abandonedbrain

Sorry to sound like a jerk, but are you using ANY type of backup system on your Mac? Time Machine, anything? If so, you SHOULD be able to go into the backups and pull out all of your custom changes, as it looks like these are single files (similar to how Adobe does it with PS). What those are, specifically, I'd need confirmation on from the support people at Serif, but it should be do-able. If you're NOT using a backup, here's your push to do it. It's at minimum the price of an external USB hard drive; a cheap one is fine as it's just backup data, not live data. Use Time Machine, it's free and built into the OS. Better still, a cloud-based offering from CrashPlan or BackBlaze would be extremely useful.

Hello. I'm a long time Freehand user, and a reluctant Illustrator user. Heck, I still run OS X 10.6 Server in a VM on my MBP, just to keep using Freehand when I just need to "get things done"... That being said, I found Affinity Designer recently, and I really REALLY want to love this thing! However, as I'm running through some very basic (to me) functions, I'm getting quite frustrated. My biggest problem right now is in regards to aligning and locking objects. If I want to align three objects vertically, in any other app, I select them and hit the Align Vert button/menu item. If one is ahead of the others (in front of), that's automatically the one the others align to, at least in Freehand. Want to snap to a different object? Bring it to the front and align again. In Illustrator, you can select the three objects, click on the "key" one to align to, and the others snap to that one. Either program's way, it's consistent. In Freehand, if I lock an item, it stays put. I could use that as a snap object, similar to key objects in Illy. I can't figure out what constitutes a "key" object in Designer. One time, I'll draw three objects, and aligning snaps to the first of the three. Great if you are only drawing those objects and immediately aligning them, but what if you then add two more, and re-align? Now it wants to snap to the newest object. Inconsistent. However, I should always be able to take an object and lock it, and use that as an anchor. But when I try that, if I select an object in Designer and lock it, then select two other objects to align with it, the locked item moves to snap to the others! OK, so I get that you don't have Illy's key object picking. But I can't seem to get consistent results with this software, and that means it's of almost no use to me, $50 or $5000. So is there a rule in the program that dictates which object gets to be the "key" one the others will snap to? Is it documented and I'm just not seeing it? Thanks for any info/help. Like I said, I really want to like Designer. Parts of it feel like Freehand (in my eyes, the best of the bunch cross-platform over the decades), parts feel like Illy with all of the Astute plug-ins I've had to add to it to get it to act like Freehand. It's slick, it deserves to be more than $50 once it's got all of the basics in place.