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The Tab key toggles the tools, toolbars, & Studio on & off. Are you maybe hitting that by mistake?

Are you using a beta version of Designer or the App Store version? If the App Store version, I am a little confused about why this is posted in the Beta forum... Anyway, opening the original in the current App Store version (1.4.1), I noticed that everything I checked in the breadboard group has neither stroke nor fill, which may explain why Designer omitted it.

You do not need to use any keys, modifier or otherwise, or click on anything. Just move the cursor onto any edge of the text bounding box & it will turn into a four way arrow, indicating that you can click & drag there to move the text frame around on the document. This is very similar to how it changes into a two headed arrow over the side & top handles or into a curved double-headed arrow over the rotate handle.

Documents created with the trial version can be opened with the purchased version.

From your screen shot, it looks like the layers are not groups -- if they were, you would see "(Group)" following each of their names in the Layers panel. So one way to delete Europe in the Countries layer would be to expand it, select Europe, & tap the delete key.

This is for AD but I think it applies to both: https://player.vimeo.com/video/120563699/

I don't know if this is documented somewhere -- I discovered it by accident -- but in AP the View > Customize Tools window has both the multi-tool flyout icons and the individual tools available. So if you find yourself using one or two of the flyout ones frequently, you can add them to the Tools palette as individual tools (no flyout delay required to access them). This can be a real timesaver for some workflows. The same is true for AD, but in a more limited way -- the individual shape tools are not available.

Without a screen shot as a reference, it is hard to understand what you mean but is this something other than the web page background color or pattern showing through?

From I can tell, that is normal. What makes it different from just dragging with the Move tool is that you can then select the Node tool, which reveals all the nodes in each object regardless of what group they are in. You can then selectively delete nodes in more than of them at a time by dragging a marquee (with the Node tool) around them & tapping the delete key. If you want to delete entire objects, you must select all their nodes. Since you are limited to rectangular selections, this may require doing this several different times with smaller marquees if some objects you do not want to delete overlap those that you do. It may help to temporarily lock or hide layers you do not want to delete, since that excludes them from drag selections, but that will require a trip to the layers panel. The control-click "Find In Layers Panel" will simplify that chore somewhat, but not completely.

I am another of that "tiny minority," but to be clear about it, my problem is the low contrast of the UI in places like the background that indicates if a tool or button is selected. This is a serious, eye-straining issue for me because I am nearly 70 years old & work on a 27" iMac, so these background squares are quite small & it is hard to see small changes in their contrast. They also take up a relatively small amount of the screen & are overlaid by colored icons, so the argument that they would throw off my color perception or 'burn out my eyes' if they were higher contrast simply does not apply. For that matter, the analogy to staring at the sun for black on white text is somewhat misleading because the sun is orders of magnitude brighter than a computer display. And with due respect for the differences in transmissive & reflective illumination, I have read millions of pages of books, all of which were set in black text, without experiencing any eye strain, but frequently experience it very quickly when reading text that does not contrast much with the background, whatever the color scheme or type of illumination. Another thing that should not be ignored is that the computer screen is only part of the visual environment. We don't (or at least should not) spend all our time staring at the screen, & whether we do or not the illumination, brightness, contrast, & color of other things in our field of view plays a significant part in what our eyes & brains have to cope with. I am sure that I am not the only one who sometimes runs a two monitor setup or needs to refer to other things besides the frontmost app, both on-screen & not. There are other things worth considering in what is quite literally the "big picture" view but as LillyG said it all comes down to choice is good.

Thanks for checking. Renaming the folder is much simpler than what I had in mind, which actually was to compress it into an in-place zip file. I will try this, keeping in mind that I may have to reinstall the app if problems develop.

Just so there is no confusion about it, you Control (or right) click to bring up the contextual menu, not Command-click.

Try this: With the move tool, click once on something in the group. That will show the bounding box surrounding all the grouped objects & select the group in the layers panel. Then double-click on the object you want to work with in the group, which should select it. If needed, do as crabtrem suggested & use the right-click contextual menu to select the Find in Layers Panel item, which will expand the group & select the object's layer in the Layer panel. EDIT: Actually, you don't have to do the first click to select the group with this method -- just double-clicking on the grouped object should select it. I like this method because it can be done with one hand just using the mouse. Also, double-clicking on a selected shape object with the move tool will switch to the node tool, another one handed shortcut I like using.

For what little it's worth, the "Toolbar" naming convention is one you will find used in many OS X apps, including some of Apple's own like Preview & Safari. So for instance, if you are using Safari to read this, control-click on the top section of the window (the toolbar) & you will see the "Customize Toolbar..." option pop up. In general, toolbars contain buttons that perform some immediate action, although there also are some that activate dropdown menus. Collections of tool icons are sometimes called "tool palettes" to distinguish them from toolbars. If that was not confusing enough, we now have other window-spanning bars with different names & purposes. For example, Safari has the Favorites bar, the status bar, & the sidebar; & Affinity has the Contextual toolbar. iTunes has ... well, a bunch of stuff, some of which doesn't even seem to have a name.

That's my guess for why the previews often do not show up. That can be set on a per folder basis in the View Options window, which can be opened with the keyboard shortcut Command + J, from the Finder View menu item, or from the Action icon in the Finder toolbar if it is enabled.

I don't know if this will help, but in the Export window, after clicking on the EPS icon click on the "More" button & make sure the "Embed metadata" item is checked. I do not know if this embeds icc profiles in EPS documents -- I tried reading pp 72-74 of this tome to find out more about that, but it is waaaay above my head. Note: any resemblance between me & the experts is purely coincidental!

