LCamachoDesign

I'm going to express my interest on this feature as well, in specific, I'd like Affinity to port the iOS interface to Windows in tablet mode.
I was waiting for yesterday's Apple event to see if the new iPads were a good buy before deciding. Technically, the new iPads are really great, but then I saw the prices and that killed the idea right there. The base model (64Gb, barely enough to work with) went from 750€ to 910€! The Apple Pencil went from 99€ to 135€! That's almost a 200€ increase in price! That makes the a base model iPad more expensive than a Surface Pro... I can't justify it as I already have a Surface Pro anyway.
So, a way to use the Affinity apps as touch friendly drawing tools would be great, and the UI already exists, which may help.
Thanks!

This is a long-standing issue that's been brought up time and again. I sincerely hope a fix sees the light of day eventually. In the meantime the only viable workaround is to take your path elsewhere (e.g. Inkscape), expand it and then bring it back in. Maybe it'll get promoted in the agenda if enough people voice their concerns so let's make some noise :)

Flyeralarm wants this specification to make sure, that the PDF has flattened content.
The X-3 format, written by Publisher IS flattened. So Flyeralarm shouldn’t  reject it. If you have doubts, use PDF X-1a 2003. This works too. The main difference to X-3 is, that PDF-X1a only allows CMYK and spot colours.
 
By the way: Flyeralarm wants PDF files, which definitely aren’t „state of the art“ nowadays. They want all text to be converted to vectors. Frankly spoken: I’d never ever do this, because it is last-century-workflow. Converting fonts  isn’t necessary at all any more, because modern layout software embeds (subsets of) fonts correctly. Font conversion to vector might downgrade printed typo quality, because converting fonts abolishes hinting.
If you aren’t for whatever reason bound to Flyeralarm, I’d like to recommend „Die Druckerei.de“ https://www.diedruckerei.de/?dp2=onlineprinters. The print results are excellent, Prices are equal to Flyeralarm, fast turnaround times – and their data requirements are up to date (no font conversion for example, acceptance of PDF 1.4, …)

Data Merge, as InDesign does it at least, is utter rubbish. If you want to implement some sort of batch data import & formatting then look into InDesign's XML importer and Structure panel instead. It's more complicated but infinitely better. And Affinity can "easily" one-up Adobe on this by simply supporting XML and also JSON import. JSON is being used a lot more than XML these days (for the best and for the worse), so supporting it is a big competitive advantage.

Data Merge, as InDesign does it at least, is utter rubbish. If you want to implement some sort of batch data import & formatting then look into InDesign's XML importer and Structure panel instead. It's more complicated but infinitely better. And Affinity can "easily" one-up Adobe on this by simply supporting XML and also JSON import. JSON is being used a lot more than XML these days (for the best and for the worse), so supporting it is a big competitive advantage.

Mesh Wrap as a live filter is missing: you can't save a deformation map as a template and just replace the image.

This is a very important feature still missing in AP and AD. I can't understand why it's not on their To-Do List at high pri...

For me publishing is all about typography and setting beautiful text, whether that's artistic display type or vast amounts of body text. Here are some things I'd like to see Publisher get at some point (but maybe it's just me so I'm interested in people's comments):
1. Font info: In the Font selector show as much information about each font as practical (ideally let the user configure which attributes are shown), and provide a "get info" function to display all available details. Attributes of interest would include licensing flags (embeddable, etc.) existence of Kerning pairs, OpenType features of interest, western language support, CJKV support, etc.
2. Basic Font management: I'd like to be able to organize fonts into groups (potentially having one font in multiple groups). I'd like to be able to attach some notes text to a font that would be viewable as a tooltip say, or an attribute in the font info described above.
3. Optical Kerning support: I've always been a fan of Optical Kerning in InDesign as it eliminates a significant problem when exploring for interesting and special purpose fonts, and the ability to leverage the insane number of free fonts (of wildly varying quantity of course) that exist today, some/many/most/virtually all of which do not include kerning pairs. I suspect many font designers take the attitude that "kerning is a pain in the butt and people can just turn on optical kerning in InDesign so really there's no problem if you don't do the work to create them". In playing with Publisher I've been disappointed to find out just how many fonts I like will be problematic in Publisher due to lack of kerning support. The Affinity response so far is:
"We provide kerning based on tables in the font file. As these are pretty well supported by fonts, doing anything more isn't a priority at the moment."
( https://forum.affinity.serif.com/index.php?/topic/65653-tooltip-fix-and-optical-margin-align/&tab=comments#comment-342380 )
which is disappointing. I hope they'll consider it in the future.

