fde101
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Posts posted by fde101
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Haven't used it heavily enough to have noticed the kind of instability you are asking about, but the user interface is certainly far less optimal for a touchscreen than was the v1 series on iPad. They reduced some of the gap in terms of features between the tablet and desktop versions (sadly have not closed it as a few key things are still missing) but at the cost of usability.
You don't use an iPad for a professional working environment - that is what Macs are for - you use an iPad for convenience and portability. The v2 updates lost some of both, as in my opinion, the interface is much less convenient unless you have the larger screen space of an iPad Pro (which I do not) or connect external hardware (keyboard, mouse, whatever) to work around the interface flaws...
There are some benefits from what they did, but on a whole it is a net loss for many users.
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11 minutes ago, Chills said:
Are you confusing UNIX and POSIX?
No. UNIX was originally an operating system released by AT&T's Bell Labs. Various forks of the UNIX code became the various UNIX platforms (Solaris, AIX, HP-UX, SCO, etc.) which continue on long past the death of the original UNIX (a few versions of which you can download for free now and run on PDP-11 emulators if interested).
In order to promote portability of applications among these and other systems the Portable Operating System Interface standard (POSIX) was developed, which various operating systems (including UNIX, Linux and even Windows at one time) have offered compatibility with, either as their core interface for their own native applications or as an alternative API to allow "portable" code to run on an otherwise proprietary system.
UNIX later became a "standard" that companies could be certified to use as a label for their platforms, with several of the traditional UNIX vendors paying the fees and meeting the requirements for certification (as macOS currently does). These standards, like POSIX, relate to the programming interfaces and the command line environment and largely ignore any graphical desktop interface which may or may not be sitting on top.
Tanenbaum developed a microkernel operating system called MINIX which is largely designed for POSIX compatibility but which uses a microkernel architecture, which he has argued in defense of at various times. I tend to agree that microkernels have major benefits over the more traditional monolithic kernels that most operating system platforms continue to use, but the same could be said in the other direction as well, with monolithic kernels having a different set of advantages. Several of the benefits of a microkernel make this architecture superior as a teaching tool (when studying the source code) and MINIX was designed for exactly that: to be something that students could study and learn from.
Linux was a personal project Torvalds started as an experiment / learning opportunity of his own, but he opted to develop it as a monolithic kernel rather than a microkernel, which Tanenbaum (who Torvalds had been a student of) evidently took exception to and started those "debates" in an apparent attempt to steer his student back to what he saw as a preferable design (and was probably right).
Linux, like MINIX, was never based on UNIX source code, but follows many of the design principles and has a high degree of POSIX compatibility, in spite of having a very different underlying architecture from that of MINIX.
Note that the whole microkernel vs. monolithic kernel debate is largely tangental to the UNIX vs. Linux vs. macOS vs. whatever debate - it has nothing to do with whether or not something is "UNIX" or "Linux" or for that matter implements some version of the POSIX standards.
- Chills and affinity-chicken
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14 minutes ago, Chills said:
See the Tanebaum-Torvalds debate as to why Linux is not a good design
The problem here is that Tanenbaum's primary argument is against a monolithic kernel design, an argument which applies equally to UNIX, as many UNIX systems are even more monolithic than the Linux kernel, which at least supports a form of modularity with its kernel modules. A possible exception is macOS, which does use something closer to a microkernel, though not a true one.
The remainder seems to be more historic in nature, as it relates to things which have long since not been true.
Point being, by your apparent interpretation of Tanenbaum's arguments, UNIX in general is even worse than modern Linux, with the catch being that most of the "debate" was related to things that are no longer true or are no longer relevant, as both Linux and the hardware landscape have changed significantly since that time.
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2 minutes ago, Chills said:
MacOS *IS* UNIX.
Fair point. macOS is indeed a UNIX platform under the hood, and a certified one at that, but the graphical user environment it presents is sufficiently different from that presented by other UNIX platforms that for users who would be using it in the capacities described here, it would not be as natural of a jump as Linux would be.
