Gear maker

morbandit, I so totally agree with you.  I usually construct my drawing mostly from the top down, meaning I tend to draw a lot of the detail first then the background and that makes the layer's order be from the bottom up.  So I keep having to drag the detail on top of what I just created to keep it visible.  It's easier to drag and reorder 20 layers then it is to hit the toolbar icon before constructing each of 20 shapes.
 
What I have gotten in the habit of doing is to work with my current layer invisible until the shape is what I want.  Then drag it below the detail and turn the visibility back on to make adjustments and work with the color.
 
It should be that if the Insert behind selection is clicked once it works for one entry, but if it's double clicked it stays selected until cancelled.
Mike

morbandit, I so totally agree with you.  I usually construct my drawing mostly from the top down, meaning I tend to draw a lot of the detail first then the background and that makes the layer's order be from the bottom up.  So I keep having to drag the detail on top of what I just created to keep it visible.  It's easier to drag and reorder 20 layers then it is to hit the toolbar icon before constructing each of 20 shapes.
 
What I have gotten in the habit of doing is to work with my current layer invisible until the shape is what I want.  Then drag it below the detail and turn the visibility back on to make adjustments and work with the color.
 
It should be that if the Insert behind selection is clicked once it works for one entry, but if it's double clicked it stays selected until cancelled.
Mike

morbandit, I so totally agree with you.  I usually construct my drawing mostly from the top down, meaning I tend to draw a lot of the detail first then the background and that makes the layer's order be from the bottom up.  So I keep having to drag the detail on top of what I just created to keep it visible.  It's easier to drag and reorder 20 layers then it is to hit the toolbar icon before constructing each of 20 shapes.
 
What I have gotten in the habit of doing is to work with my current layer invisible until the shape is what I want.  Then drag it below the detail and turn the visibility back on to make adjustments and work with the color.
 
It should be that if the Insert behind selection is clicked once it works for one entry, but if it's double clicked it stays selected until cancelled.
Mike

This strikes me as an odd design choice... if it only sticks for a single operation then there is no real saving (in terms of time, number of operations, clicks etc) over pasting any-old-where and moving the object to the desired location.

morbandit, I so totally agree with you.  I usually construct my drawing mostly from the top down, meaning I tend to draw a lot of the detail first then the background and that makes the layer's order be from the bottom up.  So I keep having to drag the detail on top of what I just created to keep it visible.  It's easier to drag and reorder 20 layers then it is to hit the toolbar icon before constructing each of 20 shapes.
 
What I have gotten in the habit of doing is to work with my current layer invisible until the shape is what I want.  Then drag it below the detail and turn the visibility back on to make adjustments and work with the color.
 
It should be that if the Insert behind selection is clicked once it works for one entry, but if it's double clicked it stays selected until cancelled.
Mike

It's the "Bake Corners" button in english.  And yes it is nonreversible.  Too bad the corner button doesn't have a scale with object option.

That is truly amazing.  I have tried off and on for a few years to draw a face that does not look like a cartoon.  Each time I give up.  Anything half as good as what you've done would have thrilled me.  You have a very good eye to pick out the nuances between vector elements.  Outstanding work.
 
Congratulations on the arrival of Vesper.  May your life experiences with him be even more amazing.

There is still a problem with the corner tool.  When a corner type is selected it stays highlighted only while the mouse button is down.  Going back to None as soon as the button is released.  Then as soon as the radius is changed the corner type for Rounded becomes highlighted, even if another type was selected.  Then after the radius is changed the type can be changed to whatever is desired.

It did kind of sound like that.  But what I had been referring to was another corner tool issue that came up recently about it failing when the number of corners was over 4 or 5.  Thanks for passing this on.
Mike

I have a rectangle with a stroke aligned to the inside of a rectangle.  I wanted another rectangle that went from the edge of the stroke to the edge of the stroke.  Seeing as snapping doesn't detect the inside of the stroke I zoomed in.  But as I changed the zoom the width of the stroke kept changing as seen below.  Of course there are ways to get around this problem.  But it does show that there is a problem.

 
Using beta 8 on a mac running Sierra.

You tease!

Is there a way to select multiple non-contiguous adjacent layers in both AP and AD, e.g. in the attachment if I want to select all the layers coloured 'red', I can click 'Square 3', shift click and then select 'Square 5' to select the first 3 layers, but if I then want to add 'Square 9, 13 and 17 to 19' to my selection I can seemingly only do this by Cmd (⌘) clicking each additional layer one at a time.
Is there any keyboard combination that would allow me to select the first and last 'red' layer in each non-contiguous group rather than having to click each individual layer to add it to my selection, so in the attached sample, click Square 3, shift click Square 5, cmd click Squares 9 and 13 and then some way to click Square 17 and shift click Square 19? There are instances where there may be hundreds of non-contiguous, adjacent layers that need to be selected and it's a bit of a pain having to select them one by one.
I guess this may come back to a feature request I think I've seen which would allow the option of selecting all layers which have the same fill or outline colour or at least a subset based on grouped layers, allowing you to select all layers with the same fill or same outline colour within individual grouped layers...

