tcarisland

I've tried drawing and vector apps on both, and from my experience, the old Wacom Bamboo I had in 2010 was way better than any iPad due to precision and pressure sensitivity. It should be stressed that the cheapest Wacom now is far worse than the ones back in the "Bamboo" era, so you might look for a second hand Intuos of some size.

Hi, I'm now a computer science student with a background in art history, photography and some minor experience in graphic design and illustration. The programme I'm attending is called "Nanoelectronics", which means I learn about a mix between programming, analog and digital circuit design. One of the main motivations behind this is because I've been dabbling with Digital Audio Workstations and drawing since I was a teenager, and these courses are the closest I can come to learning about image processing, signal processing and maybe even learn enough electronics to learn how an analog synthesizer is made. I've noticed you talk a lot about how Affinity Designer uses OpenGL to render graphics efficiently, and for this reason I've become very curious about what OpenGL is and how to use it. The courses I've taken up to now have been about OOP with Java, programming in C and x86 Assembly Language, but there's been very little choice in learning how to program GUIs and graphics programming with OpenGL. I've been looking for good books on the subject, and I find the quality of computer science books are not always that great. My favourite books that have helped me the most were "Big Java, Late Objects" by Cay Horstman and "The C Programming Language" by K&R (the Floyd and Buchla book on "Electronics Fundamentals" was great too, but that wasn't exactly a programming book). So my question is. How did you (the developers) learn how to program native GUI applications for OS X (macOS)? And how did you teach yourselves OpenGL? I noticed there's a book nicknamed "The Red Book", but from what I've read, some like it, some hate it. I'm still finding the learning curve of Xcode to be a little off-putting (even though I find programming Swing applications in Eclipse fairly easy). So I'm wondering where to start, and how other people started learning about Cocoa, Objective-C etc... and how GUI applications in OS X are structured. I hope this isn't too off topic, but I think it would be nice to hear from the developers about how you got to where you are now making useful software.

Photoshop CS2 runs fairly easily through Wine in Linux.

What 3D effects are you referring to? Are you talking about gimmicky 3D-text with raster-effects that usually end up being incompatible across platforms? To represent three-dimensional images on a two-dimensional surface there's perspective / projection techniques. Adobe Illustrator offers a (from my experience completely useless and easily replaceable) two point perspective grid. Affinity Designer offers proper orthographic projection tools, i.e. isometric grids, that are way more useful than any other tool. If you want 1,2,3,4 or 5 point perspective, I find that the node tool pretty much covers this since the node/pen tool is capable of drawing both straight and curvilinear lines. Most vector graphics tools will tell you that their software is not a 3D-modelling suite. For that you use Autodesk Maya, Blender or some manner of CAD tool. To try and emulate the functionality of something that originally belongs to a quite different software suite usually ends up in half assed results. The only 3D-tools I'm missing as of yet would be the some added functionality in the transformation tools, but that isn't strictly a 3D effect, and the mesh-warp tool on the roadmap just might be the thing to offer this functionality. It would be nice to see some scripting options available though, so I agree with the plugin idea, preferably in some major language like C or Python.

For quite some time now it's annoyed me a bit how the boolean tools sometimes result in overly complex shapes that don't need to have as many nodes as it gets after using the boolean tools (add, subtract, intersect etc.). A technique I often use to make things bolder and thicker is to add a stroke, expand it and then add it, but as you can see, even something as simple as a circle can end up getting far more anchor points than necessary. It also took me way too long to find the equivalent of the "simplify" tool, and it would be nice if it was possible to choose the level of simplification. Is it possible to improve this feature? I also miss the auto-grid features while using the isometric grid, it would be nice to be able to zoom in or out and still have an isometric grid to work on. The simplify tool does seem to work, but it could be a little more customisable, not to mention easier to find.

Just a little suggestion, would you consider making a showcase video each time you release a significant update to the program? Image-Line does this with their FL Studio program (audio production suite) every time they release an update and it's really a nice way to get a quick look at the improvements not just from a list of text, but also visually. It's also fairly entertaining and pretty good advertising. I wouldn't consider this strictly necessary or anything, but just thought it might be a good suggestion.

I suspected that might be the case (gradients being a proprietary implementation issue), I still thought it needed mentioning, so that it might be possible for future releases it's possible to make sure files are AI10 compatible when exporting eps. Maybe a warning or option is in order when exporting eps, so that when trying to export a file that involves gradients to convert the curve colours to a non gradient one?

I just started uploading a few simple vectors for istockphoto.com this month, and to my surprise I could actually upload a .eps file created in Affinity Designer to their site without any issues. Usually I stay away from gradients and opacity though since I experience less compatibility issues by just getting the colours right in the first place, but for realism it would still be nice to be able to do gradients and still have them accepted. I tried uploading one file that had a two very simple shapes with gradients in it and got this reply: So it seems the gradient used in Affinity Designer isn't AI10 EPS compatible, which is used as the "lowest common denominator" of .eps files. There's some more info on compatibility issues in their training manual: https://secure.istockphoto.com/help/sell-stock/training-manuals/illustration with the file format criterions here: The reason why I'm posting this is since Affinity Designer seems to be aimed for the professional market, so I thought I'd post a heads up on what certain sites require for files to be accepted for sale. I've also had a few issues with joining paths, is there a "cmd + J" like hotkey I could use to join two anchor points to create a combined "curve"?

