vonBusing

Purpose: Features / Improvements / Fixes 
Status: Beta
Requirements: Purchased Affinity Designer
Mac App Store: Not Submitted
Download: Here
 
To use this beta, simply download the file from the link given above and double-click on the file to open the installer. Follow the instructions to install the beta version. The beta sits alongside the Mac App Store version and will not interfere with it. Please note that if you use features which are only present in the Beta version then save your document, it will no longer open in the Mac App Store version.
 
 
Notable changes:
- PDF import/export improvements, particularly in the area of bleed and trimboxes
- Pantone/Global colour improvements. Application and Document palettes are now searchable
- Artboards now have their own guides and snapping grids: These currently still need work.
- Disabled page resizing options when using artboards
- Fix for the ‘document’ artboard size making ever-larger artboards when used from the Artboard Tool’s context toolbar
- Added double-click to edit palette colours
- Visual indication that documents are loading (in the application title bar)
- Fix for non-retina drawing of UI in Layers panel - the disclosure triangle was drawn incorrectly
- Added ‘Hide Selection’ option to context toolbar of some tools - use it to hide the tool drawing while dragging
- Context toolbars changed to use icon instead of text ‘reset bounding box’ so that it occupies less space
- Improved performance when complicated grids are visible - more to come though…
- Improved printers marks
- Changing paragraph indent now also changes the first line indent too
- Fix for view appearing blurry at times when translated by a sub-pixel amount
- Canvas rotation with the trackpad can now be disabled from Preferences
- Increase font size for Japanese version
- Paragraph panel fixes
- Switching documents via Command+Tilda is now a customisable shortcut
 
Edit: This build currently only works on Yosemite and El Capitan.

I totally agree with jackamus: guidelines should be lockable. Moving guides instead of intended objects - been there so many times...

I haven't yet downloaded the latest Beta as it has nothing to offer me in the kind of work I do.
 
Just a little tiny nudge to the Developer's office.
It really would be very useful not to have to move a guide line in order to select a line that lies directly on it. The Guide need to stay where I put it otherwise it will not be a guide line!
 
Is drawing to scale still on the cards for the future?

It is going to be added as I know it's on a lot of users' wish lists, but so are a large number of other things that can't be worked around, so these are currently a higher priority, being realistic. :(  I am hoping to start adding arrowheads in about 3 months time.
 
Thanks,
Matt

+1 for arrow heads. I have iDraw for the sole feature of its arrowheads & line styles. It has dimension lines with labels – draw a line with with the label style and it automatically adds arrow heads and the length of the line is dynamically as text in the middle. It is incredibly time saving if you need to add measurements to a detailed floorplan or a display stand for an expo.
 
Please have look at iDraw for inspiration when you get around to developing this feature.
 
(I think our biggest frustration regarding the lack of arrowheads is that we have had it in other apps for more than 10 years, so we assume it's now practically an opensource feature with the code being widely available – not a complex new feature requiring massive R&D)
 
Thanks guys.

We plan to do that. The UI wasn't ready for this beta. However, we felt that overprinting black by default would be a useful feature in addition to per-colour black, and it happened to get completed first.

Matt, it would be useful to allow individual, per-color overprint, not just limit it to black... Also it might be good to have that set up via the swatches palette as well... awesome work!
 

Purpose: Features / Improvements / Fixes 
Status: Beta
Requirements: Purchased Affinity Designer
Mac App Store: Not Submitted
Download: Here
 
To use this beta, simply download the file from the link given above and double-click on the file to open the installer. Follow the instructions to install the beta version. The beta sits alongside the Mac App Store version and will not interfere with it.
 
 
Notable changes:
 
- Live preview of compound object boolean mode
- Overprint black
- Fully support El Capitan split-view
- Enabled monochromatic icons
- Fixed cycling of tool shortcuts
- Fixed international character input
- Improved PDF import/export
- Added user-adjustable controller ramps for brush variances
- Added recent fonts to dropdown
- Improved iCloud file syncing and merging
- Added cancel button to export progress panels
- Added Registration colour
- Improved file size of PSD export
- Updated help
- Fix for Ctrl-run up issues
- Numerous stability fixes

Thanks Garytagreg and ronnyb for the 3-finger gesture tips. For me, still on Maverick, It works like a charm, even on those sliders in AD and AP. 
 
