whitehead

Thank you Ash - I was not aware of the V2 caps lock toggle and this is a game changer for me; as a result, I've just spent the last four hours noodling happily with Paolo's DAUB brush sets and rediscovering what a subtle brush engine Affinity has. We can basically tick this one as solved... superb!
Wants I think would be subtle enhancements: nobody I am sure wants to copycat other platforms, but CSP obviously has a pretty mature context cursor system (i.e. eraser cursor for the eraser, the option to toggle the fill cursor to crosshair and so on) but these are possibly overkill. Obviously the likes of Rebelle, Artrage and the rest have their own solutions.
I'll pop a note in the existing brush options thread toward this solution.
Peter

Thank you Ash - I was not aware of the V2 caps lock toggle and this is a game changer for me; as a result, I've just spent the last four hours noodling happily with Paolo's DAUB brush sets and rediscovering what a subtle brush engine Affinity has. We can basically tick this one as solved... superb!
Wants I think would be subtle enhancements: nobody I am sure wants to copycat other platforms, but CSP obviously has a pretty mature context cursor system (i.e. eraser cursor for the eraser, the option to toggle the fill cursor to crosshair and so on) but these are possibly overkill. Obviously the likes of Rebelle, Artrage and the rest have their own solutions.
I'll pop a note in the existing brush options thread toward this solution.
Peter

Thank you Ash - I was not aware of the V2 caps lock toggle and this is a game changer for me; as a result, I've just spent the last four hours noodling happily with Paolo's DAUB brush sets and rediscovering what a subtle brush engine Affinity has. We can basically tick this one as solved... superb!
Wants I think would be subtle enhancements: nobody I am sure wants to copycat other platforms, but CSP obviously has a pretty mature context cursor system (i.e. eraser cursor for the eraser, the option to toggle the fill cursor to crosshair and so on) but these are possibly overkill. Obviously the likes of Rebelle, Artrage and the rest have their own solutions.
I'll pop a note in the existing brush options thread toward this solution.
Peter

Absolutely agree on every point. For me, all Affinity need do is clone CSP's brush dialogue and we would be there so everyone is happy, but even after years we are still no closer. I genuinely do not know how anyone approaches painting/sketching in AD/AP with such fundamental issues (the brush 'resize and unhighlight the brush you are using' is another corker) and it is incredibly frustrating, as is the basic silence from Affinity. This, apparently, is their modus operandi and to some extent understandable - no developer has the time to comment on every feature request/bug report - but after all these years it starts to feel a lot like arrogance.
Of course, over time CSP have ramped up their own vector tools and you feel they could make serious inroads into this market if they had a mind, just as they have started to mop up on PS's space for illustration now. I can't imagine Procreate aren't looking at the vector space too.
Anyway, all very interesting - I don't use an iPad and your comments have answered some questions I've had there. The most galling thing around Affinity is their focus on everything else but this, from focus on Publisher to their 600k object layers... effectively absolutely anything rather than address very legitimate feature requests going back to 2016 or so.

I agree Serif has every right to include or exclude features based on their plans and priorities, but they are also beholden to their customers or else they will fail to exist. Serif risks their product being viewed as an amateur alternative if universally understood expectations for professional software are not met sooner than later.
Everyone feels their tool preferences are "essential" and I know not everyone agrees on what is truly necessary to make Affinity products stand on their own.
I think many would agree with my perspective, that properly functioning boolean operations, true vector brushes and text warp are a few examples of basic necessities for a wide majority of designers.
How can anyone create professional designs if the boolean operations create dirty geometry and parts go missing? How limiting is it that only raster brushes can be unique? Why has text warp been available in Photo but not Designer for years?
I'm excited about the little new features like being able to port your brushes to any installed version of the apps on different devices automatically... that is cool - but it feels like we're getting excited about new fancy rims on a car and ignoring the fact that we've never installed brakes. I'd rather a car with brakes and the other essentials over one that has fancy rims and no brakes.....
Yeah the car looks nice with the new rims, but it can never leave the driveway safely... I'd much rather we get the car drive-able first and then worry about making it look flashy.
I'm using an outdated version of Adobe CS6 Illustrator to do my vector work.... I have to paste anything i do in Designer over to Illustrator to merge vectors so they are not a mess. I rely on Illustrator or Vectorstyler to make blends and make text warps. If I want to fill in sections of negative space in a design, I have to also paste it in illustrator to do a live fill or use a blob tool or use the merge tool with a fill behind the negative space to cookie-cutter it. I care WAY more about basic function than I do about the bells and whistles.
 

