Gaz

It's important that everything is right before it's released, no point releasing a buggy piece of software. As a developer, I understand software will be ready when it's ready.
I think the Beta was originally planned for late 2015. When you say months, are we talking far into 2017 as an estimate ?  :)

Something that is missing from Adobe Illustrator, and would be good in Affinity Designer are Technical Illustration Tools:-
 
 
Isometric Grid, allowing constraint along 30º as well as vertical
Isometric elipses (35º Elipses, with minor axis constrained to Grid Axis)
 

Ability to join circles and ellipses with a tangent line tool, connecting one circle to another with a line.
 

Ability to delete line or curve up to another intersecting line / lines / curves with a key stroke.
 
 1  Draw a line or curve,
 2  Draw two additional lines / curves, both overlapping original at different locations,
 3  Select the middle part of the first line / curve
 4  Press a key to delete the part of the line / curve up to each of the intersecting lines curves.
 5  Option to select multiple lines / curves and perform this to all of them at the same time would be living the dream :-)

Thanks
Gaz
 
3dtp Ltd

Something that is missing from Adobe Illustrator, and would be good in Affinity Designer are Technical Illustration Tools:-
 
 
Isometric Grid, allowing constraint along 30º as well as vertical
Isometric elipses (35º Elipses, with minor axis constrained to Grid Axis)
 

Ability to join circles and ellipses with a tangent line tool, connecting one circle to another with a line.
 

Ability to delete line or curve up to another intersecting line / lines / curves with a key stroke.
 
 1  Draw a line or curve,
 2  Draw two additional lines / curves, both overlapping original at different locations,
 3  Select the middle part of the first line / curve
 4  Press a key to delete the part of the line / curve up to each of the intersecting lines curves.
 5  Option to select multiple lines / curves and perform this to all of them at the same time would be living the dream :-)

Thanks
Gaz
 
3dtp Ltd

Something that is missing from Adobe Illustrator, and would be good in Affinity Designer are Technical Illustration Tools:-
 
 
Isometric Grid, allowing constraint along 30º as well as vertical
Isometric elipses (35º Elipses, with minor axis constrained to Grid Axis)
 

Ability to join circles and ellipses with a tangent line tool, connecting one circle to another with a line.
 

Ability to delete line or curve up to another intersecting line / lines / curves with a key stroke.
 
 1  Draw a line or curve,
 2  Draw two additional lines / curves, both overlapping original at different locations,
 3  Select the middle part of the first line / curve
 4  Press a key to delete the part of the line / curve up to each of the intersecting lines curves.
 5  Option to select multiple lines / curves and perform this to all of them at the same time would be living the dream :-)

Thanks
Gaz
 
3dtp Ltd

Yeah, subscription is a nice idea (for Adobe), but not for me. I wish them luck, but after 25 years of buying and using their products I, for one, am switching to something more reasonably priced.
 
I've weaned myself off Photoshop and I'm in the process of weaning myself of Illustrator. If I can add InDesign to the mix then that would be amazing. I don't think Publisher will be an InDesign killer for a while though. It'll probably take a couple of versions before it has most of the features we're looking for. I get the feeling this product will hit the ground jogging and build up to a run, in subsequent years. But an Adobe free future looks more plausible.  :)

I'm looking forward to seeing the Beta as well.
 
Creating a DTP package from scratch must be incredibly difficult. Adobe took years developing theirs and InDesign 1.0 was horrible. Best not to rush things.  :)

Here's a tip: if you press and hold ⌘ (cmd) while clicking on a layers's thumbnail in the Layers panel Affinity will create a selection from its content. So if you do this with a shape layer you can create a selection without converting the shape to a selection or even change to the Pen Tool. Note that if the shape doesn't have fill but only a stroke, that's the stroke area that will generate the selection.

If you select it (the adjustment layer) and pick any tool (gradient, paintbursh, selections...) you can edit it directly applying those to the layer itself.
Anyway, you can't "see" it (the greymap I mean), only its effect.
 
