Australian Zoomer

I re-assigned command-M to "Minimize", in the Window menu. It doesn't work right at all: this minimizes every window! (No, not even Photoshop does that.) It's getting pretty ridiculous, the pure number of features I've tried to use in AD that are simply broken and unusable. It's becoming clear that AD has only a few happy paths, and so it's a great app if you happen to use it exactly the same way that the AD programmers do. I wouldn't have thought that "command-M = minimize" would be a feature that differentiates applications -- it's a default when you create a new empty project in Xcode! I switched to AD, not long ago, because it looked like a better Mac app, and here I am on the verge of switching again.

I feel like everybody is missing the point here. True. With enough work, it's possible to beat any app into something usable. Back before the Mac, that's what we all had to do. It sucked. The reason Apple has been so successful over the years is that they have Human Interface Guidelines, so us users don't have to learn how to do the same exact thing in every new app. Open is always command-O. New is always command-N. Everybody is better off because of standardization. You don't sell a car with the brake pedal in the glovebox, and then tell customers they can get the wrench out of the trunk if they want to change it. Well, I'm not a Photoshop user, but Affinity Designer is more like Adobe Illustrator, and command-M is not "Curves" in Illustrator. It's also not an Adobe product, at all, so I'm not sure why this is relevant. Is it trying to be a good Photoshop clone, or a good Mac application? There's gobs of other Photoshop keyboard shortcuts that it doesn't support at all. Instead of "F" to go full-screen, Affinity Designer uses the Mac standard command-control-F. That's a good thing! Again, not sure why you're bringing this up. Nobody ever questioned that it was a conscious decision. Clearly, keyboard shortcuts don't just get assigned on accident. I stated that it was (1) non-standard, (2) frustrating, and (3) unnecessary. I never said it was an accident. It's your application, and it's your prerogative to make the app behave weirdly if you want, but I think you're underestimating how much this is hurting your users. Since apparently the Photoshop converts love customization so much, why not use the Mac standards as the default, and have a set of "Photoshop" keybindings that Photoshop people can use? Or at least go the other way, and give us a set of "Mac" keybindings? I really don't want to have to dig through all these keybindings to make it work like a normal app. Especially since half the keybindings just show up as the question-mark-in-a-box that's used for missing characters -- apparently nobody bothered to test this feature!

Pressing command-M adds "curves" to the document. I found this out by mistake when I hit command-M for about the 99th time today and got curious as to why my document window didn't minimize. In the OS X HIG, Minimize = command-M is listed as an "Expected" menuitem: https://developer.apple.com/library/mac/documentation/UserExperience/Conceptual/OSXHIGuidelines/MenuBarMenus.html "Some menu items are marked as expected, which means that you should include them in your app, unless it’s impossible to support them." and "When there’s an appropriate keyboard shortcut for a menu item, it is listed. In general, enable the appropriate keyboard shortcut for every expected menu item in your app." "Curves" is a perfectly good feature, but there's really no reason to steal command-M for it. There's no mnemonic association between "M" and "Curves". It's not the keyboard shortcut for that feature in Adobe Illustrator, so there's no historic justification (and in fact, Illustrator correctly uses command-M for Minimize). There are other free keys available for this feature in Affinity Designer, such as "command-K" = kurves (a mnemonic for which there is much precedent, e.g., command-K is Konnect, in the Finder). Please, support the standard Mac keyboard controls!

Wow. OK, that's strange. I never would have guessed that. It's also not as useful as the normal way. I can't see at a glance if my file is saved yet. I can't see the whole path unless I Reveal In Finder and then command-click the proxy icon there. I can't drag the file directly from the app, instead having to view it in the Finder first. Thanks for the workaround, but it's still a pain, and I wish AD just used the normal way.

(I'm not sure if this is a Bug or a Feature Request, so please feel free to re-file it as appropriate.) Affinity Designer (as of 1.4.2) uses special black document windows that don't have a standard Mac proxy icon in them. I can't, for example, open the containing folder of a document (a really common task!), without a lot of extra work. Another common task I have is just figuring out where something lives: a file might be called "Logo", and I want to make sure it's in the right folder. The quickest workaround I found to open the containing folder is: focus the AD document window, Save As, see where it's saved, cancel, switch to the Finder, Go to Folder, and type in the path. Clearly, that's a pain. In every other Mac application I have, it's simply: command-click the name in the titlebar (don't even need to focus the window), and select the first item there. It would be great if Affinity Designer supported the standard/quick/easy Mac way! In fact, that sentence pretty much describes all of my gripes with AD. :-) cheers!