AdroitAndroid

OK, I tried opening a new documet using Affinity Photo as well, and I got a hang. Publisher was in the background using the Photo persona this whole time. When I quit Publisher, Designer started behaving as expected when creating a new document. So it looks like this was a bug.

I've created a new document in Affinity Designer 2.4.0. I used a Web preset and adjusted the pixel size. It opens, and I can see layers as I add them. I can select objects. But… none of the content is actually visible. It doesn't matter what fill color I use. The rectangle is inside the bounds of the Artboard. The behavior doesn't change if I uncheck Transparent background. I've tried creating several different documents with various settings, and I'm always getting the same behavior. What am I doing wrong?

Yes, I am still new to Affinity and I attempt to drag a swatch to the eyedropper at one point. This isn't how it is meant to work, and doesn't acutally make much sense given how it's used; I didn't understand Affinity's ideosyncratic eyedropper mechanics at the point that I made the video. 🙂 Yes, that works when the color is already in Publisher. But I was/am attempting to import a color from elsewhere, hence trying to drop onto the swatches area to then select it. In playing around with this, I have discovered a possibility that no one has mentioned thus far: you can just drag and drop a color from another app directly onto an OBJECT in Affinity. Once the object has been given the color, it will show up in the Recent swatches list and you can use it like any other color. You can then add it to a palette if you want to keep it for later. This is by far the easiest solution, especially because Affinity doesn't have to be frontmost when you start the drag. I'm glad we got there in the end! I don't think this detracts from any of my suggested improvements above, but it does solve my problem in this case. Glad I could document this solution for anyone else trying to import colors in the future. affinity-dnd.mp4

Thanks for letting me know @DanC, I appreciate the reply. I'm sorry to hear that this is working as designed at present. One of the other pretty frustrating limitations of the existing implementation is that I can't find a way to easily share colors between Affinity documents in a tabbed interface. AFAIK, tabs are the default arrangement when creating new documents. But when you drag a swatch to the other document's tab, nothing happens. (The hovered tab should activate after a short delay and allow you to finish the drag in the second document.) And the eyedropper doesn't work either: the tool state seems to be isolated to the document, so as soon as you switch tabs, the context of the document you're trying to import the color into changes and the eyedropper is gone. Is a user really expected to: Drag the tab out into a second window Move the new window if needed so the relevant color isn't obscured Use the eyedropper tool Drag the tab back into place If so, I hope you'd argee that this is quite painful and nonobvious UX! If I'm missing a trick, please do let me know. I really feel like color sharing is not very well thought-out in the current interface, and I would encourage you to spend some time thinking about the most ergonomic way for a user to actually share colors (both in and out) between Affinity tools, documents and other apps. The eyedropper is great when it works, but sometimes it just isn't the right tool for the job.

Thanks @Return. As Walt says, there's an issue with that right now. But I still think this bug is relevant, since this is how all other color wells behave on macOS. InDesign has drag and drop between elements within ID; I don't have a CS sub, so I can't test if it also uses the pasteboard to allow dragging to and from different apps. I would hope so, but it's Adobe, so… 🤷‍♂️

A bit more data. The reason the drag from Affinity doesn't work is likely related to the fact that the Drag pasteboard isn't changed at all when the drag is initiated. So there's no way for other apps to access the color information.

In Mac desktop apps, moving colors around is a simple matter of drag and drop. When I want to use a color in Publisher that I've defined in another application (for example in Color Slurp), I expect to be able to drag the color swatch (a macOS term) from Color Slurp into the Publisher Color palette and just drop it on the circle showing the foregound color of the selected object. Unfortunately, this doesn't work. I also have not had success dragging into the Swatches palette, or into the "Fill" and "Stroke" color wells in the toolbar. None of the color picker options in the popup button of the Color tab of the popover which opens when you click these color wells accept drags either. I would also expect dragging and dropping color swatches within Publisher to work, but it doesn't. Initiating a drag from the Swatches palette to a color well in the toolbar works, but the drop itself is rejected. Attempting to drag from a color well, which should produce a swatch which you can drop elsewhere, both in and outside of Publisher, seems to do nothing.

Oh, I see. Thanks for explaining how this works. It seems this only works if Affinity is the foreground app. If Affinity is taking up your whole screen, this approach won't work. When you switch apps to bring the other item to the foreground, the drag event ends. It also doesn't work to press Cmd while clicking Affinity in the background to start the drag event while the other application is in the foreground. This is still quite cumbersome, because it will involve changing the size of the Affinity window. If there's another way, I'd love to hear about it.

In other Mac desktop apps, moving colors around is a simple matter of drag and drop. When I want to use a color in Publisher that I've defined in another application (for example in Color Slurp), I expected to be able to drag the color swatch (a macOS term) from Color Slurp into the Color palette and just drop it on the circle showing the foregound color of the selected object. Unfortunately, this doesn't work. I also have not had success dragging into the Swatches palette, or into the "Fill" and "Stroke" color wells in the toolbar. None of the color picker options in the popup button of the Color tab of the popover which opens when you click these color wells accept drags either. The only way I've found to reliably import a color is to copy its RGB hex value, open the popover from the color well, select "RGB Hex Sliders" and paste the 6-character hex code into the # box. This is super cumbersome. 😞 Is there a way to drag and drop colors from other apps that I'm missing? If not, is there some simpler way to import a color from a color well elsewhere in macOS?

Having a reliable way to enter "Normal Mode" is really important, and Ctrl+Enter seems like a good keystroke for that given alignment with other suites. It's especially important because Esc doesn't work reliably. For instance, if you have some text selected, the first Esc clears the selection. But if you press the key for the next tool at that point, it will just insert it as text at the insertion point. This is super annoying, especially since sometimes you only need Esc once, and having to think about which situation I'm in slows me down. Ctrl+Enter is also just more ergonomic than having to reach for the Esc key. Thanks to @JLukeW for suggesting binding Ctrl+Enter to Deselect. I've done that in System Preferences on my Mac, and it's working very well. Still, this isn't quite the same thing, and it would be great if Affinity could fix this.