fde101
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Posts posted by fde101
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Just to point it out, 1-2% of the Steam users using Linux, does not equate to 1-2% of the desktop market using Linux.
Not everyone plays games on their computers, and not everyone who does play games uses Steam.
I happen to have Steam on all three platforms: I have a steam deck (Linux), multiple copies of Steam installed on Windows (under CrossOver on my Mac - granted "fake" Windows but it would still be counted as Windows in the statistics, in a virtual machine which crashes when I try to run 3D graphics, and on an older Windows laptop that lacks the performance for some of the games I play), and under macOS.
Given the choice, would I rather play a native macOS game (maximum performance on my most powerful computer), a Linux game (native on my Steam Deck), or a Windows game (in which I may need to try it in several places to finally figure out where it sort of works)?
If you go purely by the numbers, I am among those contributing to the statistics being extremely misleading. Sure, I have it installed in places that would be counted as Windows in the statistics, but I would 100% prefer a native macOS game, or failing that one under Linux, over one for Windows. I would even look for it on my Nintendo Switch or some other console before getting a Windows version if the game is available for the Switch.
Consider also that I very rarely use Windows on one of my personal computers for anything other than playing a game (the rest of the time being to update security patches or run some program that is Windows-only (something that is already a rarity for me and is becoming even more so over time), which means that as more of the games I am interested in become available on other platforms I have access to, there will be less and less reason for me to bother with running Steam on Windows. I suspect there at least some others in this same position, and the Windows "dominance" in the gaming market would be reduced by some non-trivial amount if more games became available natively on other platforms.
As much as I suspect this is true for gaming, I suspect it is even more true for many of the creative markets. This is mostly a problem of momentum, but that momentum can be hard to swing.
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5 minutes ago, albertkinng said:
The key takeaway here is that as a developer, you're not strictly limited to the default behaviors provided by the development environment.
True, and when developers leverage this ability to create arbitrary changes to apps which break with conventions that are standard to the environment, it almost always results in sub-standard applications which do not fit in with the rest of the environment.
A macOS user who is accustomed to finding that option in that location in that menu will look for it there in other applications as well. Being the one application that makes them go hunting for it when it can be readily found in the same expected place everywhere else is not an act if kindness to your users.
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Bad idea, at least on the Mac, because this is a standard macOS convention used by many other apps, both from Apple and from third parties.
If I create a new document-based SwiftUI application for macOS using Xcode, there is zero code or configuration in the application itself to even have an "Open Recent" menu at all, much less with a "Clear Menu" command, yet the framework creates it automatically, it is so inherent to the nature of a macOS application.
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Something like this would probably be relatively easy to implement as a script once that functionality becomes available.
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On 2/10/2024 at 11:57 AM, Pšenda said:
if that was even possible
It would be difficult to do that in any sensible manner without introducing animation/video features into the current products, which Serif has indicated a few times in the past they have no intention of doing at this time, same as 3D features.
I don't believe this is a good fit for the Affinity product line at this time.
As has been pointed out above, there are alternatives out there: Apple Motion (Mac only), Blackmagic Design Fusion, Natron, some limited capabilities in Blender, maybe even something like Tumult Hype (Mac only) or Synfig Studio depending on the type of work you are trying to use it for...
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Another option (depending on your requirements) might be to export the document as a PDF 1.4 with Advanced Features turned off and Rasterize set to Nothing, then re-import the PDF.
Note that the preview displayed for this export (at least on macOS) is not accurate, as it continues to show the FX applied in spite of the fact that they are not included in the exported document.
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In the interim, if you have Keyboard Maestro or other similar macro utility, you could try something like this to assign a keyboard shortcut to one of the channels:
Note that the "Image" for the first one is the "RGB" popup menu and for the second is the "Master" from the menu next to it; for both items I right-clicked on the image well and enabled "Wait For Image".
You would substitute the channel of interest for the second image, and could thus assign another of these for each one.
Not as fast or seamless as a native solution, but it may or may not be an improvement in the interim if you have such a utility available.
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As to the Channels panel, I'm kind of marginal on whether or not it makes sense to add that one to Designer, as it doesn't quite fit the role that I see Designer having in the lineup. I can certainly see how some would find it useful, but as a kind of kludge, in that if you are performing the kind of channel manipulations that I believe the panel is intended to support, you are really in Photo territory, and if you are trying to do the previews that are suggested here, that is really more of a Publisher / preflight kind of task, with Designer kind of caught up in the middle of it. Regardless, if the Channels panel were added, as I mentioned earlier, the Pixel persona would be the most appropriate home for it there.
The bigger issue I have with the Channels panel is how cumbersome it can be to work with. Why can't I drag one channel over another to duplicate the content of one channel into another channel? Why can't I option-drag a channel into the bottom of the list to create a copy of it as an "extra" channel? Or maybe command+drag one channel onto another to swap their content?
