fde101
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Posts posted by fde101
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I think these are both bad ideas. There are plenty of "design for dummies" apps out there already, no point in Serif wasting their time on another.
A separate "easy mode" is bad for the reasons @MikeTO outlined, along with others.
Personally I think the Layer menu could be split into two: one with the actual "layer" properties such as group/ungroup, hide, arrange/align, etc., and one with the more "graphical object" properties, such as Convert to Curves, Expand Stroke and the like, but I'm at a loss as to what to name the split-off menu - calling it "Graphical Object" or even just "Object" doesn't quite feel right.
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The Table Formats panel works quite well for quickly formatting an entire table. The problem here is that the OP has a specific use case in which formatting needs to be applied differently to specific cells of the table which do not match the calculable patterns which can be used in defining those table formats.
I agree that there is not currently a good solution for applying styles selectively to arbitrary cells.
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On 9/6/2023 at 11:01 AM, walt.farrell said:
if you don't know the correct terms you probably won't find the results you want.
If whoever wrote the posts you are searching for did not know the correct terms (or the same incorrect terms as you do for that matter) you will wind up with a similar problem.
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Yes, that is how that software works, and yes, that is a limitation of such programs.
A benefit, on the other hand, is that most such applications provide ways to repeat the adjustments/edits against other photos, so if you have a bunch of photos that were taken at the same time in the same place, you can make your adjustments to one of them, then apply those adjustments in bulk to the others as appropriate, and the adjustments are still just slider values and the like so you can still tweak them per photo if needed.
The solution to the proprietary nature of the tracked edits is obviously to export the photos in their completed formats once you are happy with them and need to use them outside of the application in which you performed those adjustments/edits.
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There are numerous options out there for this already; just a few examples:
- Capture One
- DxO PhotoLab
- On1 Photo RAW
- DarkTable
- RAW Therapee
- Luminar Neo
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Just to point it out, if you have Publisher and are not using artboards you can do this for a top-level layer by moving its content to a master page and placing the master on the page that originally contained the content.
Not ideal, not practical, and not usable under all conditions, but it is something sometimes anyway.
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One factor is that the dimmed text of the layer type is not responding at all to the UI contrast/brightness settings. The undimmed text of layers that are named does respond, and the background responds slightly to the "UI Brightness" control, but the range of that control is a bit too limiting to get the dimmed layer type text to a reasonable point. I would argue that the fact that the text does not respond to those settings is probably best treated as a bug.
The general lack of contrast/readability for that text may not be a bug, but it is clearly a design flaw.
If you hover over the layer preview / icon you get a tooltip with the same text that is being displayed, except that it is actually quite reasonable to read - but you shouldn't really need to do that.
I agree that there should really be some improvements in this area.
- Les Wilson and Krustysimplex
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3 hours ago, myclay said:
I can´t expect that developers who don´t know of each other could solve how big their fonts and icons are when I use their programs regularly side by side.
These standards are established by the underlying operating system when there is a graphical interface. A macOS application should follow macOS standards for fonts and for icon sizes. A Windows application should follow Windows standards for fonts and for icon sizes. Match the platform, match other applications on the platform.
It makes sense that design applications would differ from others when it comes to color, as the use of neutral colors surrounding the workpiece is essential to avoid distorting the perception of the colors in the design itself, but there is zero value in failing to adhere to documented and established conventions of the platform when it comes to things like font and icon size.
3 hours ago, myclay said:how often do you do that? I rarely if ever connect/disconnect my monitors.
Laptop users do this somewhat frequently. For example, I carry one between home and the office for my "day job" and at the office I have a second monitor on my desk that I use, while when working at home I only use the one built-in to the laptop. I could easily arrange for a second monitor to use at home as well, but it would not be the same monitor I have at the office...
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32 minutes ago, myclay said:
Sometimes the UI designs are vastly different
If they are different to the point that this can impact them, they should be working on solving this problem too.
(And yes, I know that won't actually happen any time soon - but that doesn't change the fact that it is the ideal).
