows and understands what everyone else is doing can make rapid progress. Big teams get bogged down with lack of communication and lack of shared understanding. A small company like Serif does compete with the Adobe leviathan.
I have bought the full Affinity licence although I only use Photo (and Publisher occasionally). I wish the company well.

Some people don't seem to understand that if someone bought a piece of software when it first came out, several years ago, they had to wait for years for many updates to be added. Someone who bought the same software a few months ago already has all those updates included. "Old" purchasers and "new" ones have exactly the same version of the software, the only difference is that some people had to wait for the updates to be added, while others received the software with all those updates already included!
(By the way, personally I would not believe everything I see on YouTube or on social media!)

Oh, come now. Let's be realistic, and compare Publisher's development progress with InDesign:
InDesign 1: Everything new! (1991) <--> Publisher R1: Everything New! (2019)
Both were products developed from scratch by companies with a deep understanding and experience developing design software.
Either first release lacked footnotes or book support. But Publisher R1 offers a wide range of features that were only introduced in InDesign by version 2 ~three years later in 2022: transparency, TOC, indexes, glyphs panel, tables - to name but a few things.
And MANY features that are part of Publisher R1 only became available after years and years of development later in subsequent InDesign releases: multi-page PDF placing, bullets and numbering, dynamic spelling, IDML format, multiple page sizes in a single file, primary text frame, Hunspell dictionaries, anchored objects, data merging tools, doc info fields, hyperlinks (pdf), smart guides, effects, and so on and so forth.
InDesign 2 <--> Publisher R2
InDesign became somewhat usable compared to QuarkXPress three years later. Rather lacking, but it was the first release that professional users (including myself) began testing the waters with. SO MUCH was missing compared to Publisher R2. But one thing InDesign 2 had going for it: OS X was supported. QXP only supported that OS much later, and it was one reason why Mac users installed it.
The InDesign developers also inexplicably removed useful features such as SVG export in 2008 with CS4, however. (Publisher has been a gods' end in this regard: I have converted quite a few InDesign publications by opening the IDML, fixing a few things, and export the pages to SVG! 🙂 )
Version R2 of Publisher is a far more mature product compared to InDesign 2, 3, or even CS2 (which was released 8 years after version 1).
I am aware it is not possible to compare the development cycles of the two programs directly. Affinity Publisher started development in a time when dev tools have become easier and more efficient to develop with. But still, to state that development is lagging or slow is rather out-of-touch with the realities of complex software development.
In fact, I am quite impressed with what the Affinity devs have accomplished so far with Publisher. They are far ahead of the curve compared to InDesign's development cycle.
All that said, I do agree that there are a few inexplicable omissions in Publisher that seem so foundational to publishing in general that prevent myself from using it - because I simply cannot produce a press ready PDF. My personal pet peeve is the lack of 1bit bitmaps and support to output these properly in a PDF. The lack of spreads beyond two pages is another one. And reflowable epub export would be grand.
Yet as it is said: Rome was not built in a day. Neither was InDesign, and the same holds true for Affinity. Even though I cannot use Publisher yet for much of my work and still rely on InDesign, I position myself as a pragmatic person. I trust these issues will be tackled and solved in the not-so-long term. I am patient. And there is no need to flip over in anger over software or what could have been.
(I continued to use QuarkXPress till 6-7 years later after InDesign's first release).

WASM reminds me of Rust hype, which reminds me of HTML hype which reminded me of Ruby hype which reminded me of thin client hype which reminded me of Lawn Mower Man hype for VR etc etc etc.
C is here to stay.
Forever.
And that's Ok.
-- Embedding Lua is also light, fast and easy.
end
this is what the "for" in "make plugins for Affinity products" means. ie API access.

