deeds

I'll bet. I was wondering how to export something with good font rendering. Couldn't find a set of switches for font rendering qualities. Realised my comments about this not being a design software are more true than I first imagined. This should be a source of embarrassment. Particularly because the font rendering options in the Apple APIs are something incredible. There's three, and they're each relatively easy to code, test and utilise, and performant. Two of them are so performant they're used for iOS as well as MacOS. And the other is used for PDF rendering, and is the reason we have Adobe.

This thread is all woe, and equally applicable to Affinity "Designer". Ouch. Neede to use an Adobe product to get good text rendering.

Sorry, but I don't follow your seeming elevation of design over illustration. You got this right. Then built.a straw man, anyway.

I'm afraid these are all indicative of the exact opposite of your desires. The "rush" on arrowheads was over multiple years. Yet it feels tacky, wacky and hacky. And is just that. So are dashes. And these are the most simplistic of line endings and line features. To me, these are yet another indication that the product design constraints and compromises favoured illustration, not design. As a result, it's years between requests for primitive design features and their implementation, for things (like blends) that are integral to iterative, creative and exploratory digital design, but of almost no use to illustrators. The features you're talking about in Adobe Blends, that are useful for iterative and explorative design, came about as a byproduct of the desire to provide complex gradient creation and editing - via blends - something blend shapes are only tangentially suitable for. It was Adobe's way of saving time by repurposing focus on heavy blends gradients rather than creating a good set of gradient tools. I remember when this was first brokered to the world of designers. Adobe already owned the design media, so got them to parrot their beliefs, despite how clunky it was/is. So I completely agree, looking at Adobe blends for inspiration should only be done from the perspective of their integration... for blend mechanics of operation, other means and methods are far superior. And there are big issues to solve, like unwinding direction and origin, interpolation when vertex counts are different, rate of change curves, etc. But to do that kind of discernment requires a designers eye and experience, just as knowing integration well requires utilising it, and learning to lean on that integration for creative empowerment, deadline targeting, deliverables and differentiation. I don't think anyone at Affinity does this kind of product feature testing and consideration, let alone being capable of separation wheat from chaff. When Adobe Illustrator is viewed through the prism of vector based illustrative endeavour, an improved version looks like Affinity Designer. When Adobe Illustrator is viewed through the tunnel of programmer art creation requirements and thinking, you get Sketch, from Bohemian Coding. When viewing Adobe Illustrator through the prism of creative design requirements, it looks abhorrent. Because it is. Freehand, Xara and CorelDraw were better for general design, Fireworks was in a class of its own for UI design, and Flash was an innovative set of odd ideas that sort of worked. We are now at an odd spot. 3D design programs have superior 2D design features than those apps pretending to appeal to 2D designers, yet those 3D design apps have the 2D features as a byproduct of providing ways to prep for 3D. Affinity Designer has somewhat gotten the effects right, but the rendering is bad, particularly in things like gradients and glows, shadows and blendings between them. And the lack of ability to reorder and add extras is beginning to look as it is: antiquated. Then there's the two different ways of interacting with them, neither of which is good. A fair indication that the features were checkpoints rather than considered and internally desired. Affinity Designer vector node editing remains its strongest point (please excuse the pun), as a byproduct of the fascination with illustration, not as an end and goal in and of itself. This is borne out by the fact that the points aren't anything like capable of the elastic adjustment possible in CorelDraw or soft selection in 3D apps both of which date back to the early days of digital creation wherein vertices are considered parts of meshes that make up shapes. I'm using less than 10% of Affinity Designer because I don't have a Wacom device, is how I view this. For anything complex in design, I turn to a PC and Corel and 3ds Max.

This is CorelDraw, since as long as I can remember. At least as far back as the early 1990's.

Unfortunately it was never like this. I would have thought that a drawing application, or design program, especially when starting from a blank slate, would have learnt from the massive rise in parametric, procedural and stack based creativity software, and made it this way. But Affinity didn't. This is much sadder because the corner tool is actually pretty good, and their non-destructive booleans show they certainly understand why non-destructive editing is so creatively empowering.

"complaining". Quaint. Not everyone is limited to what Illustrator does in terms of design software experiences: https://knowledge.autodesk.com/support/3ds-max/learn-explore/caas/CloudHelp/cloudhelp/2019/ENU/3DSMax-Modifiers/files/GUID-E64D7D23-D10B-4E53-AD9B-559599565833-htm.html

On every shape I use the Corner Tool. There's a hidden step. It's converting to curves the moment the tool is used on a vertex, thereby destroying the original shape. A chamfer tool shouldn't do this, ideally. The dream: ability to add curvature and retain original geometry/shape qualities for subsequent editing.

