loukash

Alright, @rodsal23, so you want to animate layers?
And you can!
Here you go:

ade_animation_layers.mp4 As you can see by the clock in background, it's no trick, it happens in real time. Each loop is executed per simple keyboard shortcut.
But I admit it's slightly "cheated", as in: it's not Affinity that performs the animation.
Sooo…
If you need your animation "preview" now, your workflow will have to include an external macro utility.
On Mac, you can do fun stuff like that with AppleScript's System Events via Automator services.
Or much more comfortably with a macro utility like the incomparable Keyboard Maestro:

(Windows folks are on their own, sorry. But the principle will be the same)
Have fun!

So…
What you can already do now is:
create layers

  switch to Export persona convert layers to slices export, e.g. as GIF

  use one of the zillions of free 3rd party apps to create your animation

So…
What you can already do now is:
create layers

  switch to Export persona convert layers to slices export, e.g. as GIF

  use one of the zillions of free 3rd party apps to create your animation

So…
What you can already do now is:
create layers

  switch to Export persona convert layers to slices export, e.g. as GIF

  use one of the zillions of free 3rd party apps to create your animation

I started with Freehand 7 in 96 which did everything I needed it to 25 years ago, and back in 2014 saw Designer as a shining light as it showed so much promise, looking at all the missing basics planned back then, I thought within a couple of years I'd at least get similar basic functionality as freehand - now we're approaching 7 years from release and I just want to get work done, which is ultra frustrating as Designer is a brilliant beast - brilliant we recently got select same and contour tool but it took 6 years - 
Now at the point - wish someone could find the grave of Freehand and do a super Frankenstein job on it (no subscription)- massive shame Adobe got it hands on it.
Yes I know missing basic features aren't everything, you only have to use VectorStyler to realise how good the Affinity user interface is, I'm just tired of the workarounds on workarounds to get functionality I was getting 25 years ago with Freehand
Also some of us need to print CMYK to CMYK devices!?!?!? 
(Vincent Price type voice) 'O' RISE GREAT FREEHAND' 
Moan moan eff-in moan😕
Sorry guys woke in a mood realise the team are doing all they can to achieve - just getting stuff off my chest

So, we had a good laugh, now back to business…
Exactly. As it stands from what I've collected on the forums so far, animation features are nowhere near the top of the list. And as a Serif lead developer has stated here in the forums a few years ago (I read that post just the other day but don't remember in which thread context it was), definitely not on the list of features he personally would even want to develop (apparently a long story). So, sorry for bringing the bad news, but I was slightly worried about your all health in case any one of you has been holding your collective breath that an animation feature will be added in three, two, one…
That said…
What I would actually like to see – apart from scripting – is a Macro utility in Designer (and Publisher, for that matter), like the one we already have in Photo.
And – lo and behold – it is already possible to program a macro in Photo that will turn layers on and off:

 
The only problem is:
It is too fast!
There is no "Pause n seconds" step available, as far as I can tell, apart from injecting and immediately reverting bogus actions inbetween that would take some time to process…
But hey, whatever.
It's just your another "INSANE workaround" by yours truly, folks.
Enjoy.

Yes, that was the post I meant. Thanks!

There are currently no animation features at all in the Affinity apps, and Serif staff have indicated that they don’t plan to add them any time soon.
 

A MacOS Automator service plugin/workflow, programmed by yours truly:
“Activate All Affinity Studio Panels”
FAQ:
What does it do?
It contains a nifty AppleScript code that goes through the menu View > Studio, checks for all panels without a ✓ check mark and activates them all at their respective last position (if any). That's all. Why does it do that?
Because otherwise you'd have to repeatedly open the menu and the submenu again and again, activate each panel one by one. Which is – pardon my French – a major p.i.t.a. As in, literally, a pain in the arm. Been there done that. How do I use it?
Upon installation in ~/Library/Services (see included ReadMe) or in /Library/Services if you want to activate it for all users, you can run it from the Affinity Designer/Photo/Publisher menu > Services > Activate All Affinity Studio Panels. You can assign a custom keyboard shortcut via System Preferences > Keyboard > Shortcuts > Services. Heck, you can even disable it from there if it annoys you. (But why should it? Hey, it's a Good Thing™!) It will only do its Good Thing™ while one of your Affinity apps is running frontmost. Should you accidentally launch it while using another app, it will only inform you that it can't do anything. Can it do any harm?
I don't think so. But if you're paranoid, open the *.workflow document with the Automator app and see for yourself. It's open source. What does it cost?
It's free as in beer. That is… feel free to contact me if you'd like to buy me a beer. I won't say no! Where can I get it?
loukash.com/download What's there?
You'll be able to download a file named "Activate_All_Affinity_Studio_Panels_v1.0.zip". Inside the ZIP archive, there are two files:
• Activate All Affinity Studio Panels ReadMe.pdf – which you should read, obviously…
• Activate All Affinity Studio Panels.workflow
That's all. My website runs on Wordpress, so it will automatically attempt to set a few cookies. Feel free to reject them. Enjoy!

