deeds

This is such an antiquated notion, testing. Testing??? Why waste time on such things? Next you'll want a control group and objective analysis and reports... and responsibility, liability and accountability? What gives, man? It's as if you think things need to be proven to work, to be effective,and safe. Why could that possibly be true in a modern, progressed, scientific world where there's consensus and digital ID? The problem is you, man!

Dear Granddaddy, It's come to our attention that you're not paying attention to the times. The times, they are a-changin'. For instance, all tools are less better than them was befores. Nows we has more reasons to do less, slower, and do it worse, too. This is progress, man. Get with it! This has/is/was compensation for relative wages going down for 40 years. You're welcome! Also, populism, in democracy, is now absolute badness. The baddestnessest. Orange is no longer a colour or a fruit. It's an adjective for the devil in a skin suit fuelled by KFC™, Pepsi™ and recreational golf. It's not all bad. Men can now have babies. And maternity leave, man! Also, it's getting warmer, apparently. Which should be good, but isn't, because colder would be worster. Or something about hockey sticks and The Mann, according to Steyn. And that's before we get to semantic changes. Words really are changin', man. Nobody knows what a woman is, anymore. Safe and effective are words subject to only relativity determined by those using them for their own purposes. Objectivity is old, man. In with the new. Also, journalism died with Chesterton, but that's not yet been reported.

The bigger question: was the new UI designed in the new versions of Affinity Suite during their beta phase? Either way, the answer will be of great interest, me thunks.

Oh, they definitely are, even if Serif wouldn't be competing intentionally. You don't think there's more equivalence with a suckerfish (remora) and its host shark?

Linux and Rust. What a combination. I can't wait for them to make something for end users.

We aren't talking about most, though, are we. We're talking about accessing a performance critical API in a performance critical manner in a performance critical environment. In this scenario, and others wherein realities of performance and stability of performance are significant factors, this transition away from C to "easier" has yet to occur without significant compromises in... you guessed it.. performance, cost, stability and maintainability. This despite decades of this kind of mantra-ish advocation for "superior" approaches. C is THE superior approach for that which C is most suited. Which this is. And it's simpler to use, too. Learning to love pointers is a lifelong affair.

are they competing?

Sadly, I don't think of this as dire, but commonplace. The norm, so to speak. The exceptions are rare, and wonderful.

How so?

"said"? Do you know how outsourcing works? You don't "hire" them, the work is contracted out. That involves using people here to write up specifications and often the headers for the implementations, and then to monitor and check the resulting code.

You're projecting. Humility is the path to understanding and insight. If you want to ask questions in order to begin understanding the scope of your lack of understanding, just do that rather than being somewhat presumptive about what the problems might be that cause the complaints that you don't understand.

The solution to this is that Affinity make "hit boxes" (the areas clickable) that more accurately merely encompass the characters in a text object rather than the bounds of the container for the text. It's something that only a company that uses its own products would realise is a worthwhile endeavour, since text is ofter the top most object but the least likely to need to be selected for most general and common editing tasks. And let's not even get started on how clunky the locking mechanisms are. Or the lack of selection sets... etc.

It's fine for me isn't nearly a sufficient point from which to understand the experiences of others.

This problem is in v1, too.

Perhaps the thing about the long periods of silence and general secrecy this thread pertains to is that whilst it's a tactic to avoid whatever Affinity thought this kind of seclusion might prevent, it's also definitely been preventing any chance of significant virtuous cycles of ambassadorial users keen on deeply learning and then promoting the products and their empowerments/possibilities in an organic and wide scale manner. Fortunately, for Affinity, no other digital creativity apps in their space have figured out how to foster a good, virtuous cycle of community, either, during the lifespan of these products. Inevitably, this will happen, and it won't be Affinity that creates this. They don't have the chemistry, attitude or market insights to make this kind of thing happen. And the products are increasingly not the kind of special sauce that engenders and fosters creative excitement, enthusiasms and new endeavours. Do see a counter example, Cinema4D did this very well in the early to mid 2000's, whilst their much bigger rivals had become somewhat entitled and presumptuous about their place in the market, C4D stole and then created whole swathes of users and new creatives by just being "cool". Houdini is trying to do it more recently, but they're stuck with a usage paradigm that's so weird to most people that their efforts are actually driving more interest to Blender, which has a more traditional user paradigm, and the benefit of huge Open Source goodwill, now that they're not as clunky as before. Early on, Sketch had some of this kind of energy around it, but their workflow is so lacking in flow and reward for creativity being expressed on the fly that they were probably largely responsible for folks considering the Figma workflow acceptable. And I think Affinity's completely dropped the ball on work flow. Having never really understood it, instead just copying the most identifiable (and often worst) aspects of Adobe's paradigms, they now seem to have completely ignored possible advancements in workflow and feel, and regressed in many crucial ways that will be difficult to turn around from.

Yamaha. Not Yamaha Inc's wider purchases, though some of them do outsource significantly, too. That ad almost convinces me they do most of their coding through outsourced facilities.