I suspect they have done their path creation in a way that makes it difficult to offer this feature, and compromised in how they do their path creation early on, for other benefits. Further, it doesn't seem like they have anyone on their staff that understands the appeal of design oriented tools, that their focus is on illustration tools, instead. Perhaps the best example of this mindset is in the chamfering (Corner tool) being destructive. Imagine how useful a non-destructive chamfer would be...

For the third time, in various forms... yes... it's the discrete GPU. As to everyone else, it's unlikely they're working in such a way as to notice this. They probably have Affinity Designer in the foreground most of the time and/or not using other apps that heavily rely on the GPU in a way that's easy to detect when something backgrounded is impeding GPU performance. The game I'm working on is particularly frame rate sensitive, otherwise I'd probably not notice it, either. It's its performance degradation when Affinity Designer is backgrounded that caused me to notice this odd behaviour. There are a couple of oddities. I'm using 10.13.6 with all updates And running at 2880 x1800.

that has already been done. Try to keep up.

Pan and zoom remain somewhat performant in Integrated mode... And, yes, you are suggesting using the integrated GPU. Exactly the thing I'm concerned about, you're doing. Rather than optimising the app for higher performance, you're asking users to compromise for the sake of the background efficiency. perfTest.afdesign Select and move one of these objects.

Yes. I get that... but what's the point of having Affinity Designer run like a slideshow? Performance was one of AD's true advantages. But increasingly less so. So I've leaped over that, to the next point... that every other creative app has managed to utilise the GPU in Macs without going berserk in the background. Because of the next three points: 1. I've already pretty much isolated it to the GPU that Affinity is somehow flogging in the background 2. I can't run Affinity Designer in Metal Mode without it being slower than it is in OpenGL 3. AD is already showing regressions in performance over the last few versions, that are significant If you're tempted to go one step further, and suggest users utilise the integrated GPU for running AD rather than getting it to sing on a Mac... that's something I'd really rather you never considered, and would greatly prefer that some effort be put into getting the gains possible from actually using Metal in the best ways possible. And, yes... having switched to integrated and leaving a basic test file open, with no effects and limited shapes that now runs like a slideshow, AD is no longer using huge amounts of energy when backgrounded.. So yes, you can assume there's something wrong with how you're backgrounding AD when in OpenGL mode on the discreet GPU. However, now Unity crashes on entering Play mode, every single time. So there's now some conflict going on in terms of (probably) memory access for GPU versus integrated GPU. Great Performance in Discrete GPU, Metal mode, please.

I'm developing a game with Unity. It's open in the background when I'm working in AD, and AD is in the background when I'm working with Unity. Unity doesn't require the use of the discreet GPU, but it would be folly to develop without it on all the time for performance consistency of testing and iterative development. This isn't an uncommon need. Most everyone doing 3D and animation or other high end graphics forces the GPU on, since things like AE, Premiere, FinalCut, Logic, Maya, Modo etc... all like it to be there, all the time. And they all manage to rest it, and not chew energy when they're in the background. So not only have I not tested turning it off,, I don't want to work like that. I am asking that (when backgrounded) AD get itself under control, and let go of the GPU and whatever CPU usage it's doing, so that Unity can run as it does when Maya, Modo or AE are backgrounded. It's annoying to be constantly closing and reopening AD to get consistent performance out of Unity play testing. I don't need to do this with the other mentioned apps. Once AD starts using excess energy in the background, Unity's play mode frame rate halves, and I have to close AD to get it back up to smoothness. None of the other apps mentioned show up as using significant energy when backgrounded. Only Affinity Designer. Closing the others doesn't improve Unity performance, closing Affinity Designer does, and closing AD also improves performance of these other apps, too. It's not nearly as black and white noticeable in the other apps, but it is noticeable.

All same. things to note: 1.Using native resolution 2880x1800 2. Forced GPU on, via graphics switching being off in energy saver preferences 3. CPU is not being flogged by Affinity Designer when it's backgrounded... 4. Energy usage of Affinity Designer is often outpacing Unity and Rider when backgrounded, fullscreen. IOW: it's flogging the GPU, I presume, or doing something with the CPU that the Activity Monitor isn't monitoring