Data Merge, as InDesign does it at least, is utter rubbish. If you want to implement some sort of batch data import & formatting then look into InDesign's XML importer and Structure panel instead. It's more complicated but infinitely better. And Affinity can "easily" one-up Adobe on this by simply supporting XML and also JSON import. JSON is being used a lot more than XML these days (for the best and for the worse), so supporting it is a big competitive advantage.

Data Merge, as InDesign does it at least, is utter rubbish. If you want to implement some sort of batch data import & formatting then look into InDesign's XML importer and Structure panel instead. It's more complicated but infinitely better. And Affinity can "easily" one-up Adobe on this by simply supporting XML and also JSON import. JSON is being used a lot more than XML these days (for the best and for the worse), so supporting it is a big competitive advantage.

I wrote up a mini-review - trying to use it to prepare a few very simple pages of a textbook.
https://medium.com/@postenterprise/affinity-publisher-beta-hands-on-review-4f5f05c96c02
The main point is not about features but about the Affinity development process.

You will all hopefully be pleased to know that from this morning in the footer of any affinity spotlight page is a link to the page with RSS, JSON and Atom feeds for the articles
https://affinityspotlight.com/feeds/
 

There's no 'priority' issue here. I'm the Project Manager (and Lead Developer) of Affinity Designer, so I'm busy working on my next release (AD for iPad) whereas we have a whole team of developers working on Affinity Publisher and have had for a long time now. My post was really about apologising I've not been around as much as usual (because I'm very busy!) and about reassuring you that Publisher is still coming along nicely from what I can see... I'll move on to help out the team with Publisher imminently, sure, but it's not like there's been a pause while everyone waits for my help!  They're much better at Publisher-specific stuff than me anyway, so I just need to help out in the areas that I'm good at! As with any of our products, they won't be released until we're actually happy with them, because at the end of the day, nobody wants software that doesn't really 'work' properly!  
It's difficult from my perspective to imagine what we could have done here to make customers feel less frustrated by the lack of progress?... Development of good software is often an iterative process - it's SO unlikely you'll just hit the sweet-spot on your first go at typing something and you'll need to start again with new knowledge and try something a little different - that process is notoriously terribly difficult to estimate how long it takes. In a world where it only matters if something actually works or not, then maybe your first go would've been good enough and maybe timescales are easier to guess, but we're looking for a great solution, not just any solution... So Publisher seems to be taking a while when viewed from the outside - but there's no 'problem' here, everything is going great and we're converging on something special - but rushing to reach a goal before it's truly ready would just be a terrible idea and would setup the product very badly for the future. I think the 'teaser' video for Publisher we released was partly to show that it really was happening, and partly because we're really excited to show it to you! The guys working on the product are doing their job, but it's also something they're passionate about, so they're proud of their work and want you to enjoy it. The alternative was for us to have never said anything about Publisher at all but then customers would just wonder what we were doing that was meaning we weren't updating Photo/Designer very often recently and then would get frustrated. Hang in there - it's on its way and it's going to be good!  

The is issue is getting the priority right. Personally I would find the value of a major product on major platform which make up 1/3 of the collection far more important than shifting the focus on Designer for iPad. Is their user base is so high that it warrants such decision? I am sure Adobe would not have delayed the development of InDesign and say we are focusing on Illustrator for iPad first! To me this madness... But hey I am not the company or the developer...

Ok - I've added this capability.  Was a bit more involved than I thought...  I've done it so that Space redrag will move just the node for the edited handle, even if there are multiple nodes selected. This gives a subtly different but useful editing capability to just moving the node.  It will allow you to move an isolated node, and allow for snapping to the other selected nodes.
There was also a lot to think about to ensure that all the stuff I've previewed before continues to work correctly, and updates after the node position is changed.
 
Anyway, enjoy the video:

CurveHandlesRedrag.mov

If it is like in the latest places I've worked at, the web team (lol, was in one) is typically (well,you often have the many hats person, but IMO, tends to be a small percentage) having a very different set of tasks and work load than those making the main native code applications (these are not web applications, yet, I believe). 
And promo is so, so key for absolutely anything that you do, that it is not just optional. How you do it differs from company to company or individual, there are many ways. But it is a total must. Specially in a so competitive market as this is. A large percentage of the matter is that people know that you exist. And believe it or not, a wild lot of people yet don't know, although more and more people everyday are getting aware of Affinity. Wacom does their constant set of interviews to artists, technology previews, etc, etc. And like them, so many companies. So, absolutely logical that this is created (and it is being pretty well done, also).

