thomasp

Among the applications I work with Photoshop and Blender come to mind as applications that will load in content saved out from much newer versions of the software. You'll get a warning prompt and content that's functionally incompatible with the older version might be either missing or displayed wrong but the general file will load in. In many cases at least in my experience it's no big deal unless the file has been specifically built around some more recent features, resulting in half the data being omitted.

As a response to the comment I quoted about a 'modest' increase. How is that modest again, to charge so much more for practically the same thing but now call it V2? Because ... Inflation? Oh I'm aware of the discount, no worries. However as it stands it's a discount for something that looks like no significant improvement to what I already use.

Original price that I paid for Designer and Photo (both Windows) was 39.99 Euros each (looks like this was the regular price back then) and a little under 33 Euros each for the Mac versions a while later (seems like those were discounted). This isn't dawn of time stuff either but rather end of 2018 for the most recent purchases. Now, one major version later these same number of licenses - if purchased without discount and in the same fashion - would cost me a staggering 84.99 Euros each. Doesn't sound like a particularly modest increase to me. In fact I don't recall ever seeing 'my' softwares increase prices from one version to the next anywhere near these percentages unless the capabilities of the software were totally transformed. Here on the other hand it appears mainly the version number was changed - which is to say: where are the key new features, the slew of bugfixes and the amazing performance gains to make version 1 look like an oldtimer? What it is is still small fries next to what single seat licenses of Photoshop and Illustrator would have cost before they went subscription. But then those two were shaping up more quickly and at a comparable 8 years of age were already more mature all around if memory serves.

As a 3D guy I've transferred plenty of content from Designer into my 3D applications - via SVG. Is there some trick I'm missing about DXF - can it transfer more than points/lines or does it have other advantages over SVG? Honestly haven't dealt with this format since spending a few hours way back in school, messing around with Auto-Cad.

Well on the other hand - I have a single Ultrawide screen here connected to the Mac. I only use separated mode. 😃 To me it's mainly a band aid because the default mode with an application background window isn't behaving to my liking in Affinity: it's too easy to snap and maximize floating document windows which is a pain when you usually have a bunch of windows open and want them side by side or move them around a lot. For me it's a reason I never really got into the Windows version of Affinity despite also having a license for it. Works fine in Photoshop though - I've never used that without the application background window anywhere. Turns out I don't actually want to see the desktop peeking through.

Going one step further, I find the general trajectory of Windows very unpleasant. MSIX just seems to tie nicely into that. Hand-holding, second-guessing and even overriding the user's decisions at every turn seems par for the course. For someone who got started with NT4 and W2000 style operating systems it's so much work to fight this thing from a fresh install, every iteration of it seems more obnoxious and deliberately designed to annoy. Suffice to say I dread upgrading these days. Time for more applications to move to Linux so we can leave this abomination of an OS behind. 😇

But then you spend your time rebooting, resetting your session over and over - and managing two installations. A long time ago I did that with Windows and Linux on the same machine. Painful when you would need to reboot just to quickly perform some action on your data. Personally I'd rather stick with Affinity V1 than deal with something like that again. 😇

Do they allow export of the warp mesh or -settings to be reused across different documents/patterns? All I know beyond the liquify persona is the mesh warp tool and that won't let me reuse anything.

Have a look at the Liquify Persona in Photo for warping these patterns. Comparable to the Liquify filter in Photoshop, assuming you're familiar with that.

Assuming you would even want auto updates in a production setup. I always turn them off or block them and prefer to install updates at my own choosing (or skip problematic ones). 🙂 E.g. I have Affinity V1 applications blocked from net access because I do not want alerts about new versions popping up when the programs start up.

Perhaps its worth to investigate why this is happening? Might be code signing or some other phone-home functionality. Personally I'd try installing a firewall that can block outgoing connections and restrict Affinity and OS code signing daemons from accessing the net temporarily. Also appstore daemons - if you happen to use the app store version of Affinity. This one in particular: https://github.com/objective-see/LuLu

MS - like others - have done a lot of wishful thinking over the years though. Their OS is littered with little graveyards of abandoned functionality that was supposed to be the one and only solution. Let's see how this one turns out.