I just read this on your facebook page: I know this it's probably some time before this happening, but Affinity Designer has been around for almost a year already, so it kind of raises the question: will there be a smaller "upgrade price" for those who already own previous versions of Affinity programs? It would be nice to know about your pricing plans and other details if different versions are to be treated as different programs. From what I've seen you've been very good at sharing the necessary information through roadmaps and tutorials so I've no doubt you'll tell us about it in due time, but some details would be nice to know without having to wait too long.

I used to have Adobe CS5 for a few years, but after a laptop that pretty much fell apart and taking up computer science I needed a computer with a decent build quality and a decent Unix-system which is why I switched to mac. To my dismay, Adobe chose to up the prices to levels bordering on extortion, and considering I stick to either open source or companies that offer free updates (anyone else here like FL Studio?) Affinity Designer was one of my first purchases with my new mac. Still, what I was working on as a hobby before I did the big switch was doing some vector illustrations, a few traces here and there, but also some isometric drawings, I even had two of them accepted on istockphoto.com Thanks to the new update I'll finally be able to go back to where I was (even though I hope the line tool will be in place pretty soon). Here's what I made before by the way, by the look of the isometric grid here, making stuff like this will probably be a pleasure to work with. http://www.istockphoto.com/vector/office-buildings-isometric-27009085?st=3f64ae7

Couldn't you just implement an auto-trace algorithm taken from Inkscape and release the source code borrowed from open source software on the website? Apple does it all the time, I'm not all that familiar with the legal requirements of GNU, but from what I've read about it it seems perfectly acceptable to take open source software and implement it into proprietary software as long as the GNU source code is released. I'm using Inkscape and Affinity Designer interchangeably now, but I just can't stand the look and feel of most FOSS software, FOSS is good for strictly functional stuff, but my experience is that they pretty much suck when a GUI is involved. Anyway, the autotrace isn't really the most important thing, as mentioned it's easily fixed by using Inkscape and exporting it into Affinity. I'm still missing a (straight) line tool with a fairly simple mathematical dialog window where I just type in the length and direction - it's pretty basic vector stuff actually, what I miss is the strictly vectorial part of drawing vectors - i.e. the ability to just click on a point on the canvas which opens up a small dialog window asking for the length of the line and the direction in the form of an angle. So for example if I want to draw a line that's 10cm and goes 30 degrees upwards in the left direction I fill in "10cm" in one field (in Java the Swing package that would be a JTextField) and "150" in a field marked angle. If this could work together with the "lock to grid" that would be perfect. It would also be interesting with a line tool where I could just type vectors directly, i.e. being able to click on any point and a dialog window opens asking for the X and Y coordinates of the vector. This is perfect for drawing orthographic projection without having to deal with clumsy CAD software. I just found out the crop tools are already there in the "Document Preferences" window, which is awesome, and I see you added dashed lines and arrow heads in the last update - this made it way easier to create proper UML drawings. The reason why I'm a bit insistent on this is because I also think this change should be fairly simple to implement yet still add enormously to the usability of the program.

So, I just got myself a new mac, only downside being that my version of CS5 happens to be for Windows. I happen to have a copy of PS Elements 11, but what I really need is a good vector program. So now I thought I'd get Affinity Designer seeing as any future purchases from Adobe is out of the question for pretty obvious reasons. Sorry if I'm barging in making assertions here without doing the right amount of research, but after googling a couple of scenarios I found these features somewhat missing. Anyway, here's my personal list of suggestions. Crop tool like in PS CS5 - i.e. being able to control cropping by percentage or pixels chosing to crop from the left, right, top or bottom with detailed instructions, I find the resize and crop tools in PS to be somewhat superior to most other programs, and it's a fairly basic, yet important feature for any image editing. Sadly, this seems to be missing in PS Elements as well. Line tool like in AI - the line tool in AI happened to be really great for drawing using orthographic projection. Why? Because I could just click at any point on the canvas, and insert instructions on how long the line should be and at what angle/degree it should be, working with isometric perspective I find being able to create lines at 30, 60 and 120 degree angles to be extremely useful. And also being able to duplicate and move these lines and objects by degree and length. I'm not saying Affinity Designer should be a CAD tool, but for those of us who knows Orthographic Projection from the ground up, a basic vector toolkit is pretty useful for this. Auto-tracing - because even though it's often a bad habit, it's still extremely useful. Automation tools - being able to record actions and execute these multiple times, or for batch processing multiple files. Perspective tools - just might be nice, but again, just a good line tool like I suggested earlier might do the trick. Sorry if I suggested something that already exists, if some of these features already exist, please tell me how.