I'm relatively new to illustration and Affinity and this is my first image upload (1500x2000 px jpg image). I used Designer v2 to create this illustration of my custom-built classical guitar and thought it came out fairly well, given my very limited experience and familiarity with the program. I still have a tremendous amount to learn about illustration and Designer, but I'm having fun doing it. I'm a long-time photographer and photo editor, but illustration is a whole new ballgame, as I am discovering. As a photographer, I paid attention to lighting, highlights, shadows, reflections, etc, but those elements were already pre-existing in a photo and I could easily enhance them, as desired. In illustration, I have to create these elements myself, which I have found forces me to pay much more attention to highlights, shadows and reflections. It makes me appreciate how important these elements are to form, depth and realism. It's quite an education, and will no doubt make me a better photographer and photo editor too. 
I'm very open to any suggestions and constructive criticisms. I want to get better at illustration. So, if you have any suggestions, please let me know. Thanks.
Lou

To answer the points one by one:
1. Professionally means earning the larger part of your income from DTP.
2. You may be right, but it doesn't feel like it.
3. (ignoring the insulting quote marks) we are not talking here about whether we like the colours of an icon or a hundred and one things that don't matter/have easy work arounds. We are talking absolute deal breakers that anybody who uses DTP extensively for technical reports, books, magazines, company prospectuses, exam papers, etc etc etc cannot do without.
4. I don't use it, because I can't yet, but I do support it because I believe in it as a worthwhile project that I want to see succeed (yes, I know that's old school, but then I'm very old).
5. No there are not - not for macOS anyway. Or does the ellipse signify sarcasm? In which case the implication is that there are not any other such options, in which case it is more important than ever to make sure APub is fit for purpose.

Hey Mr. Ash
thank you for your clarifying words above, thought I don't see any need for them. You did an awesome, marvelous job on v2 and as a customer whos been around for years now, I think the 40% off starting price for v2 is more than each customer around can wish for. I gladly would have paid even the full price, since I think that even this is (200 for the whole stuff) is more than fair.
So what I want to say is, unfortunately you can't make it right for anyone, there are always some out there who has sth to complain.

Keep on that awesome work
Gordon

Hi Everyone, I'm new to the Affinity forum. I just purchased Affinity photo yesterday after trying it for 5 days. I'm impressed that the program worked on my old (2017) PC laptop. I've been spending a lot of time this week watching all the available tutorials on this product. I made this image after watching one of the videos. 
 

+1 for grep styles. Not having these is dealbreaker for me.

For professionals, affinty is the best deal ever seen.
I pay 600€ per year for concurrent softwares... Since 2017, I have paid 3000€.
With Affinity, since July 2017, I have only paid €268.96. V2 included. In 5 years! V2 cost me less than V1. 🤣
I think Serif has an extremely respectable pricing policy and the best value for money.
Only one thing to say: Thank you! 🤘

Affinity has been far beyond fair in its pricing. I appreciate that tremendously. The only thing I was disappointed about was the new installer that used some mysterious, difficult to find installation folder, but apparently they're already addressing that.
Thanks for great software!

@AshI have enjoyed using Affinity Photo for several years and appreciate your more than generous pricing, the fantastic learning opportunities provided through the past years, the friendly and prompt in answering questions and solving problems over the years.  For me the Affinity team has always delivered a great product, lets me doing editing I would not be able to do otherwise, and enjoy improving my skills.  Thank you to your whole team.
Peace
Marvin

Thank you for remaining subscription-free — seeing that you folks sold several times better than expected is awesome news. I hope many people are already leaving the dark side to join Affinity, with many more to join us still. All of us will not hesitate to purchase again to keep this beautiful software alive and independent. You’re the best!

I for one was happy to pay for the new Universal Licence, to me the 40% discounted price represents fantastic value for money considering what we are getting for it. Everyone gets the same offer price - personally, I am happy with that.
In my mind it looks like this:
3x macOS apps at £25 each
3x iOS apps at £5 each
BARGAIN!

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

While we can resize the Section Manager on the Mac, I wish we could resize the left and right side of the panel independently. As it is the right hand side is not resizeable at all and we can only see a fraction of the section name we type in the Section name text field. I think this really needs to be improved.

1. Footnotes
2. Books
3. Universal license

Come on Let's twist again! - The Serif Stars ⭐ 😀 🎉👯‍♂️

Don't forget to turn on the audio! 🔊 😉

twist-again-edit.mp4