debraspicher

FWIW, reading about the exchange of massive amounts of other people's money can feel so inconsequential 😂 Currently re-watching Silicon Valley in the same vein...

I seem to remember having to pay for 2.0 and being told it was a big upgrade for me and that Affinity was "setting new standards". If the differences here were between 1.2 vs 1.7, etc, I would almost certainly agree, they don't live on the same scale. However arbitrary it can seem, version numbers do give at least some indication to us as to how the developer interprets the current state of their own product. It would be very understandable for 1.x to be missing some very basic functionality. 2.x, we would expect their ducks to be in a row so to speak where at least 1.x's functionality is concerned, but here many of 1.x flaws and bugs made it into 2. Am I really supposed to believe the key bugs will ever be addressed when we have iterated through 2.x updates with no signs that even problems from 1.x will ever be addressed adequately? However if "version numbers mean nothing" then there is nothing left to discuss, frankly.

Your writing reminds me of my own writing when I was younger. I started on a typewriter. Then I moved to Word 6, which I used for "creative" writing also, but it became more "script-ish" (as in largely dialogue). Very interesting to see another person use a similar style. A traditional writing style can feel too precise. Writing is a lot like painting, which means it can take almost a lifetime to truly master. I found your post interesting, so thank you for that. I think I tried Scribus way back when it was newly in development and supposedly it's seen big improvements of recent, or at least I've seen written by others by reading in passing. As for the context of the post you are quoting, it is in reference to the technical issue(s) with accurate vectors, hence the "shark bug". VS is not brought up to be a "tit for tat". We can suggest its relevant here because VS is only 1.2 and yet Affinity is 2.4... What Affinity has managed with their line is seriously impressive and current staff should be commended to have made all that possible. None of us would be here nor it possible otherwise. However, clearly there are quality issues with the updates that being put out and their inability to put out the resulting fires is heavily concerning. If Canva is actually listening, they will send Serif a big fat check to hire al the talent they need to fix the quality issues and other developmental obstacles. Otherwise, the horse is long dead... Re: Inkscape, I want to love the app as it could have been a stellar piece of software, but its development speed is terribly slow (kinda expected with OSS) and its UI is a cry for help. Will more income help? I'm not sure, honestly. I suspect if others are like me, they may be skeptical that adding money to the equation will automatically lead to speedier development and that exacerbates the issues with raising money for long-term OSS projects. At least with companies, we know they rely on steady revenue and are required to make cash to sustain. There's a cash for value too, as what we pay is supposed to be proportionate to what we receive. I do use Inkscape for some things, especially Trace Bitmap, which works really well for converting delicate ink jobs. It's not as user friendly to me as VS, though admittedly that wasn't my first impression when I first tried VS. I can see VS becoming what Inkscape couldn't be in that regard, should it take on inspiration in the development of a solid "user flow" throughout the breadth of the application. Note: I didn't say workflow... nobody wants a UI filled with inflexible/dead end workflows.. *cough* Illustrator *cough*. Both are held back by some cumbersome UX and strange UI decisions. VS has better document management and that's important for my ability to stay organized creatively as it allows me to also work rationally... two things that can come into conflict for me when writing code.