It's probably not the most elegant solution, but it definitely works (AD for Windows).
p

I don't have an iPad, but I click on the Add boolean operation and it closes the shape.
Best regards!

Are you referring to the iPad version, Renderluz? Sadly (within Windows at any rate) the accursed 'outline' is very much a permanent issue, as the (many) comments above attest, going back years and years. Just a sad joke now.

Mark, is there any timeline around solving the brush highlights issue as reported in the thread 'What Brush am I Using'...
(this thread beginning in December 2016) 
...and the GUI problems as reported in the thread ' preferences: add option to remove/hide brush outline'?
(this thread beginning December 2017)
As I see it, neither issue has been addressed at all and cumulatively all I think are ground zero hindrances to artists who would be looking to make the switch to AD and/or AP from CSP, Painter and the rest - a huge market. The 'sneak peak' of https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JnfxzknVK_0 is interesting and welcome, but as ever with so much of Affinity development, handling 600k object layers feels so much like an eccentric edge case in comparison to basic GUI problems that make the apps hugely unusable if you are a digital painter.

1.10 feels like a milestone release but it is crushing to try out the beta and find all of these conditions as they were five years ago.
With thanks,
Peter  
 

I agree, I truly hope the next update can be a major bug fixing release of many of these long standing bugs open for years.
Fixing many of these bugs would be the equivalent of adding new features since some of these bugs simply prevent you from using Affinity in the ways you would like.  I think the vector brush gap bug on closed curves has been there since initial release.  Because of that, I simply can't use vector brushes in many cases where I might would otherwise for interesting effects.

Mark, is there any timeline around solving the brush highlights issue as reported in the thread 'What Brush am I Using'...
(this thread beginning in December 2016) 
...and the GUI problems as reported in the thread ' preferences: add option to remove/hide brush outline'?
(this thread beginning December 2017)
As I see it, neither issue has been addressed at all and cumulatively all I think are ground zero hindrances to artists who would be looking to make the switch to AD and/or AP from CSP, Painter and the rest - a huge market. The 'sneak peak' of https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JnfxzknVK_0 is interesting and welcome, but as ever with so much of Affinity development, handling 600k object layers feels so much like an eccentric edge case in comparison to basic GUI problems that make the apps hugely unusable if you are a digital painter.

1.10 feels like a milestone release but it is crushing to try out the beta and find all of these conditions as they were five years ago.
With thanks,
Peter  
 

Add your lament in those threads... Affinity apps are the only ones that stop the link between the used brush each time you modify a setting while working, as if we should always use brushes without adapting them to our need (width, opacity, etc.).
That's particulary annoying when you're used to apps remembering the last selected brush, or showing a panel of last used brushes, or permitting a panel of favorite brushes, etc.
 
etc.
The fatidious workaround would be to create a category by document and add the brushes you used in it... or always using the same brush, or a limited amount of them, so you can easily distinguish and remember them. Circle, rectangle, triangle. Keep simple.

Everything here at 
Tl;dr is a standard cursor suite and the ability to completely switch off the brush outline Changing brush size to not visually deselect the active brush (i.e. currently no idea which brush is active once you amend size) I genuinely feel the addition of these three elements would be a game changer for anyone who wants to use AD/AP for natural media art. 
Thank you
Peter

Indeed the first post on this was by Paulo Limoncelli back in October 2016: if Affinity can ignore Paulo, I guess they can ignore anyone. It's really baffling 🙄
 

So, a few months on, I've checked out AD to see if any of the issues listed above have been addressed over recent updates. 
Cursors - as noted above in my post from March 11, 2018(!), a basic overhaul of the brush cursor function please so it is usable for freehand painting. On the whole, it looks like for most brushes we've at least lost the intrusive brush outline, but success seems random and occasionally the cursor flips back to a standard windows arrow. There doesn't seem to have been any real work at all on this, which seems disappointing. By now, I would think we would be moving toward a standard PS/CSP dialogue for cursor control, as suggested above. Brush Library - changing variables on the selected brush (i.e. size) still means the blue brush selection box is turned off, so you have no idea which brush is currently selected. This feels like basic stuff. Brush Size Dialogue - still very crude. You can just about change size via the slider, but using a keyboard shortcut throws in weird variables rather than standard increments by 5 or 10 or whatever. The package is also in dire need of a PS/CSP brush size shortcut window, with preset sizes you can quickly select.  All very odd - certainly the big 1.7 update brought some key improvements, but I'm still a bit baffled/frustrated why some of the key bits someone like me would look for are so unloved. We have this big, gorgeous brush engine but I still can't drive it!

