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The Affinity file format is proprietary and not publicly documented, so while someone outside of Serif could certainly write an app to read IDML, trying to write to an Affinity format is another story altogether.

Tracing bitmaps to vector (automatically or otherwise) really belongs in Designer, while the mail/data merge feature should be in Publisher.

This is not a bug. It is a feature that does not yet exist.

Currently there is no option for adding FX to the Appearance panel. That alone would be a great addition (being able to add layer FX to the appearance panel items the way you can add them to layers), but I also agree that the transform effect would be nice to have, not only for the appearance but for layers as well.

This part of the printer dialog is provided by the OS; I don't believe the individual applications have any control over it.

The Fuji X10 is advertised as a 12 MP camera with "L" (12 MP) and "M" (6 MP) settings, but further research suggests it might actually be capturing two 6 MP images which are in fact meant to be combined later on to produce a single image. Whether that image is really 12 MP material or more legitimately 6 MP material I can't be sure, but the photo sites are separated on the sensor so they are at distinct locations and it could very well be legit to stitch them into a larger photo. Fuji does strange things with their sensors sometimes and their cameras likely require special handling because of it... this one evidently has an "EXR CMOS" sensor which is like two bayer patterns interspersed with each other at a 45 degree angle... fun stuff.

You can add a custom keyboard shortcut for that in Preferences if that helps.

This assumes that the document is being created from scratch. This is Photo so in many cases I would expect the documents to start as imported photos, which does not give the opportunity to set the DPI at the time of document creation. The DPI that matters though is the actual DPI when printing, not necessarily the value stored within the document. If your photo is (made-up resolution alert) 4000x3000 pixels and the document claims to be 30dpi, but you print it in a 8"x6" area on the page, it is effectively printing at 500dpi.

This seems like a rather curious decision...

I would expect that most users of SVG would want the files to NOT specify an exact size. This is because of the complexities of how web browsers (the primary intended consumer of SVG images) deal with scaling across different screen sizes and usages. There probably needs to be an option on export to indicate whether or not the SVG should be saved with an exact size defined as part of the file to account for these alternative use cases for the format.

The Mac operating system has built-in color management which provides most of the required functionality. Most of these color management features are already part of the OS-provided and printer/driver-provided functionality. The options in that print popup are divided into three parts: the top part is provided by the application ("Range and Scale", etc.), the middle part by the OS ("Layout", etc.), and the bottom part by the printer driver ("Print Settings", etc.), so the top part will vary depending on the application you are using, and the bottom part based on the printer that is selected, but the middle part is fairly consistent between applications and printers. The primary color management choices are actually in Publisher's document setup (not the print dialog) to set the color space information for the document (and I believe paper type standards relevant to color management are rolled into that selection), and in the OS-provided "Color Management" section of the print dialog, which allows you to select the color profile to use for the printer. As you pointed out, selecting a paper type is a function of the print driver, and it will vary from printer to printer. It is right under "Layout" in the popup menu in your screenshot.

It is perfectly valid that documents may contain a mix of different color spaces - for example, vector design elements might be in CMYK while photos taken with cameras might be in RGB - and if the designer wants to match a color to something from one of those photos, maybe a frame or something, it might be best to stick with RGB for that color. The reason is that modern high-end printers will treat colors differently if they are in the different color spaces, and the RGB color space can handle a wider range of colors that cannot be accurately represented in CMYK. With printers that use more than four colors of ink (HP Indigo digital presses for example), forcing everything to CMYK would actually limit the quality of the final output because colors which are in the photo may be reproducible by the printer but would be lost in the process of preparing the document to be sent to those printers. If matching a color from an RGB photo, that particular color might need to remain RGB as the printer might handle the RGB differently and give it a slightly different mix of inks when printing than the CMYK would get, so if the document contains a combination of CMYK elements and RGB elements, then a mixture of different colors on the document palette is correct and desirable. Some of those presses (again using the example of the HP Indigo) can also mix in specialized spot color inks that would also need to be included in the document, for metalic or other effects to be added to the final document, so it is not just CMYK and RGB either. While it might be a nice option to be able to configure a document palette such that all colors added to it are forced to the document color space, the flexibility of being able to mix color spaces is a good thing in general and adds the flexibility of being able to prepare documents for those high-end output devices.

This is also a great example of why these features should be in user-provided scripts rather than integrated into the software. The specific corrections are highly specific to the subject material. Running those corrections on a document which includes programming language code could in some cases change the meaning of the code, rendering the document incorrect. Particularly with snake-language (err, Python) as the spacing in front of the code is part of the syntax. Similarly, if the document uses tab stops to format table data, removing "double tabs" could cause data to show up in the wrong column of the table. This may work extremely well for some kinds of input, but it is not generically safe. If it is known that the incoming documents are safe to run these corrections on, then allowing the user to write such a script is a great solution for this.

If I am "resizing" a photo document, 99.9% of the time I want it to resample. The DPI information stored in the file is something I generally consider meaningless so a resize of the file that merely adjusts that information is not something I would be likely to bother with using on any kind of frequent basis. It would probably be more appropriate for the box to remember what was last used and default to that the next time.

@Ace Manev, welcome to the forum! In addition to my comments above, I realized that I should probably point out the alignment handles too in case you might not be aware of them. On the context toolbar when using the Move tool or the Node tool, enable the button that has a line down the middle with arrows pointing toward it from either side: This causes a few additional handles to be displayed on the selected shape: You can drag those handles with snapping enabled to snap them to the boundaries of other objects on the page (any snapping candidates) or to the page center/edges, etc. For example, if you drag the left-pointing arrow along the left edge of the shape until it snaps to the right edge of an object, then releasing the mouse there will cause the left edge of the selected shape to be aligned to the right edge of that other object. Depending on what you need from the alignment tools, this might help to reduce the need to have those extra buttons on the toolbar - they will work well for some use cases, not as well for others. There is no reason you couldn't just leave them enabled. Note that they need to be enabled separately for the move and node tools, and that with the node tool, they are only available when transform mode is enabled: Transform mode places a bounding box around the selected nodes of the selected object so that you can manipulate those nodes in much the same manner as you would manipulate an entire shape when using the move tool. You can then use the alignment handles to align the selected nodes to whatever (the selected nodes do need to have both height and width for the alignment handles to show up).

The alignment and distribution options are on the main toolbar at the top of the window, so I presume that is the one he is referring to. That one does not have those capabilities, at least not on the Mac. Adding those features (alignment/distribution/etc.) to the set of icons that can be added to the tools (the one on the left, which can be floated) would be one possible way to handle this. Adding a separate "Arrange, Align and Distribute" studio panel might be another.

I saw that too... quickly discredits that review site and gives me reason to move on.

Yes, evidently the people who created the OS (Bell Labs, as a successor to UNIX) were fans of the movie.

As a side note, this technique is called mouse chording and was a primary way of interacting with some software in the Plan 9 operating system, and Wikipedia lists a number of other applications and platforms that have made use of it to varying degrees: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mouse_chording

In other snooze... CorelDRAW is available on the Mac again for the first time in nearly 2 decades. It is only 5 times the price of Affinity Designer + Photo (it also includes PhotoPaint and AfterShot, along with a font manager). That appears to be bitmap also, not vector.

no

Agreed, though note that bitmap fills already do work for strokes as well as fills.

if you have both Publisher and Photo, you can access the main Photo persona of Photo from within Publisher. This has the features that would generally be most useful for these kinds of tasks and is only a click away... I can't speak to how it compares to the cut-out studio as I have never done anything significant with the older Windows products (no Mac versions...)