How long do you think it took me to create the above animation from scratch, including the roundtrip to a free GIF animation app?
Exactly.
So why even bother when the "Export Slices" button is literally only a few clicks away, and you can then drag and drop the folder full of slices onto any offline or online GIF animation tool to get your preview within seconds?
That all aside…
How do you know how "easy" it is to code a macro type of function, let alone with a timer?
Sorry, usually I'm all for various kinds of feature or option requests, but this one doesn't make much sense to me.

So…
What you can already do now is:
create layers

  switch to Export persona convert layers to slices export, e.g. as GIF

  use one of the zillions of free 3rd party apps to create your animation

How long do you think it took me to create the above animation from scratch, including the roundtrip to a free GIF animation app?
Exactly.
So why even bother when the "Export Slices" button is literally only a few clicks away, and you can then drag and drop the folder full of slices onto any offline or online GIF animation tool to get your preview within seconds?
That all aside…
How do you know how "easy" it is to code a macro type of function, let alone with a timer?
Sorry, usually I'm all for various kinds of feature or option requests, but this one doesn't make much sense to me.

A MacOS Automator service plugin/workflow, programmed by yours truly:
“Activate All Affinity Studio Panels”
FAQ:
What does it do?
It contains a nifty AppleScript code that goes through the menu View > Studio, checks for all panels without a ✓ check mark and activates them all at their respective last position (if any). That's all. Why does it do that?
Because otherwise you'd have to repeatedly open the menu and the submenu again and again, activate each panel one by one. Which is – pardon my French – a major p.i.t.a. As in, literally, a pain in the arm. Been there done that. How do I use it?
Upon installation in ~/Library/Services (see included ReadMe) or in /Library/Services if you want to activate it for all users, you can run it from the Affinity Designer/Photo/Publisher menu > Services > Activate All Affinity Studio Panels. You can assign a custom keyboard shortcut via System Preferences > Keyboard > Shortcuts > Services. Heck, you can even disable it from there if it annoys you. (But why should it? Hey, it's a Good Thing™!) It will only do its Good Thing™ while one of your Affinity apps is running frontmost. Should you accidentally launch it while using another app, it will only inform you that it can't do anything. Can it do any harm?
I don't think so. But if you're paranoid, open the *.workflow document with the Automator app and see for yourself. It's open source. What does it cost?
It's free as in beer. That is… feel free to contact me if you'd like to buy me a beer. I won't say no! Where can I get it?
loukash.com/download What's there?
You'll be able to download a file named "Activate_All_Affinity_Studio_Panels_v1.0.zip". Inside the ZIP archive, there are two files:
• Activate All Affinity Studio Panels ReadMe.pdf – which you should read, obviously…
• Activate All Affinity Studio Panels.workflow
That's all. My website runs on Wordpress, so it will automatically attempt to set a few cookies. Feel free to reject them. Enjoy!

I didn't want to offend you by any means.
But Affinity apps are advanced and flexible design tools. They have a learning curve. And with flexibility comes complexity. It's inevitable.
Comparably, even me as a "pro", although I've been using e.g. Photoshop since the 1990s, it never was my main tool. And so I only ever knew and used the basics, all those years. Until I began to explore and learn to use Affinity Photo and its advanced features, and started to compare them to the "old" Photoshop CS5.1 that I was still using until then and never really knew what I could have been doing with it.

Well, frankly, the Affinity suite is being marketed as "pro", so… even a "casual user" should better know what they are doing.

Well, frankly, the Affinity suite is being marketed as "pro", so… even a "casual user" should better know what they are doing.