Something tells me you've become all too accustomed to having your suggestions dismissed. (Playfully joking here, not at all meant to be snark) I'm not against that suggestion, but I think no matter what, something has to change if they ever intend to go after the "big dogs". And that may very well not be their intention if the goal is to target something like Canva's current demographic, which is quite large... and legitimately, there's nothing wrong with this as that is a market that is demanding to be served. It would just be disappointing to a number of people who were hoping to get further away from Adobe's workflow beyond the typical technical, economic, professional reasons, etc. (i.e. creative).. people who were already happy with Adobe will just continue using Adobe. Theoretically also, Canva can be intending to "buy" the technology to put into the product rather than building it themselves as they seem to be gathering technologies as capital as their habit. Serif's software can be a wrapper for whatever future business aspirations they have down the line for a professional suite... so many possibilities. It doesn't fix preexisting bugs though. Some can say very little will change as far as how Affinity is being developed, but I don't see how that happens the more that I think about it... surely Affinity is worth the $$$ it is because of the possibilities of building atop its foundation. Whether that is good or bad news is subjective to the individual customer. Items for our consideration... consider these in relation to the Serif acquisition which was in late March: (Apr 5th) Canva millionaires made as $US1.6b share sale completes https://www.afr.com/technology/canva-millionaires-made-share-sale-to-hit-3-6bn-first-1-6bn-done-20240405-p5fhmm Why the $2.43 billion Canva share sale is an epic moment for Australian tech https://www.startupdaily.net/topic/business/why-the-2-43-billion-canva-share-sale-is-an-epic-moment-for-australian-tech/ (Apr 18th) Pixels and Pictures: Canva challenges Adobe with Affinity acquisition (33%) https://kstatecollegian.com/2024/04/18/pixels-and-pictures-canva-challenges-adobe-with-affinity-acquisition/ Edit: Post below is older but keeping in because the quote is interesting to me. Unfortunately, I can't change text color of date because I am on mobile atm Edit2: Hail, desktop. (Apr 26 2022) Investor drastically slashes value of its Canva shares price https://www.news.com.au/finance/business/other-industries/canva-takes-hit-to-valuation-after-investor-wipes-33-per-cent-off-share-price/news-story/db5c38dde744b4576d52dd11b0e6ffa9 I'm sure there are other articles floating out there that can adjust the picture a bit, but this was all I could find...

The "shark teeth" "defect" is from a bug I reported before, obviously never fixed. I'm sure others have reported it. I've cleared my attachments, but the topic is here: These were the attachments... 231201_stroke-odd-behavior.afdesign Sadly, this is the result of not polishing up on core functions. One consideration, that some have speculated to in the past, is that they don't fully comprehend the math involved and there's plenty of "tweaking" under the hood to get the desired visual results. I've been playing with (and learning, actually) Vectorstyler which is built by one man and it's amazing to me how much manipulation is feasible with just that one program. Serif has a team of people and decades of experience to hire the correct people, so these kinds of issues in CORE functionality (expansion, pressure curves, anti-aliasing curves, etc) should not be so pervasive. I don't see how Canva can change their thinking that dramatically... horse to water, etc.

I would be very happy with robust quality and improved output. Affinity does most of the things I need for what I have used it for. I happily keep other tools in my chest. The benefit of having most tools under one roof is to decomplicate output. Adobe tries to be a swiss army knife with their suite and it doesn't feel pleasant to be locked to a one-size-fits-all workflow. But where it excels, imo, is in final output. Of course it doesn't do everything perfectly. No software does, which is why many of us are still here like *knock knock* Hey...

I know I joked earlier about the abuse of the laugh emoji, but I turned off Reaction Notifications a little while ago. They've become useless anyway. All I want to see in my feed is Patrick sharing the latest updates with all my unicorns achieved. It's not going to happen. People are better off arranging their own offshoots for software enthusiasts. It wouldn't have to be limited to the industry, though we need the information on that use case the most to encourage competition, because there are a good number of smaller professionals as well who have communicated that they believed Affinity could be going for higher aspirations than it currently does. The messaging from Serif is so difficult that my simple hope is for Canva take over in such a way that we don't have to endure such poor communications ever again. The navel-gazing that encompasses some of what I think can also be described as "non-serious" has largely been incentivized from Serif's OTT marketing and the speculation that that continuously generates. It sells cheap licenses but it is a far cry from incentivizing more discerning customers to jump onboard for the long haul no doubt when they see the amount of zealotry in the fanbase. Imo, it's toxic longterm for the userbase as some are turned off by the constant hype rather than being given straightforward and realistic expectations. It can leave the sense we stay in the dark as to whether these products remain a dependable platform for their longterm for our individual usecases. The messaging post-acquisition is not nearly enough to answer these questions and other than what we've seen, I've just accepted that for now at least this is not a safe ship for me. I don't know that Serif ever promised to outright compete directly with Adobe, but the carrot was left out there for so long that it seemed at least a far off aspiration. Now Canva takes over and screams "We're going after Adobe!!!"... there's that hype train again. Can it actually deliver? Canva's market is no where near the industry space and is much larger. How much of the perceived aspirations are legitimate goals or are just clever marketing? And at what point are we just projecting into Affinity what we want it to be?.. those are the important questions for me.