This is going to sound weird. And it's a lot of work, but the best environment, at the moment, for making dynamic infographics, is probably Unity's game engine's RectTransform and what's known as UGUI (Unity Graphical User Interface Elements System). The RectTransform and the Canvases these are stored upon mean that there's an inherent child/parent dependency that's exploitable WITH constraints. Constraints, in this context, means relationships between positions of Canvases (which can be nested) and other interface elements. Due to the nature of game UIs needing charts and graphs for things like health and endurance statistics being presented dynamically and in game world space and HUD space and Screen Space, these features are vastly more powerful and related to one another than in other applications. If you're interested in this, avoid anything newer than Unity 2019.4LTS and DO NOT USE THEIR NEW RENDER PIPELINES!! You won't be able to render Vector outputs, but can scale bitmap outputs to huge sizes and do offline rendering to images, despite it being a realtime game engine. The artfulness and dynamics you can add in a game engine are unlimited. It's vastly more powerful and capable than something like After Effects or Apple's Motion.

If development is outsourced, the service is woeful. If the key, initial developers are gone, but the development hasn't (yet) been outsourced, the service is woeful. A key example of a medium sized business with its initial key developers still working on SOME of their products, is JetBrains. If you're lucky enough to be using one of their products that still has elements of the initial team working on it, the service and support is truly staggering. Better than anything, ever, from any era, for any product. Start emailing them with exact information about anything, at their sales emails even though you're already a customer, and the responses will floor you... if it's one of their products with the original core team still somewhat intact. They try, with the other products, and it's still better support than just about any other modern company making software, but it pales in comparison to what happens if you're using something with some original team members. Can't say this strongly enough, hence repeating it. I suspect most of Affinity's development is outsourced. The most extreme negative example of long term outsourcing of development is Yamaha.

Substance, 3D Coat and Quixel etc in a different league. Procreate's 3D is a bit primitive, for sure. But it's quick and easy.

FWIW: whenever someone talks about marketing and selling apps outside of the major App Stores, the conversation excludes iOS devices as that ship has sailed. Apple has a monopoly on the provision of software to their iOS devices. There's a significant court case occurring to challenge this, in which interesting parties like Microsoft and Sony are seemingly supporting the endeavours of Epic Games (Tim Sweeney and Mark Rein) to challenge this monopoly. Google is attempting to curtail the creation of alternative stores and side loading on Android phones in the manner in which iOS has achieved this, but aren't having as much success, but have had significant success reducing payment options. This is also being challenged by Epic games, and also supported by other interested parties. The biggest exceptions to this are in China, wherein (even before the sanctions) there were massive alternative stores for Android devices. Some were provided by telecommunications companies, and these were/are amazing. Like nothing we have in the west. Some are created by the handset manufacturers and others by big online retailers. All of them are incredibly competitive and make the case for both why Google and Apple fight so hard for monopolies (massively higher margins and controls) and for the effect of free markets on pricing, discount and support. Microsoft has a boot in both camps, seemingly wanting to challenge the successful absolute channelling of single payment gateways to all apps that others have, and slowly prepping to do this themselves, for themselves on their platforms. If Affinity were to sell their products on the Epic Games Store like (for example) Krita does (Krita is kinda like Procreate on steroids, for PC), they'd get to see how a more friendly (to software makers) and competitive store operates. The margins for developers are higher, to begin with 88% versus 70%. Who knows how Apple would perceive that kind of activity...

To the best of my knowledge, the PDF export preview feature in browsers is the same as Affinity are using, in that it's VERY slow. The fastest good export of PDF I've ever seen, that also has wonderful optimisation features, is within the ColorSync Utility on a Mac. If it saves anyone time, you can export fully uncompressed PDFs faster from any creative app, and then compress it in ColorSync Unity, getting better (and smaller) results.

You're forgetting timed discount rate differences: IOW: Release discount of 40% for everyone. After the release discount duration is over, new users get only 20% discount for the next couple of weeks. A continued but reduced introductory special, whilst v1 users still get 40% discount After a few more weeks, the 20% for new users intro discount goes away, and the 40% upgrade discount remains, for a while longer, but also slowly ramps down to zero discount, over a much longer time. Preferably a full year and a half (to be fairest), as it winds down to zero discount... Then, throughout that time, whenever a new user discount promotional event occurs, do the corresponding discount to the current remaining upgrade discount, so prior users are still getting a better deal. This pleases everyone, and permits Affinity to slowly ramp new users up earlier, to the full price, and not make the 40% discount seem so blanket. AND use sales/promotional discounts well, as they please, when it serves them best, and everyone is always happy. Considering how this ramping works to increase gross revenue over time, by virtue of a shorter period of full intro 40% discount for new users with higher pressure and stronger calls to action, they might have been able to offer a 50% upgrade discount for a brief period, before slowly ramping down the amount of upgrade discount. Which would have looked better, and been a better way to do all this.

Come on... you can admit it... since using Procreate, there's been at least one time when you've sketched something on a real piece of paper, and double tapped to undo, out of habit from too much Procreate usage...

Lua, please. Not JavaScript, and especially not Python. Arrays, in Lua, start from 1. So it's easy for newer users to think in terms of Layer 1, Object 1, Effect 1, etc. If they ever get around to using arrays. Not that that's nearly a crucial reason to use Lua for scripting, but it is a nice extra, easy thing for direct relationships with software worlds of objects that don't begin at 0 The main reason to use Lua is that it's objectively the best of the lightest scripting languages with the easiest syntax to teach and preach, embeds incredibly easily and is familiar to anyone with a passing interest in Lightroom. And those coming up from Roblox. And the tragics afflicted by World of Warcraft.

Wait till you find out that Functional languages and most of the latest trends in ECS and DOD are merely really C-like usage of modern languages. And that this cycle has been gong on forever. And that it usually costs less to just do it in C from the beginning. Whatever that is.