This is actually... brilliant!! It will do wonders for the exposition and divulgation of Affinity software.
Important question though. Is there a RSS/Atom feed for the new content/articles/whatever? Thanks!

Yeah, but I already have enough emails related to work going into my inbox. I need less emails, not more. Besides I already have a design related curated feed in Feedly, it's much better to plug this source into the existing system rather than having to check a separate place for news.
For these reasons, please consider doing an RSS feed.
Thanks!

I'd like to suggest a few improvements to the Swatches panel:
 
Ability to convert swatches from and to normal/global/spot. For example, convert a normal swatch to global, or convert a spot to normal, and so on. Fills should automatically rename when colour is edited. For example, a fill named C:0 M:0 Y:0 K:10 should change to C:0 M:0 Y:0 K:50 if I do edit the colour to be a 50% black. Ability to group swatches into folders. Global colours names should be their values (for example C:0 M:0 Y:0 K:0) rather than "Global Colour %n" A command to select/delete all unused swatches. Perhaps create a document palette by default for any new document? A "Merge Swatches" command that works like in Illustrator Select multiple swatches at once to delete/copy them Global, overprint and spot colour indicators should be larger, they're hard to see when the swatch is selected (see attached) All these are to help us manage & identify the colours, plus correcting mistakes all designers make eventually. :P
Thanks!

Seeing what can I do in social media....

It's tied with todoist at 32% now! Just a little more and you can win!
Do a blog post too Patrick.

Our Affinity Designer Welcome screen now asks for a vote too, and a push on Social Media

No, QXP & VivaD can only use IDML files. Sorry I wasn't clear.
 
Nothing other than InDesign can open ID's native format. And at that, the version of ID has to be the same or newer version than that which created the .indd files. Which is one reason IDML exists, for older versions to be able to open files produced in a newer version. (It is also needed to remove oddness in ID files.)
 
In QXP version 2017. IDML opening was introduced as a beta feature in the last update. In version 2018 coming out soon it has been improved and will be/is a standard feature. But to be sure, Q's IDML import still has a ways to go before it supports everything one can do in ID. Quark is committed to expanding and improving this feature.
 
Viva Designer also only can process IDML from ID. Like Q, it also cannot currently handle all ID's features. However, it has not progressed much since the feature was available. My bet would be that Quark will handle a vast majority of features during the 2018 cycle.

I'd like to suggest a few improvements to the Swatches panel:
 
Ability to convert swatches from and to normal/global/spot. For example, convert a normal swatch to global, or convert a spot to normal, and so on. Fills should automatically rename when colour is edited. For example, a fill named C:0 M:0 Y:0 K:10 should change to C:0 M:0 Y:0 K:50 if I do edit the colour to be a 50% black. Ability to group swatches into folders. Global colours names should be their values (for example C:0 M:0 Y:0 K:0) rather than "Global Colour %n" A command to select/delete all unused swatches. Perhaps create a document palette by default for any new document? A "Merge Swatches" command that works like in Illustrator Select multiple swatches at once to delete/copy them Global, overprint and spot colour indicators should be larger, they're hard to see when the swatch is selected (see attached) All these are to help us manage & identify the colours, plus correcting mistakes all designers make eventually. :P
Thanks!

If 99% of the listed jobs ask you to know indesign to work there then yes, it is industry standard. Adobe suite is industry standard at the moment and this is disastrous in so many levels.
PDF is a file standard.

DTP's tend to have better typographic control and better asset placement/management. Illustrator has historically been used for packaging and other sorts of design work (posters, brochures, leaflets, etc) because 1. it was an additional expense to buy InDesign for both designer and printer/manufacturer, but mainly 2. InDesign is a massive beast of complexity and terrible UI choices, if you want to do just a couple of pages you'll get it done faster in Illustrator.
Illustrator is a vector DRAWING application, it would have no business in doing any sort of layout, or content handling, it should be used for illustration and drawings only. But the unwieldiness of the proper application for this (InDesign) has turned it into the default choice.
Anyway, I digress, I'll take whatever does the job best and fastest.