I would argue that it would be an improvement, but many apps are written against the X11 environment and would be harder to port and have come across in a way that makes them as straightforward to work with, etc.
Most traditional UNIX workstation environments had graphical interfaces based around some flavor of MOTIF, which is also available on Linux. Newer ones are actually using GNOME or environments derived from GNOME, which went the other way (was popular on Linux first). This includes, for example, OpenIndiana, which is built on an updated version of the OpenSolaris kernel from back when the bulk of it was released as open-source. Not certified, but real UNIX nevertheless. Solaris had transitioned to GNOME as its desktop environment prior to that as well.
4 minutes ago, Chills said:Linux is a retrograde step from any UNIX.
How so? Personally I find it to be about the same in most respects. Each UNIX platform is different from the others, and Linux is different in largely the same ways.
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On 12/8/2023 at 2:17 PM, Bit Arts said:
On the other hand, you may be able to use the Point Transform Tool (shortcut F)
In its current form, this does not solve the problem presented. For this to be relevant there would need to be a button on the toolbar (for example) and (ideally) some shortcut to disable moving the object, and instead causing it to transform based on the handle closest to the mouse position when you dragged over the object in a place where it currently moves it.
On 12/9/2023 at 11:05 AM, JET_Affinity said:it should at least make one of the absurdly redundant five bounding box rotation handles able to rotate the bounding box around its content
An option to freely transform the bounding box without transforming the object it represents would be interesting, but I'm not sure how that is relevant here either.
On 12/8/2023 at 12:35 PM, loukash said:personally I'm pretty happy with the Affinity solution not having dozens of unique tools for each small task I want to perform
Agreed.
On 12/8/2023 at 11:31 AM, Muhammed taş said:it would be easier to directly shrink the example by pressing s or another command key
Holding down a letter which is assigned to a tool (in this case the Shape Builder tool) temporarily switches to that tool. In order for this to work they would need to be independent tools which is not how the Affinity products tend to roll - they generally gravitate toward fewer tools with each being able to do more.
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On 12/9/2023 at 11:11 AM, pezetko said:
Even long-based Windows postproduction shops migrate to Linux now
Those that primarily do VFX and 3D work, yes:
That shouldn't be too surprising though as many of them would be moving from other UNIX platforms (IRIX from SGI was at one time a major player in this field) rather than moving from Windows. Linux is a much more natural shift from UNIX platforms than Windows or macOS would be.
Many more are likely using Linux for servers. Most workstations in non-VFX post houses are more likely to still be either macOS or Windows. As has been pointed out, the apps simply aren't there yet - some are, but not enough of those which are currently in heavy use.
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9 hours ago, Pšenda said:
Didn't you notice that main thread (the first pinned post in the feedback forum so no one can miss it and create unnecessary duplicate posts)?
In all fairness, that thread is called "Scripting" so someone new to the forums could easily miss the fact that it also discusses that a future plugin API is under development.
@sveinbjorn, welcome to the forums!
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This might qualify as a bug report, however, in which case it is in the wrong place.
- _Th, walt.farrell and debraspicher
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37 minutes ago, loukash said:
Within Affinity, this would be a job for the often requested and eagerly awaited (also by yours truly) "Vector Blend Tool".
Agreed, if implemented that would provide a better (and much more flexible) solution for this particular problem than would a new shape tool.
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Swatches are designed to maintain consistency of color throughout a document. Placing an *editable* hex color field on the Swatches panel runs contrary to its purpose and the very notion should be immediately dismissed as a bad idea.
Also, hex values are only of interest to web designers and do not scale well: they only reflect 8-bit-per-component RGB and do not account for HDR, CMYK, etc.
Swatches may represent spot colors, which by definition are not RGB, or even CMYK; even though they have RGB/CMYK representations for display and printing on devices that do not have true spot color support, displaying RGB values for them could be considered misleading.
Similarly, displaying hex values for swatches representing CMYK colors can be similarly thought of as misleading.
Including them on RGB and RGB-related color space color pickers in the Colors panel makes a lot of sense and should cover the needs of most web designers.