There's something productivity-focused about CorelDraw. It is not interested in throwing UI at you (even when you expect it most) and seems to push you straight to work more quickly and it does indeed seem plausible to create things much quicker than in AI. However it could also be an InDesign replacement depending on the complexity of the document. The problem I've had with AI is that it required subscription-based plugins to actually do most technically challenging things very quickly. So not only we would be paying for Adobe, but also the plugins. Vectorstyler in this respect seems to look at the most popular baseline programs and seeks to address these shortcomings.

@Westerwälder Psst. Tagging you in in case you haven't used up all your laugh emojis for the day yet.

Especially unhelpful when the customer is already confused.

This post warms my heart so much. I have both CorelDraw and Vectorstyler on trial atm.

I love the origin offset feature for setting up margins and columns with padding (not just gutters).

We may head that direction and hope there's a clearing. But if not, it's a day to get out and have a small adventure. On the plus side, I have filters now I can use for future solar shots... @Iphilpot I would've been living in the NE at the time (my husband's home state), but I do remember that. I don't think I have any photographs of it, just my memory. On topic: @awakenedbyowls If you are making use of OneDrive (built into Windows) at all, it is possible to move that to another disk as I have for every install of Windows. So that may free up quite a bit of space if you're using that a lot. I know not everyone uses it but surprisingly some I have talked to have, so I do often suggest that when system disk storage becomes a problem. I have never kept mine on the system drive (C:) as I'm on the 365 plan and I have quite a bit stored on it.

It'll be worth it, I think. Looks like cloudy weather here. We are planning to drive but it may not matter.

Can we not do the psychology crap again? We are not mental health experts. We push pixels around a screen for a living. I don't find the mental analysis either convincing or insightful.

Utilizing in-browser support for its native text support is very different than implementing an entire text engine into software... By the way, BRAVO Canva. It was super quick to jump right into registration (I used my Google login) and straight into a new design. Less than a minute. The text frame I created... The text "entry" itself... 100% browser-based. Convert these elements into a final bitmap image and "done".

I think you'll find when using too large of assets for a brush that typically will be used at a radius much smaller, you will not find the quality is better... it's best to pick a size that matches up with the intended use case of the brush. The only time maybe to use something super large is it is an "asset" brush in the sense that you are pasting large photographic-style elements on the canvas... so like a brush that prints nebulas, similarly highly detailed elements would use a large radius, but it would drop them in one at a time or very slowly/sporadically... something that you will use to render (ie. paint) on the canvas, you should pick the size closest to the size range that the brush is intended to be used at so as to not be too taxing and so that an appropriate amount of detail is still seen...

I don't know about Mac, but on Windows, if you click anywhere outside the filter dialog box (for example to pan), it resets the first option back down to "0" in the case of the Unsharp Mask. It's very touchy and when experimenting, I lose the setting that way. If you have clicked away from that dialog and closed it, it's very easy to not notice that the filter is now "off" because of this particular UX flub.

Yes and I find that particular quote you and @bbrother cited to be both stubborn and insulting when there are years and years of unaddressed efforts by the users of this forum. That's why I refuse to participate in the betas at this point. It's counterintuitive. They have rode off into the sunset after literally cashing out on all our goodwill but still only have vague insinuations production could be higher (relying again on our imaginings of what could be), but then insist "nothing will change". They were acquired, not as a blessing but out of necessity, so clearly a lot needs to change.

This doesn't go to the legal discussion, but I can see a time where kids, even adults, actually start believing the Masters added dinosaurs to their paintings because of the prominence of AI versions. Public education is in such a state where we are that we are closing schools and removing school days because so many are transferring to private/charter. Anyway, the point of mentioning that particular bit is one of the benefits of having the ability to quickly create graphics by hand is that we can create materials for home use because the schools are so lacking now. So I think there will always be a need for hand-created materials, especially those where context is critical to the presentation of such knowledge. The computer doesn't understand child development and the nuances of that. Medical knowledge, matters that require great sensitivity in addressing and presenting, etc.. Example: I would never trust ChatGPT for giving me medical advice relevant to my own actual situation, for example. It may be that graphic designers may have to consider picking up a side focus so that they can produce materials/works for other people's benefits and also monetize their own unique specialty in presenting such materials. The popularity of YT, etc, is an example of that in video form. People have taken what they were paid to do as a trade for example, monetized their knowledge of it and made that knowledge more widely accessible through creative means. Companies may turn to AI en masse for their own graphics solutions, but on the other hand, they become dependent on these tools and it leaves the independent person to pick up where these tools fail to present information in a way that is relatable... so I think in the end, it's all in finding a balance and adapting to these changes in a smart way. I hope that makes sense... it may not...

