debraspicher

That narrative is unfortunately still unconfirmed conjecture and is purely speculative. Which in all fairness, is the position we've been put in for quite some time as customers. I'm not saying I don't agree with vast portions of what you are saying. I can see it. We just don't have a clue what is going on behind the scenes. Not a clue. This could've been Phase 2 or a potential fork on Serif's longterm economic map. A thought: 2 months isn't a long time at all to change the entirety of your company's vision from a stable vision to putting all your eggs in the basket of an unknown entity. See how that works? I can introduce some other argument that grinds the other direction and around and around we go, all over again... never-ending speculative projection. This is unacceptable coming from a company that is trying make big huge claims such as Serif/Canva. And that's the primary issue, is we're again put up against the wall as customers and for many who have migrated from other platforms, this is a position we know all too well. So people are rightly hedging their bets and that includes guessing the direction of the company, because we have no other assurances things will go the way we hope. Anyway, away from the old, onto the new: If they truly intend to capture a professional audience, then they need to get away from these games of cat and mouse with their messaging and start by being much more transparent with their intended business strategy. They can begin by solidifying these decisions in some major way that cannot be easily reversed. Also, a written commitment to V3, etc, offering perpetual could be a start for some. For others, we need to know that the buglist will start being the major priority. As to features, I'm not as concerned because there's plenty of incentive to add those. I don't think Canva bought the company to let the codebase rot. That would undermine their overall investment there, but I've seen stupider... As far as preserving Affinity's original vision for the better, it's going to have to probably come from Canva... I know. I'm asking a lot. I'm not holding my breath, either. Relevant post giving the timing of this one: https://forum.affinity.serif.com/index.php?/topic/201423-canva/&do=findComment&comment=1194508 :

It's like they're asking for an extended credit line on my faith. Except, they still haven't even paid off all of the other debt they'd accrued. You sold the company for millions? No extended credit line for you. Your balance is now due. Sincerely, Valued Customer.

I started transitioning away not very long before the Canva takeover.

Probably watching on as a software enthusiast because let's be honest, history is being made here. We've played our part in whatever this ends up becoming. I'm Adobe-trained, so that's what I've gone back to and for me it "just works". It's a big disappointment on so many levels, but it's been less drama than what Affinity has been lately for me as far as working. There's still tears, but they are over QoL matters more than problems that I can't find some way around. I'm still getting the output I need. So I've gone back to it and if need be, that's where I'll stay... at least until something better comes out. It would be absolutely amazing if Affinity suddenly gets a much needed boost ASAP and starts crushing bugs and other long-promised feature updates because I prefer it when it was working well. I can't tolerate the drama of uncertainty anymore and reliability is very important to me right now with where I am in life. I can tolerate a price increase, even a reasonable subscription fee, but it has to be for robust and polished software, not for a business venture. I think many professionals feel that way. One thing's for sure though, @Bit Disappointed will not be changing their name anytime soon. Even when the time comes for their name change limit to expire.

You have fun hobbies. I feel like we could be friends.

Just stop.

You're confusing testing with bug reports. Please stop.

Uh yeah, they're not getting anymore beta testing from me either. No more testing of any kind. (Edit: In case it's not clear for any reason, that does not count for bug reports. I'm just no longer willing to help develop software by testing it, whether that's beta or post-beta. I expect polished software to a reasonable degree.) They can afford a whole warehouse of testers now. There's years worth of goodwill in this forum alone that still hasn't been reciprocated. It is really inconvenient to change platforms, especially for major projects. On one hand, I'll have refreshed on my other toolset(s) and be looking at other options. Adobe has aged terribly, imo. It really should be easy to compete with the right polish but Serif's team has had a terrible track record with bugs and leaving features unfinished, so I'm not optimistic whatever "pledge" gets written in that the quality won't continue to slip. That pledge can go away at anytime. Only thing I like so far is that this is very much sounding anti-Adobe. That should please anyone, customer or not.

The biggest scandal of that tweet is that it is admitting it would be rather "uncool" if Affinity were acquired. The Deal With It sunglasses tell us so...

Yes, there is a limit on reactions. That's not new. We learned about it when V2 launched. How time flies.

Oh look, more freaking moonspeak 🌙 ... Might as well be written by AI. Exactly. Even if Serif announces tomorrow they are to reveal all our hopes and dreams will come true (in a future update, of course), it means very little in the grand scheme of things as they are the ones who have been bought out. At best they buy some time until Canva figures out what they will ultimately do with the software, but what Serif says itself is irrelevant. Canva can allow them continue to run as-is for a little while to maintain some semblance of stability, but the longterm is now uncertain and the rug can be pulled at any moment. I'd already started packing my things before this announcement because I could see clear as day that the suite was not being maintained but superficially (unfixed bugs&features, patch updates, lack of polish). We now see why. It's disappointing for its users, but it's literally a Tuesday for most other people in the design world. Serif does have its own employees to look after and if it can't go full steam ahead on its own, it is what it is. I don't take it personally. I appreciate that the effort was made and that we got this far. It's been a pleasure watching development, but at some point I'd like to just get on with reality. I do also appreciate that we can now take a moment to again review our own individual decisions in terms of where we invest our time and energy and go from there... so there is that. In the end, our tools do not make us, but rather we are what make our tools great and that the growth process involved there is what makes us better designers...