The value of including them on the swatches panel, together with the potential for confusion it may cause, seems questionable.
What might make more sense is to include a *label* (read-only display) explaining the selected color. This could show the hex color of the selected swatch if the swatch is an 8-bit RGB (or related) color swatch, but show the CMYK values of a CMYK swatch, the Pantone number of a Pantone swatch, etc.
This would scale better to support the range of colors that a swatch might represent, without being misleading, and without raising questions like "If I change those values what happens to the swatch? Am I editing the swatch or am I disassociating the selected object from the swatch and giving it a different color?".
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All being said, the way that it responds vs. the way it is visualized are definitely in contrast.
If it is to work the way it does, it would make sense to reverse the shading, or failing that, to remove it and leave it as a plain ordinary slider.
Note also that there are Lift, Gamma and Gain controls in traditional color grading toolsets such as Resolve, and the Gamma control in Resolve does work the opposite of what is described here - moving it to the right makes things brighter, to the left darker - so there is precedent in other software for making it work more logically and less mathematically. Most of the people using the software are more interested in the creative effect of the tool than in the math behind it.
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14 hours ago, Wizaerd said:
it creates a new file thus breaking the link with the animation application
Designer is NOT an SVG editor as Inkscape (for example) is. When you "open" the SVG in Designer it converts the supported part of the SVG file into its own native format, which does not support animation. You are not editing SVG any more - you are editing a Designer document which was populated by copying things out of the SVG. Anything that was in the file that Designer cannot translate would not have come across, so whether the "Save" option is permitted to overwrite the original file, or you explicitly export it in the menu (which is what Save would be doing anyway if they did enable it as a shortcut), the animation would already be gone.
- Patrick Connor and walt.farrell
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12 hours ago, Callum said:
This is a known issue
Should this be moved to the bug report area?
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58 minutes ago, Granddaddy said:
Or have I missed something obvious?
Regular expressions, which many users are incorrectly calling "grep" after one particular UNIX command-line utility which allows text files to be searched using regular expressions (and which various applications similarly incorrectly use in the naming of similar features).
You can search using regular expressions with the Find and Replace feature in Publisher; you just need to turn them on in the gear menu next to "Find".
Being able to provide a list of regular expressions to flag as potential preflight issues would indeed be a nice addition.
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2 minutes ago, Chills said:
Part of the problem is that there are many codecs you can't get on Linux.
This comes on to the problem of licences... Linux is a REAL mess for licences.Yes, this is true. This is a natural side-effect of the nature of open-source licenses: due to distributions generally being out in the open and available for free, there is no basis for royalty payments being made for patent-encumbered codecs (which should not really have been able to become patent-encumbered... but that is a topic for another thread of another forum). This of course would be mitigated if there was a mass adoption of open, patent-free codecs, but sadly the market seems to be stuck on codecs that are closed off instead. I blame that on the market at large.
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41 minutes ago, Chills said:
This could only be written by someone with only a superficial understanding of operating systems.
Ok, you want to be technical... there are desktop environments which are written primarily to run on top of Linux which have reached the point where they can provide a superior user experience to the Windows environment. There are some good applications for them, but many users will require applications which are currently missing or not as well-developed as those available on other platforms.
48 minutes ago, Chills said:"you are using the wrong Linux. Swap to the one we support!"
There are Windows apps that don't work or are unsupported on ARM versions of Windows.
There are Mac apps that still haven't been updated to be 64-bit and thus don't work on Macs that are remotely current. Others that still are not native on Apple Silicon.
Your point?
1 hour ago, LondonSquirrel said:And on this Windows beats Linux on the desktop by so much it's not even a competition.
Depends on the application.
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20 minutes ago, Chills said:
Windows has improved a lot as it effectively moved to a VAX architecture
I don't believe Windows ever ran on VAX. The VAX architecture is an old DEC minicomputer architecture which had a limited run (in the form of "micro VAX") of microprocessor systems.