Not a fan of the CAPS style of writing but I agree with the sentiment. An 'app' that is so nonstandard to maintain will not often get past corporate IT policy. Nor mine at home, come to think of it. And isn't this new format also tied to the Microsoft store in some way? That thing's disabled and banned from the net for good around these parts! 😇 Seems like a questionable strategy to develop this new version in isolation instead of offering a sneak peek like the previous beta program to the user base prior to release. I imagine quite a few unpleasant surprises could have been avoided by simply doing that. I'll be sitting this one out for a while.

Perhaps it's the builtin virus scanner in Windows? I had to disable that thing - incredibly intrusive and frequently scanned applications on startup, absolute torture when you frequently have to launch image viewers etc. MAde my Ryzen system feel slower than some 10-year old Intel running on SATA-SSDs. You can temporarily disable it from the settings GUI somewhere to test if it's that. It'll turn itself back on after a bit though - back to sluggish-mode. Requires more intrusive measures to get rid of entirely.

Affinity 1.10.5 here. Takes a hair over three seconds to load on Windows 10 (Ryzen 5950) as well as Mac (Xeon 6-core Trashcan) for me. Haven't done any benchmarks for direct comparison but both are working well for painting et al (hardware acceleration activated in both cases). CTRL+N instantly pops up the new document template selector.

My take from all I'm reading here in the forums is that the Affinity applications have probably been refactored to some extent. Sounds like they are now using a new windowing toolkit or the like that may not even support the basic concepts used in separated mode. If so it was probably done to make cross-platform development easier. Affinity started out very Mac-centric, it may be that this lead to difficulties in porting to Windows and the iPad. This is just my guess btw - I haven't tried out V2 yet. But the framework not supporting separated mode would make the most sense to me as an explanation as to why the feature went away and got replaced by something that feels like an iPad-'app'-concept and the FAQ just states something along the lines of "its gone, deal with it".

It depends on what features you are using. I find for sketching/painting Affinity to be better (even the older versions) and it's quicker/more versatile for larger files/higher than 8 bits color depth. Also CS6 didn't have instant blend mode preview and the like. If however you want to automate tasks or even go into scripting or if you require animation features then Affinity has none of those (beyond the most basic macro recording capability). Then even a Photoshop 5.x from the turn of the century will handily beat it. 😇

Btw. has anything functionally changed with how the on/off buttons in the layer stack work? In V1 at least you have to go and click the checkmark to toggle layers one by one. By contrast in Photoshop you can click and hold and then drag across the eye icons in the layer palette to hide or show as many layers as you want in one go. Oh and in AP V1 you can (accidentally) draw on hidden layers making for an unwelcome surprise once you unhide again whereas Photoshop prevents it. Nifty details. 👍

Yes the system requirements have been bumped up across the board, also on the Mac side. I (grudingly) did the switch to Windows 10 at the start of this year, wasn't pretty. My condolences.

It's no longer possible with V2, you have to keep using V1 if you want to run on Windows 7.

I'm also on 10.14.6 and thus locked out for the time being. Obviously would love to see Mojave making a comeback on the support list. In my book Catalina is a climb down and one to definitely stay far away from, Big Sur perhaps a minor improvement on that and whatever the current one is called only recently got its firmware issues for my hardware worked out, otherwise a somewhat mixed bag. So from a productivity perspective they're all unattractive choices to me. Especially when you factor in that upgrading the OS and especially when jumping a few version numbers at once usually also means upgrading (or replacing) other software for compatible versions.

UK prices are quoted with VAT, same as in Euroland: 20% in the UK and 19-20something in the Eurozone, depending on country - so that's not it. I noticed the price had exploded. I think mine also were around 35 Euros or so per license. To compare that with a (presumably temporary) discounted introductory offer and then claim that there was no overall price increase .... well 😂.

Yeah it's gone according to the FAQ:

I was simply replying to the OP's "Those palettes are stored somewhere in the system somehow, and I will try to find it." is all. 🙂

Affinity preferences - at least for V1 - are stored under (user-folder)/Library/Application Support/ Library is a hidden folder by default and you may have to google a bit on how to make it user accessible through Finder for your OS version. Apple doesn't want us to dig around in there. 😇 I can see the AP preferences folder contains mostly a bunch of *.dat and *.propcol files for my installation.