Garytagreg: the behavior shown in your video is like a nightmare. What is this circle around your pointer: is it from the screen recording app?

I'm told Patience is a virtue.

Yes, please!

Well, I was so focused on the Character panel bug (which Andrew Tang has already pinpointed, yay!) that I totally forgot I've been itching to ask you this, which is totally apropos:
 
I know Dave has already stated this is currently unsupported, but is it even remotely possible that you may add monotone/duotone/etc. spot colour (Pantone) gradients that separate properly into their respective printing plates (instead of being converted to CMYK straight away like Adobe apps often did but, apparently, no longer do as long as you keep them in vector form) in Affinity v.1, along with all the whizbang features that are coming in the next beta?
 
That would be HUGE. And I just checked AI and was… I won't say “pleasantly”, because I want to steer away from it ASAP, but rather bittersweetly surprised to see that it actually does that properly. And since I've been using gradients a lot lately… It would be a bummer if I had to keep using AI just to output print jobs. Judging from the current trends in graphic design, I'm willing to bet I'm not alone in this wish.  ;)
 
Also, I see that one of my requests, custom application and document palettes, was already implemented, which is great! My bad, it seems I spoke too soon…They are, however, still lacking all the other abilities I mentioned (having multiple floating palettes open concurrently, drag'n'drop swatch management, etc.), the swatch size is not customizable in either grid or list view (which would be really handy for people who have larger or secondary screens) and spot colour names are, rather unfortunately, lost when adding their swatches to a custom palette.

Just a curious questions about pdf export: are there any kind of gradients that are exported as vector or are they all converted to bitmaps?

Simple linear and radial fills can be exported as vector. Currently by default they are converted to bitmaps, but you can change this by using File > Export > PDF > More > Allow advanced features. If you do this and open the pdf in Illustrator, it will warn and then rasterise them anyway, but they can be imported as vector into other apps that support such.

This is a bug, there is no reason why they shouldn't be there.

Just the Pantone support is adding a great value to the app. Just wondering. I don't know if it is me. What would be nice is a way to know what Pantone colour is applied instead of wondering.
Like AI when you select an object you know what colour is the fill or stroke even if is a Pantone.
It's me and then i didn't see anywhere what it telling me or is missing?
Best
Marco 

Although it was rather hard to figure out where to find them, I'm super glad PMS colors found their way into AD.
 
I also found that several pdf export bugs are now fixed. Thanks a lots for that!
 
One question though, related to PMS colors: is there any way to mark an object (with a PMS color) as overprint? (no white background if the object is omitted in the printing, by color).

One improvement I'd highlight is that embedded documents may now be exported as vectors. There are lots of caveats: they need to be the same colour space as the host document, not use blend modes etc in a way that might affect parts of the host document below them, and not have a white background. Also the host can't give them global opacity or a blend mode, use them for clipping etc. Newly embedded documents now default to a transparent background, so the simple case of, for example, embedding one SVG document inside another should just work.
 
This applies to SVG, EPS and PDF export. There are more improvements we plan to make in due course, but this is a start.

Purpose: Features / Improvements / Fixes 
Status: Beta
Requirements: Purchased Affinity Designer
Mac App Store: Not Submitted
Download: Here
 
To use this beta, simply download the file from the link given above and double-click on the file to open the installer. Follow the instructions to install the beta version. The beta sits alongside the Mac App Store version and will not interfere with it.
 