The fact that so many obvious manipulations are made so cumbersome to access (if offered at all) is a rather stark contrast to so much of the rest of the program. The interface of that panel is really overdue for an overhaul.
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16 hours ago, loukash said:
stay in Publisher and just switch between its three personae to have all features in one app.
Except that you don't.
Publisher does not give you access to the Liquify, Tone Mapping or Export personas, even if you own the other two apps.
It doesn't give you access to the Pixel persona either, but if you own Photo, that one isn't exactly much of a loss given access to the Photo persona.
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3 hours ago, NotMyFault said:
- Switch to Photo (which lacks some of Designer's capabilities, making this approach both tedious and often impossible).
Depending on which of Designer's capabilities you need, you could also switch to Publisher, and access both the Photo and Designer personas within the same app.
2 hours ago, loukash said:What we need in all three apps instead is a genuine Separations panel.
I don't believe that color separations are provided for by the Channels panel - it serves a different purpose - but I don't believe a Separations panel makes sense at all in Photo, and it is somewhat marginal in Designer.
Instead, I have already suggested several times (if memory serves I believe a few others may have as well) that Publisher should have a new Preflight persona, roughly comparable to the Export persona in the other two apps, in which things like color separations, imposition and the like would all be accounted for with a more complete interface than could be provided by one simple panel.
The Channels panel is more for raster image work in which someone may want to manipulate individual color channels somewhat directly, meaning it is correctly part of the Photo persona. If added to Designer it would be most appropriately added to the Pixel persona.
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If you have Publisher and prefer to stay in Designer most of the time, consider creating an empty table of a reasonable size in Publisher then saving it as an asset in Designer so you can drag it into a document then tweak it from there.
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We log into the forums using an email address, meaning we all have one, making it the least common denominator for this functionality, and better than nothing.
That said, email itself is not particularly secure, so I agree that other options are definitely preferable when available, where this is of significant concern.
It is unrealistic to expect that many sites will support 3rd party authentication devices at this stage of the game, and SMS support is not always free to offer support for.
While cell phone companies have traditionally allowed you to email a message that gets delivered as an SMS, many of them have started pulling back on support for this, and the address you send the messages to is formed differently for different people even on the same provider in some cases, making using these services challenging and somewhat hit-or-miss.
Other SMS offerings are usually at a cost, which not all companies will want to pay when offering free accounts to a publicly accessible forum (meaning an unbounded number of SMS messages may need to be sent, thus a cost which is not controlled and which they may not be able to recoup).
Offering support for signing in using a Google account appears to be free, and allows support for Google Authenticator if enabled for the account, so that is probably one of the more realistic options that many sites would be able to offer as an improvement over emailed codes.
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It appears to be Unicode character 1E3F: https://codepoints.net/U+1E3F?lang=en
4 hours ago, BarbaraSki said:If you have any idea how to switch that off
From the perspective of the Affinity software, it is not something you switch on and off. The "m" with an accent (there are others in addition to this one) is a separate letter from the "m" without an accent - so if you have one and don't want the accent, you would replace it with an "m" that does not have an accent.
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1 hour ago, mogsie said:
For instance, search for what is NOT colour 0 0 0 100 CMYK so that I can make sure there is no lurking rich black
Search for what is, then invert the selection.
17 minutes ago, Old Bruce said:I honestly wish the Mac OS finder would allow me to search for things using Not.
It does, but it is a bit more complex than it should be to get there:
- Click the search button in the title bar and search for some random text
- Click the "+" next to the "Save" button
- Option+click the "+" on the added iine (it turns into "..." while holding down option)
- Change "Any" to "None"
- Remove the line originally added in step 2
- Set your criteria in the area below "None"
- Clear the text of the original search
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3 hours ago, GarryP said:
And should the displayed aspect ratio be reversed, or not, when the document orientation changes between landscape and portrait?
It is typically width : height, so a classic monitor or a 4/3 camera sensor size would have a 4:3 aspect ratio, typical TV resolutions such as HD and Ultra HD are 16:9, and DCI cinema formats such as 2K and 4K are 17:9, for starters. If flipped to portrait, it would be 3:4, 9:16, 9:17, etc.
3 hours ago, GarryP said:For facing-page documents in Publisher, should the displayed aspect ratio be for a single page or the whole spread?
Even a facing pages document typically has single pages for the first and often last spread, so this one is a bit more up in the air. My vote would be to stick with per page?
3 hours ago, GarryP said:Should the displayed aspect ratio take bleed into account, or not?
Bleed is not part of the page proper - it is an overprinting area to allow for cropping. I would exclude it.
3 hours ago, GarryP said:How many decimal places should be displayed when the numbers are not integers?
Two is typical in the film/video world, which is where I suspect this request is probably coming from.
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This has been requested several times, making this a duplicate thread.
In the interim, there are numerous external apps which can be used to render these equations, the results of which can then be pasted into the Affinity products.
