AffntyXara

I kinda like the way Xara (which has had a turbulent ownership history to say the least) is handling subscriptions. They still have perpetual license which will get a (paid) new version every year and a subscription licence which will be updated several times a year. The worst thing there is again the activation server. From a security view I understand why companies want this but it's not user friendly at all.

Of course Serif was in business to make a profit but they had....affinity(ok bad pun) with their users. The investment people behind canva couldn't care less about users of Serif programs. And talk about macromedia I mean as a company who once had great products but eventually faded out. The macromedia users were not at all happy when they were aquired.

That's a bit naive isn't it? No matter how well the Serif team is/was Canva now controls Serif and decisions are made based on profitability. And obviously subscription models look more attractive to investors. Most likely scenario is that Serif will be talked about in the way as people are talking aboout macromedia nowadays.

The thing is people will most likely not trust any promises made today. Serif is not in charge of their own product anymore and things can change any day. Serif was always a company that people liked with very usable software ( I still think serif movieplus had one of the interfaces ever for a video editing program). Now that it's canva serif will either cease to exist at all or just be part of a huge company. Per the announcement canva contacted you weeks ago yet 2 canva controlled stock photo libraries were added to affinity products much longer ago. To me this is another reason to be at least a bit suspicious about any announcements and promises.

I don't really see this ending well, activation servers will go offline and the name Affinity will be just as well known as Macromedia...

Activation servers will remain FOR NOW. Yeah that's about the same thing they said to Serif movieplus users. Nowadays those users are pretty much f&^%cked unless they still have an existing activated copy somewhere(which they can export by jumping through some hoops. And even then it's not possible to activate certain video codecs.

There seems to be a bug/illogical thing about the artboard export, any artboard you created by ctrl+drag inherits the original artboard name. If I add a new artboard and copy the content from another artboard into it it uses the new name.