Eiskis

You can do a continuous export from Affinity and beam it up to your phone with Skala Preview. Now, this isn't a perfect replacement for Sketch Mirror, but it does work satisfactorily. It's not as fast and you have to do a few more manual setup steps, but I tried it out and figured that it wouldn't be a deal breaker for me. I have issues with Sketch Mirror all the time as well, and it doesn't work on Android (where I use Skala even with Sketch). That said, I'd really prefer a Mirror app. I need nothing but the connectivity, live mirroring (don't even need artboard selection or anything like that) and zooming. I know it's still not trivial to create these apps but you can get really far with just the basic feature set.

I understand this is partly a matter of personal preference and familiarity with various tools, but I believe the layers panel could be made much clearer with icons or other visual aids to quickly differentiate between different layer types. Perhaps this is a topic that has been discussed before but I want to still bring it up. Let's compare the layer panels across different tools: Photoshop, Affinity and Sketch. Both Sketch and Photoshop have visual elements like icons, big and small and in different colors to help the user understand the type of the element they're interacting with. I go to the layers panel for exactly this reason, to understand what kind of element I'm using and use type-specific functionality (editing smart object/symbol, closing/opening a folder etc...). The biggest issue I've had with Affinity since day one is not being able to differentiate between groups and other elements. It's spelled out but you can't glance at the panel and visually get a complete picture of the state of entire document. Having two shapes in a group vs. having to shapes in a compound shape looks almost identical even though they are two very different things. Affinity obviously has a text label explaining the type of each layer, but this info is very fine-grained, and sometimes hidden (with long layer names). At least the symbols have a color indicator, but could more color be used to make other types stand out more? I'm fine if I have to read the text to know if a text layer is art text vs. frame text, but shouldn't the difference between a group and a text layer be immediately super clear? I also like the ability to close folders to get rid of visual noise in Photoshop. I really like thumbnails as well but sometimes it makes hard to understand the structure of nested elements. I might essentially see my face three times if I have a nested profile pic structure in my layout, and it's quite difficult to figure out which one is the actual pixel layer that has the portrait information. And in reverse, sometimes I see a portrait in the layers panel and try to interact with it, but something weird happens because it's actually a group with the pixel layer inside it. In Photoshop, I can set the thumbnails to match the dimensions of that layer, which adds some visual noise to the panel but makes it easier to differentiate between them. Empty groups are hard to spot. I wouldn't mind the option to have these groomed out automatically like in Sketch, but that's a separate issue. I at least want to differentiate between groups and other elements easily. I also struggle with masking in Affinity, and I believe it's mostly because of these issues I have with understanding the layer structures. Concrete suggestions/alternatives: Straight-up add a type icon on the left of the thumbnail? Adjust the thumbnail style per layer type to increase contrast between layer types (text layers could do without the border for example, while symbols could be highlighted somehow)? Use folder icons for folders to let user hide visual noise and make group layers smaller vertically? Use coloring for not just symbols but for other layer types as well. Investigate different ways of adding colors (the line on the left isn't very intuitive for me especially in nested symbols)? Use small icons on top of the thumbnails to indicate layer type (example: vector icon in Photoshop)? Only highlight hidden layers with "eye" icon like in other tools to decrease visual noise for all visible layers? Make hidden layers appear more discreet by changing text color of layer name as well? In any case, thank you for creating this great tool. I hope some of my suggestions have been considered and this area of the product will see some improvement in the near future, I feel like it's still holding me back and affecting daily life with Affinity.

It seems quite obvious to me that I should be able to duplicate layers by alt + drag & drop in the layers panel in Affinity Designer. This is how it works if you grab on object in the actual canvas and would be the expected behavior also in the layers panel, especially since many other tools work this way as well. Alt doesn't appear to be tied to any other kind of behavior either.

I would like to ask about the move tool, how it's intended to be used and how it could be improved. First, a bit of a premise. I mostly work on UI design and complex files with a lot of groups and layers. UIs are systems and it's important to keep the files organized, layers named and ordered in a way that I myself as well as other designers and developers can understand and work with. You typically have large base color layers for, say, a panel and also large semitransparent overlay layers for e.g. shadow effects. More importantly, the mockups typically include elements or containers that are meant to be scrollable in the actual product, and to mock this up, they can overflow the canvas (perhaps in a file or artboard that's set to be the size of a mobile device's screen). This means that you have multiple levels of nested layers and large areas where those layers overlap (meaning the objects that visually seem to be on top might have objects overlaying them), and some elements are not in the canvas/viewport to be grabbed with the cursor. The move tool, as far as I'm aware, doesn't work great in this scenario. Typically I can find an object quite nicely in my layers bar but moving it requires pinpointing it in the artboard (while nudging doesn't). This can be quite painful, requires a lot of precision and easily results in errors. The layer selection also changes constantly, which can be annoying when I also want to, for example, change character styling of the paragraph I just moved (or tried to move). In Photoshop, this is covered quite nicely. The move tool has an option for enabling or disabling the "autoselect" feature, meaning that when it's off, the move tool respects the selections made in layers bar regardless of the position of the cursor. This is quite nifty as it also comes with a hotkey (cmd) that enables autoselect. Furthermore there's an option for setting whether autoselect targets groups or actual objects. This means that as I normally have the autoselect off, meaning I can always drag and drop elements on my artboard regardless of the cursor position and maintain the layer selection. I don't think it's valid to think that Affinity should specifically aim to match Photoshop's features, but I believe the use cases I listed should be covered better. And I want to emphasize I'm struggling with forced autoselect in complex documents in Affinity as well as other tools like Sketch. With Affinity this is one of the two major concerns I still have (the other being the lack of warp tools). Would love to hear if you think I'm missing something as a user or if you have something planned.