Ha!
Hold on, here's the clue:
It's ye olde DEFAULT ENGLISH (UK) LANGUAGE BUG!
The (temporary) fix:
Change the app language from English (or Default) to English US (or any other language you can read).
English US is what I'm using anyway – and thus suffering from all those related bugs elsewhere – hence I've never encountered this issue until now.
P.S. Although seeing that others are using e.g. German and having this bug anyway, it's likely not the only "source". Worth to try though.

You use Publisher to create pages.
Keep in mind, though, that it's either pages or artboards. You cannot mix them.
Not at all! That's been part of the universal and "app agnostic" Affinity document file format concept from the start.
That's also what the much advertized Studio Link feature is all about!
Fair enough, that may seem odd. But I'd assume that's more of a business strategy decision, to make a clear distinction between the three apps, and to encourage users of just one app to purchase the other apps, too. From that point of view, this is basically a smart move. It's just the UI execution that is not so smart, as in: Once you have all three apps anyway, they should be "smart" enough to simply enable the UI for the shared features in all of them.
It's neither my hobby, nor my "job". It's my profession (vive la différence), it's what I do for a living. Exploring and learning new things that I can do with my tools is an integral part of my profession. (Auf Deutsch würde ich es als Weiterbildung bezeichnen.)
Hey, back in the 1980s when I was in the art school learning my profession the analog way, we'd spend like weeks alone to learn and practice how to properly use a small snap-off blade cutter to cut paper, Ulano film, you name it. My very first Aristo triangle can tell the whole story of this process; I still may have it somewhere…
(Do young designers these days even know what a cutter is…?)

Speaking of which… a brilliant workaround just popped up half an hour ago:
 

1 - Export the PDF with Publisher.
2 - Open the generated PDF with Designer (every page becomes an artboard)
3 - Go to "Export Persona"
4 - Select all the pages
5 - Set the preset to PDF (choose the one you need for printing o web)
6 - Export Slices

Yes. The feature is there in Affinity, but no UI to access it.
Not sure if this is a bug or just a "lazy omission".
For what it's worth, the current "ugly workaround" would be to create a "template" of linked text paths in InDesign, save as IDML, import to Publisher and save as an asset "template" for future use. Make sure to create enough linked paths in advance because you can always remove them later but you can't add/link more in Affinity.
So… here's a quick'n'dirty IDML A4 template with straight lines to get us going. You can always alter or hide any of the curves in Affinity as you see fit using the Text Frame panel, as well as style any text to your liking.
linked_text_on_path.idml

Definitely!
As I have already posted elsewhere just recently, I wouldn't use Affinity for any print jobs if I still didn't have a working installation of Acrobat (and the rest of my old CS bunch) to double check any PDF/X coming out of Affinity.
That said, I just had in idea, and… that's pretty weird:
create "humane text" in InDesign export IDML open IDML in Publisher the paths are linked! WTF?!

We were not allowed to make photocopies for screens, as we would have lost customers. It was hard enough to find the right settings with the repro camera so that the images were not too bright or even too dark.
The Agfa orange, I remember. There were also these orange canisters with developer fluid ...
And as for the youth: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MuWtfL8MH3s
We are completely off topic, hopefully we won't get a beating ...

99.9999999% agreed! (rounding errorrrrrrr… )

Fair enough, at this time I do have the time. That's also why it took me quite some time to even begin with the Adobe-to-Affinity transition only last December, even though I've been an "early adopter" of each of the Affinity apps. If you look at my post history on these forums, until the end of the last year I was also mainly just "bitching".
But then I took my time to learn to use my new tools of choice, and it has paid.
… you should not be using tools you're not familiar with inside out in your sleep.
Neither was in PageMaker, XPress, Freehand, Adobe, you name it. Yet we've learned how to work around those illogicalities over the years.
Speaking of "logical": is Apple's (formerly Emagic's) Logic Pro logical? I'm attempting to tame and master it for 20 years now. But since audio editing and mastering is only my "second job", sometimes I'm having breaks of many months, and then it feels like having to start all over again, re-reading whole user manual chapters that I've read like ten times already, etc., etc. Until it eventually starts to make sense again.
Some Affinity omissions and UI flaws are truly mind boggling…
I still have a few 30 years old sheets right next to me in a shelf. They don't take any extra space, so what. I'll keep them.