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I'm confused. In the Goggle Chrome browser on your PC, do you have a single-purpose Search bar or not? In the Mac version on my Mac, there is just the one dual purpose one.

Thanks for that info about the default for Edge -- I have no way of testing it on a Mac. But I assume the Windows version of Chrome works the same as the Mac version, so if you enter a URL (like for example "apple.com") in its dual purpose location bar & press return, does it open https://www.apple.com/ or whatever, or do something else?

FWIW, the Mac Help window can be reduced to an icon on the Dock using the yellow 'traffic light' window control button at the top of the window, much like any other window. It can also be resized. The only unusual thing about it is it can 'float' on top of all other windows. This once was the default behavior (& may still be) but there is a Terminal command that can be used to change that between a floating & regular window, as explained here.

As a Mac user I don't know anything about Edge but in every browser I have used (including Chrome, Firefox, Opera, & Safari) if you just type a complete URL into the top bar & press return (or a 'load page' or 'go' button if provided), the browser opens the address the URL points to. Also, most web browsers offer a choice of search engines like Google, Bing, Yahoo, or DuckDuckGo that may affect the search results, but that should not make any difference if a valid web address URL is entered into the address bar. I think the bigger, more prominent search bar the OP is referring to might be the search field on a web page for Google or Bing or the like set as the browser's 'home page' that the browser opens by default.

What browser version & OS are you using? Most browsers these days have a combined address/search bar, so if you type in a complete URL & press return they open the URL, even if they have a drop down list of suggested search results.

Not that it will make your search for the perfect generator any easier, but you might find this interview with Jon Ferraiolo of interest, particularly his answer to the "Why is the SVG spec so enormous?" question.

First, iOS is the operating system for iPhones & iPads. Macs run macOS. Second, all versions of the Affinity software are 64 bit apps, so there is no reason you should be getting a 'not optimized' warning. To verify that Affinity Photo is being recognized as a 64 bit app, follow the instructions in the last section of this Apple article, titled "How do I check if an app is 32-bit or 64-bit?"

Just FYI, the Affinity software is based on an entirely new code base, designed from the ground up for high memory efficiency & cross-platform Mac & Windows compatibility.

FWIW, It might be better to change the "forum" tag to something less generic like "affinity forum tutorials" because some people use Google, Bing, or similar search engines to find content, sometimes with a "site: forum.affinity.serif.com" modifier to restrict the results to this site. That is because this site's built-in search engine is fairly dumb compared to their 'smart' search algorithms, which makes it more likely your topic will place near the top of those search results.

There is a 'Hide Selection while Dragging' button on the context toolbar (looks like an eye) when using the Move Tool, but that just hides the bounding box temporarily when moving or resizing an object.

To be a bit picky about it, you did not add any tags to this topic. I think you might be referring to your signature, where you list your OS, some apps, & such. Is that right? It is always helpful to include that kind of info in a sig, but since it will appear in every post you make (& optionally can be hidden by people using the forums), it does not serve quite the same purpose as tags. Only the OP can add tags to a topic. Since you started this one, you should see a small "+ Add Tag" button just below the title of this topic, but other users won't see it because it isn't their topic to tag. Like @Patrick Connor mentioned, currently we have free tagging -- you can add as many tags as you want & they can be anything. Since tags are optional & overly generic ones are not very useful, some users don't tag their topics at all. Sometimes, no tag is added because the topic itself is considered to be generic, or just because the OP can't think of any good ones. Not much anybody can do about that as long as we have free tagging. One thing some users do that you probably would find helpful is to add a prefix to their topic titles, like [AD] or [Mac] so others can tell at a glance the platform or app the topic is about.

Also power duplicate & the align & distribute options.

I am just trying to make sense of all the comments & what they are intended to apply to. Since by the third or forth post this topic had expanded to cover considerably more than the titular question, it has become increasingly difficult to match comments with who they are intended for. After all, early on the OP raised the issue of why context items were not simply greyed out rather than hidden. That in turn lead to a discussion of the different display modes, the difficulty of customizing the context toolbar to individual preferences, & so on. As a regular contributor to these forums, you know this sort of topic broadening is not unusual, & that some users find it beneficial because they learn useful things they otherwise would not.