I've been learning Inkscape on the side as a "watch this space" Open Source vector app since Affinity has strayed too far for production work. I do not like the document creation part of it as it is quite limited there, but it can handle simple tasks. (as well as having image trace tools) Adobe has a monopoly on professional output for many reasons, much is which is irrelevant for many here whose needs don't require that much overhead. I write code and design for web, so many of my tasks I could mostly do without it, but with the bugs that eat up my time even on simple jobs, I'm quite done with the broken promises of Affinity. Clip Studio Paint, I will mention, because though they do offer a sub model, they still sell perpetual licenses. They just do not come with the .x portion of that. It's accessible with a yearly fee, but they've already released the next version which I purchased in a little over that time. I feel that's as good of a compromise as we can get, as the industry is clearly moving fully towards subscription. We could pay a yearly sub, or pay a perpetual license about as often... that's about how it used to work anyway: we get a few years and then paid upgrades...

Let me guess... it'll be something about "future updates"...

🏆

Dangling the "future update" carrot in front of your users for so long is why Serif is in the position they are in today. Just want to underscore that that this is yet another carrot they are tossing at users with promises of happy endings. Yeah, OK. I've been done with using broken software that constantly fudges output and can't even be bothered to give me proper viewport of what I'm working on, so I've already been transitioning away back to Adobe. I saw this in my email and if there is a word that describes the opposite of shocked but with similar intensity, that's where I am. I actually appreciate Serif, for once, delivering on clarity where the priorities actually lie. So yes, with 0 regrets, I now watch this space as a piece of software history and will ignore all toxic moonspeak that the average user will be continue to be subjected to in order to justify a poor history on bug fixes and delivery. Also, I'm sure someone else has posted this already, but this aged great: Thank you to staff and I sincerely hope this means good things to you each individually. It's been a pleasure.

Well I'm glad it was that "simple", I guess. They should have a longer trial period than 7 days because of install issues like this alone...

This has been a long-standing bug that wasn't fixed during a beta cycle. It's especially terrible for tablet users because it's not related to a drag, it's just not registering the change at all from tapping, but of course the highlight registers that a change was intended... Edit: This was the earliest post I was thinking of... But there's this one is 2022... I know they insist it is caused by dragging, but the highlight takes. Imo, it's exacerbated by UI being laggy on some systems and taking input poorly, but it's more likely to occur using a tablet because of the naturally quick movement. I've seen simple highlights of buttons and a hitch occurring right before the button blurb (the text/description) cause lag on my system. The brush engine when switching between brushes lags. Changing categories causes lag. It's not well-programmed. It should not take seconds to switch a brush.

Staff will probably ask for a crash dump. You'll need to pull it from here and can attach to your OP: It doesn't say outright what it could be in your log, but it may very well still be some kind of driver conflict? If you are using a Wacom, some people resolved it by updating its drivers. You can also try updating .NET, which is what the applications themselves are built on: https://dotnet.microsoft.com/en-us/download/dotnet-framework I'm sorry you are having this issue at all.

You can check event viewer under Windows logs > Application to see what the error says per the crash. It may point to a system driver that may be causing a conflict. Type it into Windows search and it will come up.

Mine has done this also for a while.

These aren't bugs or "issues", this feature is unfinished. It should be immediate priority.

I understand the theory behind the stickiness from @walt.farrell's post (thank you there, walt) in the other thread, but it also defies the point of having individualized brushes in the first place. Which is to have "on hand" a set of brushes that perform consistently on an as-needed basis. Even walt's explanation of this being a "ternary setting" would suggest (to me, anyway) this was conjured with "developer logic" in mind. I'm not the maker of 99% of my brushes in Affinity, so when it comes to experimenting, I always end up having to turn it off when returning to do mask work. Of course I always forget. Settings that shut on and off seemingly at random (from user POV) creates unneeded tension between users and the programs and generates needless support requests. I remember when I first ran into this problem. It took me a bit to realize what had happened so I was pointlessly trying to work. Time wasted I will never get back. Normally I assume I had done something wrong, so I was checking Layers and blend settings, etc to see if I had hit a keyboard shortcut (which I did in PS at times). I had no idea a program would be causing it "intentionally", because that seemed so counterproductive. Anyway, this is yet another example of arrogant design decisions from Serif. I "know" to setup the masking brushes to prevent this, yes. But I've had this issue with "creative" brushes as well. I sometimes can't tell whether "Wet edges" is intentionally set or not for other people's sets. There have been times it was seemingly obvious that setting was not intended, so I have to turn it off and check. But yes, I have to check the brush settings to see how it was intended/optimized just to simply test a new brush I'd bought. So you know what I do when I encounter this? I just go back to my other program which behaves perfectly rationally and ignore the brush engine even more... that's the cold reality.

Try Alt + Spacebar to get the menu so you can press M for "Move", then use arrow keys to move window... obviously while that window is selected. Press Enter. You can test it on other windows to check how it should behave.. hopefully it allows you in this case I can't get to PC to check for myself, atm..

It is best to keep a social media/sRGB preset for uploading to web. sRGB is the standard applied when no profile is embedded or the profile is corrupt. Color profiles can get dropped when uploaded to sites which use backend scripts which ignore profiles when reprocessing the image for rescale. Sometimes thumbnails get this treatment and it can cause color shifts between thumbs and uploaded sources. *Many things can happen also if the client redownloads their imagery from online, as they are apt to do, edit it or resave for themselves someplace and it is very likely to lose a profile that way. In short: Always use sRGB for web, especially where redistribution is likely (even accidental), unless it is for other artists, ie usually portfolios. Even if most machines can support embedded color profiles and that site supports non-sRGB standards, etc, you don't want a users screenshot of that image showing a terrible color shift floating around in the wild if their particular hardware or third party application accessing that site cannot support displaying it. CMYK is supported by some browsers but I would not trust it as well-regulated support as CMYK is designed for printers.

Wet edges once again. It turns itself on when you go through brushes and doesn't turn itself off. Very annoying when using painterly brushes and moving to mask. So yes, have to keep an eye on that setting... at least it's in the context toolbar and can be turned off easily.