Serif in a recent company statement shared by another user (see below) has stated they are putting resources into AI, so we may not need a plugin. I also agree with you, it's inevitable that this is where tech will go now as AI is the future. I don't have any particular issues with it being used to "enhance" work. My issue is when whole new pieces are created out of works that were added to a tool without consent. If someone wants to take one of my color palettes and use it in their own design, that's a legitimate use as a creative tool, I think. That's akin to exploratory use-cases and is a suitable use for AI as a creative tool. It wouldn't be very different if I had input that color palette manually and had the algorithm work it... or used other filters, etc, to adjust. Using AI to "restyle" ones work, for example, provided it's not a total replacement. So the difference for me would be using an image we created as a "prompt" (causing AI to redraw it entirely), versus using AI to "filter" through the piece and add 3d effects, shadows, recoloring, adding objects, etc...

AI takes other people's work, throws them into a wood chipper where it then applies it own signature to analyzed bits, then uses its unique algorithmic magic to interpret those works and thus their bits are used to "reform" new works based on previous works. It's a form of theft in the sense it takes other people's materials and uses it to feed the process... which it cannot do on its own without those references. The copying is merely the act of feeding something into the algorithm. It has less to do with the output, more to do with the fact that many creators do not approve their works being used to train computers against their consent. I get the feeling for some it is akin to identity theft, which I really can't blame them. That said, it's not illegal to trawl the public web and store people's information against their consent, so nothing will be done. People who hate to pay for things will welcome AI. Many people still pirate music. Just like many don't have any issue with search engines and social media sites mass collecting our information, they will be fine with it because it provides a free service in return.

I agree with @philipt18 on the benefits but the site needs a professionals area, in general. Typesetting (but a bright broader?... print design maybe?) could be one sub in such an area. May I also point out to staff it would not only better show to you how your users actually solve their daily problems, make proper use of the suite, but show painpoints and room for improvement in a more straightforward way. Right now we can only assume how others actually work. Anyway, it woukd show to everyday visitors the software and its real world usecase beyond just the occassional tutorial. Also, it allow users to interact more one on one without being lost in technical support jargon and exchange critical insights. Right now that energy is wasted because it often gets hidden in offtopic dialogue. The prominence of which just shows the community is being underutilized.

I've saved some AI eye candy from Pinterest, etc for myself, but yeah, the errors are glaring. I don't care for my personal usages, but I would never put it on anything commercial.

We can kind of achieve what is being asked for with Export Persona. I like that your example is all in one place and much easier to scan through and select in one go. I don't think the Export window needs that left side.. To do what is requested, one has to be aware of it to make use of it in EP. This requires inputting the specific width/height values into the Slice itself. That requires manually typing in "1500w" in the scaling field (nice, that input is truncated... ), etc, in this case. Once that is done, it's possible to set a Export preset to include both the scaling information and the export format settings. You would first select your format preset (the PNG dropdown), or set it up above this panel in "Export Options" manually for the slice... then to save it, you have to save it where it says "Export Preset" Then in the future, you will be able to select this specific setting in this dropdown: It is additional labor (not much once it is preset), but if you are using a template anyway, your EP setup will be included and so it will retain those delicate settings... I generally prefer EP because I can export assets quickly... but I do think that a streamlined panel like the above is critical for people who usually stay in editor portion of the program. There's tons of time savings in EP for use cases where the additional functionality is useful (and needed), but complicated for most users where only a simple one-off export would be necessary... By the way, EP can also adjust for your output Destination... it is also a relative path, like the above example.