Back in the 70s the VAX architecture was developed alongside an operating system called VMS, which still exists in active development today (by a different company) and is now called OpenVMS. The VMS operating system descended from existing production operating systems and was well-architected for its intended purposes.
Someone who had once worked on the VMS platform and was very familiar with its architecture was later hired by Microsoft and became the chief architect of Windows NT. Consequently the NT architecture was highly influenced by the VMS architecture, though VMS was never a predominantly GUI-driven system, and in order to improve graphics performance, the NT architecture originally cut some corners that created some security and stability issues that had never existed in the VMS world.
While those specific errors in the architecture were addressed in more recent versions, NT architecture has always developed somewhat independently of the VMS architecture, though with clear, strong influences in each direction over time. A big improvement over the DOS underpinnings of earlier Windows versions, but the only connection I am aware of it having to VAX is that VMS originally ran on VAX (like macOS, it has switched CPU architectures over time to remain current - first to Alpha, then to Itanium, and more recently to amd64).
A more detailed article for any interested (granted the article is a bit dated, but we are talking history here to begin with...): https://www.itprotoday.com/compute-engines/windows-nt-and-vms-rest-story
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1 hour ago, Chills said:
BMD did a Linux version when they had about 100 clients all spending over $250K per set up for video edit studios. These were systems separate to their normal business IT set up that was on Mac and PC.
True, but it didn't start with them. This is the way that product worked when they bought the rights to it, and they had already been users of the product (in that format) before they took ownership of it. In that context Linux was effectively playing the role of an embedded system.
A number of actual current embedded systems are based on Linux - it is used as the underlying OS in a lot of Korg music workstations for example (such as the Kronos series) and some high-end lighting control consoles run on it as well. People don't interact with such products at a level that leads them to consciously think that they are working with Linux, but they technically are.
Linux has quite a significant footprint in the embedded market space: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux_on_embedded_systems
1 hour ago, Chills said:PC is now growing that market.
This is not really because Windows has improved (it has, if slightly) so much as because Apple has done some really stupid things lately and users are getting frustrated with it. The idiotic orange dot they insist on putting on every connected display when a microphone is in use causes a serious impact in a lot of live applications (and for those of us who have digital audio workstations and other similar software open just about constantly it provides absolutely none of the security benefit they claim it is for), the base-level Apple Silicon chips only support a maximum of two displays, and they pointlessly (and needlessly) dropped support for eGPU with Apple Silicon systems.
While it is questionable how much of a generic benefit eGPU would provide for computational reasons (it would in some cases but not in many of the cases where people might be inclined to think it would), the ability to efficiently expand the number of supported displays on those base-level systems would open a lot of doors - and there is no technical reason the existing support for this could not have come across when they switched architectures.
For most users macOS is still vastly superior to Windows, granted it comes at a higher buy-in price, but these mis-steps are not helping. Linux is the next best choice for general computing of what is currently on the market; I would not trust Windows for anything that I really cared about. Linux is clearly preferable to both macOS and Windows for most server functions at this point, and has become superior to Windows for most desktop computing purposes, though many of the available applications still have some catching up to do. While macOS doesn't really exist in the embedded space, Windows does, and some use it (for what reason I am clueless), but Linux is again obviously much stronger there.
1 hour ago, Chills said:Most small companies won't touch Linux.
Their loss, as in many cases they are the ones that stand to benefit from it the most.
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Blender is a great example of a program doing a terrible thing.
It is ignoring all OS conventions and rolling its own user interface, making it inconsistent with EVERY operating system it runs on.
The only legitimate reason it could possibly provide for that is to ensure neutral grays for more accurate color judgement. That is the only reason that I would give it credit for, as most operating systems are lacking in providing for this requirement. I consider that a flaw of the operating systems which should be addressed so that applications with critical color judgement requirements can inform the OS as part of an application manifest or an API call and the OS would provide an appropriate neutral gray appearance which is otherwise consistent with the rest of the environment.
