Ascy

As an occasional and very long time user of Serif products, I'm very sad to hear this news. Whilst it may not be the same as Adobe buying Macromedia (remember them?) or Corel (was it?) buying Ulead's PhotoImpact (RIP), I still think that Affinity will soon move to a subscription only model (within the next couple of years). Once Serif has been sold to Canva, there will literally be nothing Serif staff can do about it. I don't buy the logic that the Canva sale is required to invest in Serif to make the products better. If you look at Serif's accounts (available online as they are a company registered in England), they made around £16m profit out of around £32m in sales in 2022. Admin expenses (which includes staff wages) were less than £13m, so Serif weren't short of cash to invest in other projects or more staff (though, as a software dev/architect, more staff does not always equate to greater productivity, indeed sometimes the opposite). But the money was there already, assuming 2023 wasn't a complete disaster for them. Basically, the shareholders have sold Serif for presumably a large payday. There was enough profit to invest in other stuff, should they have wished to. Now they've lost control of the company (or are about to), so are no longer in charge of their own destiny. What a shame for British software.

This suggestion has been made previously in the v1 forums: Most modern IDEs or code editors have a feature whereby you can bring up a bar into which you can type, resulting in a list of matching actions being returned (with those not relevant greyed out). Within the last year, I even discovered that Microsoft Office applications even have this feature - if you press ALT+Q in any of their apps and then type the name of a command, it will be listed (eg in Excel, press ALT+Q and type 'cell' and 'Format cell' will be listed, amongst other commands). This feature is a huge usability boost as you no longer have to spend time memorising where a menu or button lives, nor keyboard shortcuts. All you need to know is that something can be done and the rough name of it (or an alias) and you'll be able to see the command listed (along with any assigned keyboard shortcut). As well as being useful to infrequent users such as myself, I would also bet that it would be incredibly useful to those migrating from other software provided by pricier (to put it mildly) competitors. Also, on a separate note, I'd like to suggest that you give away versions of your previous Serif suite of software to anyone with a Universal License (or any Affinity license at all). Sometimes there might be a useful effect or filter in the old PhotoPlus that hasn't been implemented in Affinity Photo, so to some people this might add some slight bit of value (providing it's made clear that they are completely unsupported).