I have been using a variation of Asha's technique for this. I first draw a white-filled, no stroke rectangle sized to the desired ratio. (I find it easiest to do the ratio sizing with the transform panel's width & height adjustments, optionally using expressions like W*2/3 in the height adjustment to set the ratio.) I position that over the image & drag it to the desired size by grabbing a corner handle with the move tool (it resizes proportionally by default), & reposition it as needed. Then I use the Layer > Rasterize to Mask item to turn it into a mask. I drag that into the image layer's thumbnail if I want only the image layer to be masked, or just put it above the layer(s) I want it to affect if I want some other layers not to be masked.

For me, it isn't so much that the Affinity arrow tool is primitive as that it combines too many options into one tool, all of which need to be set every time it is used, making it cumbersome & time consuming for creating arrow shapes, particularly ones with curved shafts. That requires conversion to curves & adding at least two nodes somewhere on opposite sides of the shaft, & dragging the various nodes around to get the desired effect. For that, I would prefer a tool that treated the shaft as a single stroke to which we could add nodes, but still retain the ability to edit the shape of the arrowhead like with the current tool.

Of course there is. One is an unchanging property of a physical object that is the same for everyone. The other is not. I don't think it has been mentioned in this topic but the "Affinity Photo - Understanding DPI" video tutorial emphasizes that dpi is a physical property of prints which when changed (without resampling) has absolutely no effect on the appearance of a digital image, its file size, or its pixel resolution. Regarding the physical pixels of a monitor, they are not the same thing as the dots of ink, toner, or dye on a piece of paper or other physical media. They have different properties because they are created by different physical processes that among other things do not use the same method to create perceptible color or intensity (one is transmissive & the other is reflective). Because they are physically different, no measurement based on one is directly equivalent to a measurement based on the other -- it will always be an "apples to oranges" comparison that can only be stretched so far & retain any useful meaning.

PNG is an extensible raster image file format. Like every other pure raster image format (jpeg, tiff, gif, etc.) it can't display smooth vector shapes as anything other than as pixels on a grid, which means you will always get that stair stepped, anti-aliased effect you don't like. You can minimize that by using a grid with more pixels (higher resolution), but you can't can't completely eliminate it -- it is an inherent property of all raster image formats. As Hokusai said, you can use a file format like .svg (or .eps, illustrator's native .ai, or Affinity's native .afphoto & .afdesign file formats) that do not rasterize vector graphics, but as long as you store your work in any of the raster formats you will see this effect.

markw, Thanks for educating me about the File > Share > Add to Photos option in Affinity. I had not noticed it until you mentioned it. Like you say, it doesn't import camera info or appear in the "Last Import" album. As for why it strips the camera info I'm just guessing but assuming the File menu share options are provided by an OS X API, it could be that all of them use the same format. If so, since including some camera info for Mail, Messages, Facebook, etc. sharing could be considered undesirable from a privacy standpoint, Apple decided to remove all of it for that reason. I also noticed that native .afphoto files are brought into Photos as jpegs, even new ones that have not yet been saved & have nothing in them besides a shape like a rectangle that has not been rasterized. I have only tested this with a few files, so this may not always be what it does, but it seems like the menu share options are intended only for quick exports with "lowest common denominator" settings, so to speak. Regarding Photos vs. iPhoto, as I understand it Apple focused on eliminating some of the shortcomings of iPhoto, among them being its poor performance with very large libraries (but I'm not sure Photos in its current state is actually that much better at that). Another is iPhoto's massive use of file space for its supporting files, which because it uses some very old & inefficient Apple API's to support older OS X versions, are not easily shared with other apps & greatly complicate implementing Apple's latest "sandbox" security model used in recent OS X versions. And of course, for better or worse Photos was designed from the ground up to support its iCloud sharing service. Or if you prefer, the short, tl;dr version: iPhoto relies on a lot of legacy API's Apple no longer wants to support, so whatever its merits it got the ax.

This has all been covered in other topics. Photos are not "shared" from AP to Apple Photos. They can be imported into Photos' libraries by exporting them from AP in one of the formats Photos can use, but that is not the same thing as sharing. AP has options to include metadata in the exports or not, & it varies depending on the export format. Likewise, where the photos are stored in Apple's Photos app varies depending on its settings, either in its libraries or as referenced photos stored outside those libraries in some other location(s). Typically both the libraries & the other locations are in the user's Pictures folder, but either or both could be located somewhere else, including on external drives.

Apple's Photos app preserves any standard Exif or IPTC metadata included in the files sent to its libraries, but it does not include that in the "shared" albums you may see in that app's sidebar. This is to preserve the privacy of the sharers, something Apple is very serious about these days.

Like the link says, some digital file formats record a DPI value, but some do not. And even when they do, it just indicates the intended size of the image. But as we all know, OS X & Windows both allow us to override that when printing by scaling the print to a different size, printing multiple copies to one page, & so on. Regardless, the point I'm trying to make is that the dpi of a print is a physical measurement that doesn't change once the file is printed. The way we normally use ppi for screen images is as a virtual measurement that has no fixed relationship to the pixels of the screen or to the dpi of a printed page. For example, we can resize the image non-distructively by stretching or shrinking it, which does not change its pixel count, or destructively by resampling it, which does. The application software or the rendering library of the OS may display the bitmap of an image file differently at different on-screen sizes using interpolation, dithering, or anti-aliasing algorithms to alter the relationship between the bitmap & its on-screen pixel representation. And of course, files may also contain vector objects & text that have no fixed bitmap representation to begin with. So basically, when we talk about "the pixels of an image," or its dpi or ppi measurements, we could be talking about any of several things, all related but not quite the same thing. It should not be surprising that this so often causes confusion, even for experienced professionals.

Which is yet another reason this is so complicated. It isn't complete but https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dots_per_inchhas a reasonably concise description of the differences between dpi & ppi as measurement units for different devices.