 
Notable changes:
 
- Added support for Pantone colours - including PDF/X import and export.
- New blend mode - “Contrast Invert”. Try typing some black text over a gradient black->white area and choose this blend mode.
- Fix for incorrectly exporting the opposite of what the user requested with the ‘1x’/‘2x’/‘3x’ options in Export Persona. - Fix for documents with Pixel unit types incorrectly loading into the Mac App Store version (just open your document and save it again in this version to fix). - Keyboard shortcuts should now work properly for view zooming and are now properly saved for tools.
- Certain adjustments (Levels, Curves, Channel Mixer) can now be applied in any colour space - so you could add a LAB curves adjustment to an RGB document, for example.
- The Move Tool can now be told to move an object, but not children of that object: It’s an option on the context toolbar and will only show up if you have a non-group object selected which has children (a curve which clips a number of other curves, for example).
- Numerous PSD export / import improvements - Some fixes that should help create PSD files that FCPX and Motion can import.  Fixed import vector masking issue with subtractive masks.  PSD export can now export efficient flat image which decreases files sizes for flat RGB images)..
- You can now double click the empty view (with no documents loaded) to load a document.
- Numerous improvements to vector import / export - especially for PDF/X.
- Numerous Help improvements.
- Numerous minor bug fixes.

This is now fixed for the next beta. Yay, this should never have happened.
 
 
 
British pixels are now gone in favour of just normal pixels for the next beta.
 
 
 
This is actually a really good idea so I've implemented it into the next beta. :)

Just a quick comment about the Japanese localisation:
 
A common thing to do with languages that don't use roman characters (Japanese, Chinese, Korean, Thai etc.) is to write the language name in that language in the drop-down of available languages in the settings. That way, a completely non-English speaker can go to the settings and click on stuff until he sees something written in his language which makes it easy for him to change the settings to what he can actually read. Try to imagine finding the English language setting if you were running in Japanese/Chinese/Korean and everything was written in that language (which you can actually experience right now by changing AD to Japanese, restarting and going back to the settings where now "English" has changed to "英語"... not too easy)
 
Google does a good job of this as shown in the attachment.
 
At the moment, the list box in the settings menu is all in the currently set language. Doing the above would help make things easier to use. 

Just a screenshot of the tools would be awesome to give me an idea of where it's heading and what the workflow might be like.
 
I'm very curious if it's going to have a large toolset like InDesign, or a small one like Quark
(hopefully the smaller one because it will imply a simpler work process eg: 1 box object tool to create text boxes, image boxes and rectangle oblects and to edit their contents instead of a tool each (potentially 6 tools), afterall, they are sort of the same things.)
 
Here's an idea of what I'm hoping to see, attached.
 
Please please please...

You have amazing eyesight! I didn't think it be.... noticeable.  :P
 
 
Seriously, it needs fixing.  :)

Purpose: Features / Improvements / Fixes 
Status: Beta
Requirements: Purchased Affinity Designer
Mac App Store: Not Submitted
Download: Here
 
To use this beta, simply download the file from the link given above and double-click on the file to open the installer. Follow the instructions to install the beta version. The beta sits alongside the Mac App Store version and will not interfere with it.
 
Please Note: We will do our utmost to fix anything that emerges as quickly as possible, but we just wanted you to understand that for production work we would recommend using the Mac App Store version until this beta has been validated for a few weeks.
 
 
Notable changes:
- Reintroduced translations and added Italian, Japanese and Portuguese (Brazil): These do not have translated help files yet. Please understand that we are just starting out with our Japanese support so there are many things we need to change in the application itself to support Japanese properly, so please be gentle! (and if you can help, please drop us a line!)
- Fix for exports failing
- User-definable precision for different unit types (in preferences)
- Nudging works correctly in Node Tool
- PSD export of slices
- Added 'Insertion Mode' options to the Layer menu so you can bind these to shortcut keys
- Improvements to CMYK PDF export
- Numerous other improvements

Added user-defined Rotation Centre to the tools : 
In horology design, it's a huge update ! Thanks.
After a little try, I can say : Huuuuuurrrrraaaaaahhhhh !
 
I would like to see "change origin" (actually 0 is left above) and negative values for rotation.
 
I'm a little disappointed with the Tab key. In color palette, we could jump values with Tab. Now, all palettes disappears. Not funny...
 
Always the same bug in AD 1.3.5.1 : we can't select Adjustements layer. Bad news…