The W and H do work also.  This is slick.  Where I will find the most use is compound shapes like when something that was subtracted from another.  Just the area subtracted, or just the outside shape can now be rotated, stretched and shrunk.  Which is fantastic!  Just like the dynamic boolean operations, without it being dynamic.   Thanks again guys.
Mike

The W and H do work also.  This is slick.  Where I will find the most use is compound shapes like when something that was subtracted from another.  Just the area subtracted, or just the outside shape can now be rotated, stretched and shrunk.  Which is fantastic!  Just like the dynamic boolean operations, without it being dynamic.   Thanks again guys.
Mike

So maybe that is why you are a Happy Kitten? 

What is quickly?..... or easy ? Did the below in about 5 minutes. But it certainly ain't no vector distort...
 
1) Draw rectangle
2) Power duplicate it down in size
3) Add a centered star with 0 inner radius (double star works too). The only tricky thing here is that in order for the star lines to line up with the corners (I think) it has to be rotated 90º.  (star proportions should match the rectangle)
Throw the star into a copy of the biggest rectangle to clip it.
4) "Mask" out the center with another simple rectangle.... or add a couple points and mask out whatever section/piece you want (pictured).
Or clip it with the inverse.
 
Still somewhat editable.... i.e. the star is still editable as a star.
 

 
 

I admit I'm a bit lost in what your response entails, exactly, so I'll try to show you what I mean. As I see it, there are two ways to commit a transform: you can have the object become square to the document so that every time you click the button you get a nice, clean rectangle, no matter where you are (the behavior we see temporarily in "Reset Selection Box"), or you can have the object become square to the parent object.
 
The example below shows how, if you use the former option, the parent object's box becomes distorted from it's bounds when you apply it to the keyboard. However, the latter option is useful for correcting exactly that issue. And of course, if the object in question is at the top level with no parents, or if all parents have no transform, the two are indistinguishable.
 
... yes, I'm using designer for drafting.

Indeed there are. If you're doing stroke gradients it's absolutely maddening to constantly bring up that tiny widget at the top of the screen. After a while I just gave up, used an online gradient generator and brought it in with an SVG. The "creative" solution was for the birds, I can't actually see the gradient behind the blue overlay. Even when I make the stroke the wrong size just so I can see the colours during editing, the overlay distorts colour perception, so does changing the line width.
 
I found the on-document solution to be quite terrible for a lot of use cases. You can't type in percentages of stops, you can't just click through and have the next stop placed at the 50% point between the stop you just placed and the next. It's a frustration bath for so many things. Everything has to be made in tedious manual steps and with guesswork. The time that takes just isn't available for creative tasks anymore then. This caused me to look for other options, like the various online tools for gradient generation.
 
Also a thing that'd be useful with gradients in general but nobody bothers with is gamma lock or in HSL/HSV a saturation and luma / value lock. That way a gradient would always have the same saturation and lightness while blending across hues only. Right now it's a matter of checking and re-typing on each stop. We can edit all the values, why not put a little lock icon next to them? Linking would be useful as well. An easy way to bring up the values of an HSV gradient all at once, or decrease the saturation. This would save an additional adjustment layer. Adjustment layers can become quite expensive when part of a symbol group. This would be a simpler way.

Money is not the problem and as I said earlier we’ve been trying to hire for what seems like years. We are all doing overtime (and then some) - we are doing the best we can and will continue to do so. The reality is that this is a niche area for developers and you need to be genuinely interested in the subject in order to thrive...

So would I

Matt, the expand stroke is sooo much better.  I really appreciate all the hard work you put in to improve it.  One of the many tests I have tried was just a rounded corner rectangle.  In the original stroked image there was a slight bow to the stroke on the 2 vertical members.  But after expand stroke the bow was gone.  
 
Back in 2015 I had noted that a rounded corner rectangle went from 8 nodes to 47.  Well today this one went from 8 nodes to 16.  That's perfect.  Thank you.
 
Now I just need to remember to go back to using the command.
Mike

Will Serif ever address the readability of live measurements? Currently these are very hard to read.

Thanks for your help Alex.
Mike

There are excellent DAMs out there already.  And some of us have invested some heavy bucks in them.  I've been using MediaPro since it was called iViewPro and it still provides me with the all the "management" I need.  Or want.  I use MediaPro to manage my files; Affinity to process and edit them.  Affinity may come out with an exceptional DAM at some point. If so, I will consider it but in the meantime, I'd rather spend my time using what I've got than whining about what I don't.

Alex, you are right that worked.  Of course AD closes both curves when the divide is done.  But then it worked as usual.  Either I'm getting even more forgetful or I've just never run into where the curves were in one layer.  Does make you wonder why that restriction exists.  Thanks.
 
Mike