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6 minutes ago, Bryan Rieger said:
We certainly don't need two, one right above the other.
One is for stroke, one for fill. The point of it is that if they are separated from each other, then you are no longer switching between the two, eliminated the extra click needed when doing that. If you are no longer switching, then the application won't know which one to apply that "none" swatch to unless there is a separate one for each.
7 minutes ago, Bryan Rieger said:I generally prefer the OS handling screen size as it helps to normalize it across all of the apps I use.
Bingo. That s the point I was trying to make earlier. If an application provides independent controls for this and ignores the ones provided by the OS, it is in effect ignoring the user's preferences (as established within the controls provided by the OS), and even if it operates as on "offset" from those preferences, it is still no longer matching up with other applications on the system, which is generally a bad thing.
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20 hours ago, MoonaticDestiny said:
Why is there even a "use fill" check box?
On 8/28/2023 at 8:27 AM, Bryan Rieger said:the brush stroke colour can be either the fill colour or the stroke colour.
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Accepting entry of international and accented characters would probably work too, but that doesn't seem to be supported at the moment either.
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24 minutes ago, MoonaticDestiny said:
example 1 is actually bad design. nothing about it is improved
That depends on what you are optimizing for. For a smaller display as was typical in the early days of PhotoShop and other similar software, and is still typical when working on a laptop, the existing design is better.
For a modern desktop as most more serious users would be working on, his suggestion for example 1 eliminates a click to switch between the outline and the fill. With the traditional/existing design, if the fill is selected, you need to click on the outline in order to make it active, then you can click again to change the color, use the separate button to remove the color, etc... with this suggested redesign the implication is that both fill and stroke are immediately accessible without that extra click to switch between them. It uses slightly more screen real-estate but can save time as a result, and with larger monitors as are more common now, the use of extra space should not be an issue for quite as many users.
I could see adopting this when there is enough room for it to fit on the screen, and falling back on the existing approach when there is not.
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Not only that but sync services such as iCloud have been known to corrupt Affinity documents if they attempt to sync them while they are being worked on in the software.
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I somewhat agree with example one, though it is a minor sort of thing. Example two, however, I disagree with. The idea that the app should bypass well-defined OS conventions for scaling its interface is not a good place to be going, and wasting toolbar space over something changed as rarely as handle size is an even worse idea, unless it is a customizable toolbar (which the one pictured is not) and it can be added optionally.
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"Real Mem" is the actual physical memory used by the process at that time. It is based on the number of actual page frames allocated.
"VM Compressed" would likely be the amount of memory that would be used by currently compressed frames had they not been compressed?
"Memory" is presumably indicating the sum total of the memory the process is responsible for whether it is currently in use or not. I would expect that to include pages that are swapped out, pages that are compressed, "normal" in-memory pages, and pages that are memory-mapped from files on disk but have perhaps never even been accessed so were never loaded into actual RAM?
It does seem rather difficult to find details on exactly what that column is measuring.
It is also curious that they differ both ways - sometimes the "Memory" is less than the "Real Mem". I did find a comment that "Memory" does not include pages which are shared with other processes, such as shared libraries that more than one program can use, but that these are included in the count of "Real Mem".
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8 hours ago, Red Sands said:
If the childishly simple thing I've done with assets has required GB of extra memory, then I know some programmers and architects who need to refresh or learn some principles behind resource management. It can't be right that it's implemented as if by a beginner. And what would happen if I actually started using assets to a more than elementary extent? Solid architecture MUST be built in from the start.
Memory exists to be used. If loading assets into the catalog results in their being cached in memory which is not being used for something else, then keeping them cached in memory means faster access to them later when you try to display them again. The added memory usage in this case indicates that they are doing something *right*: they are leveraging the memory that they have in order to improve performance of the feature.