Other reasoning I have encountered is generally misguided. In particular, many developers cite a desire to keep the application consistent between operating systems. The problem is that a user of a computer is likely to use multiple applications, and it is more important that they be consistent with each other than that they consistent across operating systems - someone sitting at one computer and trying to use four different applications will find things that work four different ways and trying to juggle them while switching back and forth is not a good thing.
Don't get me wrong, I have blender installed all over the place and use it from time to time myself - it is a great program in terms of the functionality it offers - but the situation with the user interface is something that should not be emulated, except by video games and other immersive environments.
1 hour ago, Hadriscus said:many different interweaved tasks, oh so many buttons, and a necessity to display a lot of data at once in several different editors
The use of configurable panels to lay out controls appropriately for the task is definitely a good thing. This is one area where Apple is making a misguided recommendation to avoid this. It makes some degree of sense for consumer-level applications to limit options to some degree, as more casual users may easily get lost wondering where something disappeared to when the visibility and positions of panels are easily changed, but for many professional applications they are largely a requirement.
This does not provide an excuse for the controls placed on those panels to defy OS conventions, including scaling. Other than the neutral gray issue, there is nothing that would prevent normal OS-provided controls from working in place of the highly custom ones Blender provides.
1 hour ago, Hadriscus said:it's actually a multiplier of the OS base scale value
It would be better to design the app in such a way that this is not necessary, but if it is going to provide a global scaling feature, that is certainly the least problematic way to do it.
2 hours ago, Hadriscus said:But reality is a mess of different UI frameworks, discontinued/EOL programs, and blurry upscalings.
Yes, that is how things are. It is NOT how things should be. I think we are arguing two sides of a coin: I am indicating how I believe things should be, you are anchored in the messy situation of the unfortunate way things are (but should not be).
Different UI frameworks would be fine as long as they all ultimately followed the conventions established by the underlying OS rather than bypassing them.
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On 11/18/2023 at 10:16 PM, Daniel77 said:
"save as text"
How would that work? Do you just mean to export an individual story?
On 11/18/2023 at 10:16 PM, Daniel77 said:"save as html"
From a DTP perspective HTML is essentially an eBook/ePub format, which has already been requested in other threads, such as:
Alternatively HTML could be a simple rich text format for exporting an individual story, which would be a different feature request from what people are usually asking for.
Either way, this is not the correct place for this - the thread this was posted in is about scripting. If you are looking for the ePub style export of HTML, you should add your support in an existing thread for that. If you are looking for a story export, there may be an existing thread requesting that but I am not turning one up in my initial attempt at searching. If you meant something else by a text format export, I have no idea what that would be, but I would suggest searching for an existing thread and creating one if you can't find it, giving a bit more detailed of an explanation of exactly what you want from it.
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5 hours ago, Chills said:
The ONLY thing people can't find a good replacement for is Lightroom.
Multiple candidates have been pointed out already on several threads which have been opened here in the past - Capture One, On1 Photo RAW, etc.
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Hi @desperatepotato, welcome to the forums!
This has been requested numerous times already and there are many duplicate threads on this subject. It would be best to pick up this discussion on an existing thread for this feature rather than continuing this one as it breaks up the discussion and makes it harder to follow.
Here is one example of such a thread:
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I am using one called iQR on my Mac, which is rather nice. Came from the App Store.
Note that this thread technically violates the guidelines for this part of the forum in two ways: it has two requests in one thread, and both of them are duplicates.
On 3/11/2023 at 6:57 AM, Adam9393 said:- watermarking
Is there a specific capability you are looking for that cannot be achieved simply by placing the text/image/shape as an object on your master page, reducing the opacity to taste, and moving it to the back?
If so, I would suggest adding that to an existing thread requesting that feature, rather than continuing yet another duplicate which only serves to spread out the conversation even further; here is one I found quickly where it is requested for Affinity Photo; expanding on that with what specifically you want to have happen and the request to include it in Publisher would be more appropriate than the duplicated thread:
Blend tool in Designer
in Feedback for the Affinity V2 Suite of Products
Posted
No gorilla tool either.
Sad.