To see the grayscale representation you have to promote this to a pure mask.
Go to Channels, you'll find a channel like [Name] Adjustment Alpha.
Right click, and choose Create Mask Layer
 
Now you have a copy of your adjustment alpha as a mask, that you can re-assign and edit with right click Edit Mask.
In this case you'll see the grayscale layer.
 
Ps. Remember to clean up your Adjustment Alpha, otherwise you'll have a double mask  ;)
 
EDIT
 
Much more easier... 
Add a new mask to your Adj Layer and you're done...  :)

Hi Everyone,
 
I am stumped by this and I can't delete a segment of a curve, or at least it doesn't work as spelled out above. I opened a jpeg of an insect and set that as the background layer. I then added a new layer, chose the Pen tool, and outlined the main body. I repeated this by adding more layers for wings, legs, head, etc. Now I'm struggling with Designer while trying to delete segments of these shapes that are pen tool lines. I select the body layer, click "Convert to Curves," select the Node tool, click on one of the nodes and it becomes solid blue, I then click "Break Curve" and it become outlined in red (white center, like all the rest). All other nodes are still showing, as if selected. Next, I click another node that's four stops away from the first one--it turns blue. When I click "Break Curve," that selected node turns white, just like all the others, aside from the first one which is still outlined in red. If I hit the backwards Delete key (the main delete key), the entire shape gets deleted (all nodes appear to be selected, so that makes sense). Please help =( I know the answer is in front of my nose, but I'm just not seeing it.
 
Thank you so much. I really like both Designer and Photo (bought both) and want to migrate to them.
John Kehoe

You are not alone. I wasted more hours than I want to think about trying to break a curve at two (or more) nodes before I finally realized it only works on one node at a time. It never occurred to me that it would be so limited when there is such an obvious & frequent need to break a curve into two or more parts.

Hi Gaz,
Yes, it's a little tedious. I have raised this with the dev team some time ago but with all that'a being worked on it wasn't implemented yet. I believe this will be improved at some point.

I had shied away from using Affinity Designer for any serious work basically because, as much as I'm not a fan of it, I am still more familiar with Illustrator CS6. However having familiarised myself with where most things are (that dreaded learning curve), I have come to the conclusion that this is at least as good as Illustrator CS6. In fact, other than the variable line thickness tool being slightly easier to manipulate in illustrator, I can't see where your App is behind compared to Illustrator. (as far as day to day use is concerned).
 
This is a serious piece of software, and I'm going to revisit Photo to see if I can learn my way up that curve too.
 
I seriously can't see why I'd need to go back to Illustrator. This App is now a permanent fixture in our Companies pipeline.
Slightly late with the Congratulations, but... Congratulations :) .... !!!  You are the new Adobe as far as I'm concerned :)

I had shied away from using Affinity Designer for any serious work basically because, as much as I'm not a fan of it, I am still more familiar with Illustrator CS6. However having familiarised myself with where most things are (that dreaded learning curve), I have come to the conclusion that this is at least as good as Illustrator CS6. In fact, other than the variable line thickness tool being slightly easier to manipulate in illustrator, I can't see where your App is behind compared to Illustrator. (as far as day to day use is concerned).
 
This is a serious piece of software, and I'm going to revisit Photo to see if I can learn my way up that curve too.
 
I seriously can't see why I'd need to go back to Illustrator. This App is now a permanent fixture in our Companies pipeline.
Slightly late with the Congratulations, but... Congratulations :) .... !!!  You are the new Adobe as far as I'm concerned :)

I had shied away from using Affinity Designer for any serious work basically because, as much as I'm not a fan of it, I am still more familiar with Illustrator CS6. However having familiarised myself with where most things are (that dreaded learning curve), I have come to the conclusion that this is at least as good as Illustrator CS6. In fact, other than the variable line thickness tool being slightly easier to manipulate in illustrator, I can't see where your App is behind compared to Illustrator. (as far as day to day use is concerned).
 
This is a serious piece of software, and I'm going to revisit Photo to see if I can learn my way up that curve too.
 