Your association of memory usage with poor code quality is not correct. The real question is, if you manage to reduce memory usage by not having assets opened or displayed, is there an associated performance improvement? The two things may be completely unrelated to each other, or there may be an inefficient algorithm somewhere in the software that is looping over the cached assets to determine if something should be aged out of the cache, which is thus slowing things down at key times because it should have been implemented differently - or any of a number of other possible explanations.
If there is poor performance stemming from the caching of assets or some other resource, then I agree that poor performance is a problem, and the memory usage may be a clue to help identify what the problem is, but memory usage in and of itself is not the key issue here.
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13 hours ago, Red Sands said:
I have several programs from the big players like Microsoft and Adobe that when you exit the program, they ask something like "You have left a large amount of data in the clipboard. Do you want to keep it in the clipboard?"
Yes, I mentioned those incredibly annoying prompts (which I sincerely hope Serif does NOT emulate) in my earlier post.
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41 minutes ago, walt.farrell said:
I meant, if it's faster then couldn't Affinity do something like that automatically when closing the application, rather than whatever it's doing now to clear the Clipboard?
The expectation of a user should be that the clipboard is NOT cleared until the user replaces its content with something else (or the user logs out or the computer is rebooted, etc.). It should not be a standard practice of most applications to clear the clipboard themselves (password managers being a notable exception).
I have seen a few Micro$oft apps work around this by prompting the user that there "is a large amount of data in the clipboard" and asking if it should be cleared when the user attempts to quit (exit) the application. Annoying.
Clearing the clipboard on exit could be offered as a preference, but should clearly not be a default behavior.
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6 hours ago, walt.farrell said:
Assuming the new document also took 661 MB
It's not really a given that the first one did.
Something else to consider is that many of the studio panels are completely disabled until a document is created. Some of them may have outside resources they load the first time they become active, in which case any of those which are visible would add to the memory usage with the first created document, keep their data in memory, and reuse it for the next document.
Maybe the lists of presets in the Export window could be doing the same thing, being loaded the first time you open the Export window then cached from there on out - there are just too many opportunities for things to happen even after the first created document that I think it would be more meaningful to go through the routine then measure the change with the third or fourth document than it would to do so with merely the second?
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Yes, if the usage keeps increasing in a cycle like that, I agree that sounds very much like a memory leak.
Until it reaches the point where it is causing significant disk activity, it should at most be impacting the performance of the Affinity apps themselves, however, and not the rest of the system...
Actually, thinking a bit harder about it, macOS will actually start compressing memory before it starts swapping memory. If there is a significant amount of compression going on to try to avoid swapping, that may also explain slower performance if enough pressure has started to build up...
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Was there also significant disk activity?
If not, then memory usage may not have been relevant.
Memory is there to be used - just because a lot of memory is in use doesn't directly impact system performance, in and of itself.
If the memory is being used to the point that it is forcing data to be swapped to disk, or to the point that there is not enough left over to support a reasonable cache size in the OS, then you should also be seeing disk activity to go along with it.
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4 hours ago, retrograde said:
What is DDS?
From a quick Google search:
- Georgia Department of Driver Services
- Doctor of Dental Surgery
- The stock symbol for Dillard's, Inc.
- Defense Digital Service
- Massachusetts Department of Developmental Services
- more...
- retrograde and PaulEC
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Yes, they are "overloading" the term "layer" to mean either of two different things: the "generic" term layer which they are using as the representation of an arbitrary object within the Layers panel, and the "specific" Layer as a layer of type Layer, which is a container for arbitrary (generic) layers.
I do agree that the usage has a great deal of potential to invite confusion.
Give me the "Separated Mode" back and fix the UI!
in Feedback for the Affinity V2 Suite of Products
Posted
The original Mac operating system was single-tasking. The 128 KB of RAM in the original Macintosh simply wasn't enough to juggle a bunch of GUI-oriented applications at the same time. One application at a time.
This resulted in user interfaces where the tools were right on the screen without any kind of window frame, such as in the original MacPaint:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MacPaint#/media/File:MacpaintWP.png
Notice that the entire screen is the application frame.