Same with barcodes, QR codes, etc.
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Hi @luisduzzi, welcome to the forums!
Yes, this has come up before. I agree that having more options for these things would greatly expand the range of what is possible using the Appearance panel.
Here is an example of a past thread requesting this:
In general it is best to keep discussion of one request in one place rather than spread it out over multiple threads.
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I don't think exporting a Publisher document to a Word document would be practical. Exporting the text of an individual story, sure, but not the entire document. The structure of a DTP document is just too different from that of a traditional word processing document - it may be possible to export something which loosely resembles the Publisher document, but it would not be practical to work with in Word and some of the formatting would be very likely to break during the export.
On 1/22/2024 at 2:52 PM, tzvi20 said:export the DOCX format as that I what my college wants
Convince them that what they really want is PDF. DOCX files make for a *very* poor distribution format, however much some people might wish to pretend otherwise.
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On 1/20/2024 at 9:54 AM, walt.farrell said:
it should behave the same on macOS
It does, at least for me (macOS 13.6.3, Apple Silicon).
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14 hours ago, Bit Arts said:
this very theoretical construct
You might feel that way if you are accustomed to thinking of a traditional photo app, but one limitation of raster layers is that their data is directly editable (the very thing you are trying to accomplish) which means that their data must be stored within the document file itself. They cannot be placed as linked - they must be embedded.
There are numerous desktop publishing use cases where it would drive users just as crazy if this feature you are proposing ever became a default - there are reasons why they would want images to be linked rather than embedded, and image layers are essential to those workflows.
I don't think this request would be a popular addition to Publisher, and for Designer it is marginal, but I do agree that a checkbox in Preferences/Settings for Photo to auto-rasterize newly placed images would make sense for some workflows, though caution should be applied before consideration of making it a default, as current versions of Photo also support linked placement, and would similarly need to use image layers if users choose to take advantage of that option.
Another limitation of pixel layers is that they can only contain raster data. Vector images can be placed and remain vector, so SVG files for example remain perfectly scalable as image layers, a property which would be lost when rasterizing to a pixel layer.
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The functionality to customize the main toolbar is provided by Apple as a standard feature for other developers to use.
Problems with that functionality should be reported to Apple, not Serif.
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Hi @Andres Flores, welcome to the forums!
One challenge is that they would need a Vision Pro to test the software on to make sure it works, otherwise they will be getting support issues that they can't realistically address since they do not have the hardware. Additionally, the Vision Pro seems to be designed for one person to use, so they may need multiple $3500 single-developer systems for what may in the end prove to be a niche product.
It is not clear at this time how many of these will sell in its first iteration, so I can understand developers not wanting to jump the gun on pouring resources into supporting it until we see how it will fare in the market.
Note also that these apps on the iPad primarily benefit from the precision of input using the Apple Pencil, and all indications are that much of this precision will be lost with the AVP and its advertised input methods - it will probably not be as easy to provide precise drawings on as even using a finger on an iPad - so the apps may not map well to the platform in the first place.
This is a relatively new category of product so it is understandable that a lot of developers will hold back on supporting it initially.
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There is evidently a Blender plugin for sbsar files that relies on a component called Substace Automation Toolkit to be installed, but when that is available, is able to render sbsar files directly within Blender: https://xolotlstudio.gumroad.com/l/stxJi
It might be possible to take a similar approach with the Affinity products to gain access to these files if it is something you have a use case for - if Serif does not provide this, perhaps as a plugin once the SDK is available?
Linux user base keep growing !
in Feedback for the Affinity V2 Suite of Products
Posted
That is again, Steam users, not computer users. Steam has their own Steam Deck which runs Linux and would be counted as part of the Linux percentage, and the Linux version of Steam has the benefit of Proton, which can run many otherwise Windows-only games, a feature they do not make available on macOS, so those numbers are likely skewed.
Another thing to consider is that some game engines only make their development tools available for Windows even though they produce games that run across multiple platforms; this same issue exists with a few other development environments, and since those who are involved in development of games also tend to need to do artwork, it can further skew the availability of the produced games, since during development they will be doing most of their testing on the platform they are actually developing on, making that the most likely platform to be well-tested and released for...
It is a vicious cycle which makes it hard for anyone new to enter the market regardless of technical merit, and the fact that many companies are often more concerned with profit than with actual technical superiority or quality of life of their users does not help matters either.
This is one of the benefits of the Linux philosophy: open source projects often eliminate profit from the equation, allowing for the development of a product that can focus on technical merit rather than on how big the user base is. Of course this is a double-sided coin, as developers need to earn a living, and if there is no profit in it, they can't devote the time to the project that they would need to in order to flesh it out the way they may want it to go. As a result, very few of the projects progress as well as many would like, users on the outside perceive open source as somehow inferior, and we wind up with long and ultimately pointless forum threads like this one.