You are correct in assuming that the workbook is not intended to teach you all that a traditional user guide would. It assumes a basic familiarity with the tools & techniques, & says so in one of the opening chapters. There is no user guide as such provided with the app. However, the built-in help topics cover most things reasonably well, so that is a good place to start if you are new to the app. If you get stuck on something you can't figure out, posting a question about it in this forum will usually result in a number of replies from users and/or staff that offer as much help as you might need, up to & including short videos, example files you can download, & even letting you know when some other app might be a better choice for whatever you want to do.

"Text Convert to Curves" comes from the title of this topic -- Walt did not throw that in. If it should be in the Text menu at all, or how it should be labeled if it is, is a different issue, one of several this topic now includes.

It may seem at least a little less bizarre if you consider that there is quite a lot that applies to all the Affinity desktop apps. For some features, the only difference between the Windows & Mac versions are the keyboard shortcuts. All the apps offer the same Shapes & Pen tools; the same Transform, History, Snapshot, & a few other Studio panels; many of the same UI customization options; & so on. Also, because Photo & Designer share a common native file format & documents created in either app can be edited in the other one without conversion, it is possible to open an afphoto file created in Photo in Designer & edit it, including editing live filters that can't be created in Designer. It even preserves the history if the "Save History With Document" feature is enabled. You can try this for yourself with this very simple Ripple.afphoto file -- you should have no problems opening it with Designer. So this pretty much means that if all the forums were separate & users just followed or contributed to one or a few of them, they would be missing out on a lot of useful info.

Why should it be anywhere in the Text menu? It is a conversion that can be applied to any applicable layer type, whether text or not. I think is probably why they decided to put it on the Layers menu, along with the other items applicable to various layer types.

What is better for this thread is a matter of opinion, but there is nothing specious about saying that there is not always going to be enough room to display everything one might like on the toolbars at the same time.

FWIW, I customized the main toolbar to always show the 4 button "Arrange" group & placed that group to the immediate right of the Personas & Enhancement button groups. That makes it very quick & easy to add a new Fill layer & move it to the back without having to move the pointer very far.

When @casterle said "There's room on the Text Tool toolbar..." in this post, from the context "always" seemed (at least to me) to be implied, possibly because narrower windows or displays were not being considered. I don't know if at the time that was a good assumption on my part or not but either way, it should be abundantly clear by now that I have no objection to the use of the ≫ button when there is not enough room for everything, that the 'convert to curves' feature is not missing in any Affinity app (beta or retail), that it can be invoked with a keyboard shortcut independently of what is available on the toolbar, & that what appears on the toolbars is subject to change in future versions.

FYI, in Mac documentation, symbols are customarily used instead of words to indicate modifier keys. See for example this blog post for a list of them (& a link to how the CMD key got its symbol). You may notice those symbols popping up in some video tutorials since most are done on Macs.

The ≫ button solution is not a problem for me, nor did I say it was. Again, I was just explaining why it is not safe to assume there will always be room on the toolbars (plural!) to display everything at once. I do not know how to make it any clearer than that.

The stroke, paragraph, & character context toolbar options are the same in the Affinity Publisher beta as in the Designer & Photo 1.7 ones.

No, in Separated Mode there is just one main & context toolbar, which can be positioned anywhere on the screen. Its width can be adjusted so that for example it can be made narrow enough that it does not overlap any floating Studio panels or tabbed panel groups. The position & sizes of the toolbars & panels are saved separately for separated & normal window modes. In neither mode are the toolbars attached to an image as such -- in normal window mode they are attached to the workspace window, which could be using the full screen application view or the windowed view mode. There is also a 'nearly full screen' view mode that leaves room for the main Mac menubar at the top of the screen & for the Mac Dock, which can be positioned system-wide at the bottom or either side of the screen, or hidden, with this 'nearly full screen' taking that into account. In addition, there are a few variations for multi-monitor support, & some of them are slightly different in different versions of the Mac OS. So basically, there are quite a few view options available on Macs, some with no direct Windows counterpart, that developers have to consider when designing cross-platform application UI's.

Have you noticed that in the 1.7 beta the stroke option is no longer on the Context toolbar when text objects are selected & that the paragraph & character buttons are now icons rather than words? I think this is intended to reduce the need for the ≫ button with narrower displays.