I seriously can't see why I'd need to go back to Illustrator. This App is now a permanent fixture in our Companies pipeline.
Slightly late with the Congratulations, but... Congratulations :) .... !!!  You are the new Adobe as far as I'm concerned :)

I had shied away from using Affinity Designer for any serious work basically because, as much as I'm not a fan of it, I am still more familiar with Illustrator CS6. However having familiarised myself with where most things are (that dreaded learning curve), I have come to the conclusion that this is at least as good as Illustrator CS6. In fact, other than the variable line thickness tool being slightly easier to manipulate in illustrator, I can't see where your App is behind compared to Illustrator. (as far as day to day use is concerned).
 
This is a serious piece of software, and I'm going to revisit Photo to see if I can learn my way up that curve too.
 
I seriously can't see why I'd need to go back to Illustrator. This App is now a permanent fixture in our Companies pipeline.
Slightly late with the Congratulations, but... Congratulations :) .... !!!  You are the new Adobe as far as I'm concerned :)

I had shied away from using Affinity Designer for any serious work basically because, as much as I'm not a fan of it, I am still more familiar with Illustrator CS6. However having familiarised myself with where most things are (that dreaded learning curve), I have come to the conclusion that this is at least as good as Illustrator CS6. In fact, other than the variable line thickness tool being slightly easier to manipulate in illustrator, I can't see where your App is behind compared to Illustrator. (as far as day to day use is concerned).
 
This is a serious piece of software, and I'm going to revisit Photo to see if I can learn my way up that curve too.
 
I seriously can't see why I'd need to go back to Illustrator. This App is now a permanent fixture in our Companies pipeline.
Slightly late with the Congratulations, but... Congratulations :) .... !!!  You are the new Adobe as far as I'm concerned :)

hardini,
 
If the most important thing for you is to have full compatibility with others who are using Adobe products then your best bet is to use the exact same software as they are, same software and the same version. Even people who use only use Adobe's own software can't always exchange files between users (between versions), so you can imagine the enormous difficulty that it would be for an outside company to do this. If the .idml is an open format then great, if not, forget it. The best bet would be an open format like PDF, sure it might require a little tweeting of files but that is to be expected when moving from one software package to another. If you have to be able to pickup and hand things off to other users who are only using Indesign, then the sad reality is you're stuck paying Adobe for the rest of your life. Your other option is to get the other people who you work with to start using Affinity Publisher once it is released. 
 
Hokusai

There is a preference setting for that, Gaz … but it’s a global setting …  :)

Brilliant  :)

Found this neat trick playing with the pressure setting of a stroke...
 

 
Can also be used for tails...
 
 
 
Wouldn't use it for long paths though, it gets tricky to edit the shapes as it's mapped onto a narrow palette. Still fun for signage and as a design element, not technical illustration....

Something that is missing from Adobe Illustrator, and would be good in Affinity Designer are Technical Illustration Tools:-
 
 
Isometric Grid, allowing constraint along 30º as well as vertical
Isometric elipses (35º Elipses, with minor axis constrained to Grid Axis)
 

Ability to join circles and ellipses with a tangent line tool, connecting one circle to another with a line.
 

Ability to delete line or curve up to another intersecting line / lines / curves with a key stroke.
 
 1  Draw a line or curve,
 2  Draw two additional lines / curves, both overlapping original at different locations,
 3  Select the middle part of the first line / curve
 4  Press a key to delete the part of the line / curve up to each of the intersecting lines curves.
 5  Option to select multiple lines / curves and perform this to all of them at the same time would be living the dream :-)

Thanks
Gaz
 
3dtp Ltd

+1  :)

There's isometric grids in affinity already. Not sure about the rest.

These tools would be amazing. Tangent snapping alone would be incredible for a wide range of applications from logo design to scientific illustration, not just isometric technical illustration.

I have registered just to be able to support this. Not sure about the isometrics, but tangent snapping and trimming would be a godsend in a design drawing software.