Without wishing to sound the pessimist, this 'feature' request goes back at least three years and like a number of other utterly basic artist-specific issues in AD and AP (such as Affinity remembering which brush you are using after changing the state of the brush and size increments to the nearest whole number, rather than bonkers 4.9, 9.7, 15.6 and so on) it has been ignored. I've long since given up on Affinity as a tool, and as I've described in previous posts they certainly lost business in me being able to recommend Affinity to my company's design team. Although I can conceive of people using Designer for standard vector tasks, it's beyond me how anyone can use it for digital painting given the problems with the interface.
It's a shame as the brush engine is actually really nice: although it doesn't have the real world dynamics of some packages, it's in the same kind of league as CSP. The world is crying out for an all-in-one vector/bitmap solution for artists, but ironically you feel CSP is starting to move into the vector space more and more and of course their tools for drawing are incredibly mature now. Even Krita has come on pretty strongly in the same period but - for the artist - Affinity has been stuck, aside from some stability improvements and the excellent isometric grid options.
However, I am absolutely certain that this, like every other post on this subject, will remain ignored. This isn't even a goad to prompt the team: it's just a statement of rather sad fact. 

Definitely a must...!

Bumping this, as it's still the principle reason I don't use Affinity Designer/Photo for illustration. It seems a curious omission to me - I can't think of any other design app that doesn't cover at least a rudimentary set of alternative cursors, and some of course offer a sweep of alternatives, i.e.:

(Rebelle 2)

(Clip Studio Paint)
Certainly software like Painter has offered an extensive cursor dialogue for a couple of decades by now. Is this something isolated to only the Windows version?

Yes, very much second this as I've posted elsewhere in the forum, my posts getting a bit muddied around the terminology of brush 'preview' vs. 'outline'. To add one further suggestion to ToreB's spot-on list, perhaps an option to control the opacity of the outline might be useful for anyone who uses the outline as part of their workflow.
And a happy new year to the Affinity team.

I agree on the need for a brush manager. If the three programs are integrated with one another, then brushes could be in a central location of some kind, with a separation for Vector and Raster Brushes. If one of the programs cannot use both kinds, then it should be restricted to see only those it can use, with a quick message with regard to the reason that a certain brush or kind of brush will not open.

So, a few months on, I've checked out AD to see if any of the issues listed above have been addressed over recent updates. 
Cursors - as noted above in my post from March 11, 2018(!), a basic overhaul of the brush cursor function please so it is usable for freehand painting. On the whole, it looks like for most brushes we've at least lost the intrusive brush outline, but success seems random and occasionally the cursor flips back to a standard windows arrow. There doesn't seem to have been any real work at all on this, which seems disappointing. By now, I would think we would be moving toward a standard PS/CSP dialogue for cursor control, as suggested above. Brush Library - changing variables on the selected brush (i.e. size) still means the blue brush selection box is turned off, so you have no idea which brush is currently selected. This feels like basic stuff. Brush Size Dialogue - still very crude. You can just about change size via the slider, but using a keyboard shortcut throws in weird variables rather than standard increments by 5 or 10 or whatever. The package is also in dire need of a PS/CSP brush size shortcut window, with preset sizes you can quickly select.  All very odd - certainly the big 1.7 update brought some key improvements, but I'm still a bit baffled/frustrated why some of the key bits someone like me would look for are so unloved. We have this big, gorgeous brush engine but I still can't drive it!

Yes, I work closely with a team of devs and I'm pretty acquainted with the pressures and timescales of software development. That said, I do find the Affinity team's position on this flaw really pretty odd, with a blanket refusal it seems to even comment or give projection I just don't think I've encountered in another small developer. It is pretty dismissive, and if it wasn't for the vector potential of Design (and the absence of good vector packages on Windows) I honestly don't think I would be pursuing any of this. 
As it is, the lack of communication from Affinity betrays a strange arrogance. Their obsession with their iPad presence really starts to grate when a fundamental usability issue continues to roll on, unaddressed, for month after month. I cannot confidently recommend Affinity to my studio team when this is the customer experience, a team happy on their Macs and their Adobe product. Software is not just the platform, it is the totality: it is the understanding you are cared for. What we are all suggesting will help open Affinity up to an even broader market, but for some perverse reason they seem pretty bent on breeding resentment, in at least one of their customers: not the greatest business model in the wafer-thin opportunity outside of the Adobe space.

Good to see this getting some support... let's hope the Affinity gang tune in. Both applications could be killer on the natural media front if they only acknowledged this weird oversight!

Are you guys thinking of a hard bound Publisher book to complete the trio?

Bitmaps along paths seem to be working perfectly: fantastic. Can't wait to dig in further.