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Which developers did this & what does "for older OS" mean? As I understand it, Photoshop just added support for the HEIC format less than two months ago, & import is only available on Macs running macOS 10.13 High Sierra, which is the most recent macOS version.

What menu items? You attached an .afdesgn file, which by default opens in Affinity Designer. There is no Document menu in Affinity Designer, only in Affinity Photo. Which app are you using? If you are using AD, you can select all from the Select menu & then rotate the canvas with the Layer menu > Transform > Rotate Left (or Rotate Right) item. You will need to resize the canvas, easily done with the File > Document Setup > Dimensions tab by selecting "Anchor to Page," setting the anchor point to the center one, & unchecking the Portrait checkbox. I'm not sure where the text you mentioned in your first post comes into it, but to fill in the squares, you will need to join the 8 lines of each of them individually to create curves. That is going to be very tedious so an alternative is to do that for one square & then use power duplicate & snapping to create the rest of them, & then delete the jillion lines you no longer need. Attached is V1700196 copy rotated.afdesign I made using this method, plus a symbol for the larger rectangular strips.

Live Filters & Adjustments are implemented as layers so they are non-destructive, but everything on the Filters menu is applied directly to the selected pixel layer(s) so they are destructive.

At least on Macs & I assume similarly on Windows, all the application palettes are stored in a single per user binary encoded "fills.propcol" file, not as individual files. So while you can export individual palettes to .afpalette files for portability, you do not have to do that, nor does adding application palettes have much of an impact on file space requirements. Why? As I said, each application palette can have its own distinctive name, so there should be no confusion about that. I suppose if you have a great many clients, each with one or more standard palettes, it could be inconvenient to have to sort through a huge list, but I think for that a better solution would be a new category/subcategory organizational feature, similar to Affinity Designer's Assets one.

Is the file extension actually ".afdesigner" or just ".afdesign"?

Perhaps so, but the item I inserted in the post is the "Much Greater Than" character, Unicode U+2268. The symbols used in the Mac app versions for the button are tiny anti-aliased png files named "morebutton," "morebutton@2x," etc., not actually a Unicode or any other typographic character.

You can also click on your name at the top of the page, next to the 'Sign Out' button. That takes you to the same page as clicking on the "My Account" link at the bottom of the page.

In either app the vector objects remain vector objects. It is just that in Affinity Photo, they are displayed in rasterized form.

With the Clone Tool selected, the last item on the context toolbar is Flip: You may not see it if your window is not large enough to display all the context toolbar items, but if so there will be a chevron ≫ at the right edge that when clicked pops up the other items in a submenu.

The organization of the built-in help topics & the somewhat iffy search function makes it difficult & time consuming to find info about some features, or even to know if there is any info about them included in the topics. Back when paper manuals were the norm, it was customary to include a section that listed the function of each item in the app's menus, organized by the menubar item they appeared in. I would like to see the same thing in the built-in help, so for example in Affinity Photo there would be an 'Edit menu' entry that listed each item that appears in the Edit menu with either a brief description of its function or a link to another help topic that explained what it did in more detail. For some items, like "Copy Merged" or "Inpaint" I think this would not only make the help easier to use but would make it evident to the people who write the help topics where there is insufficient, nonexistent, or too difficult to find coverage of a topic.

@ronnyb I like your first & third suggestions very much. I am not so sure about the second one, mostly because I think it would be easy to lose track of which documents used (or even had) a particular document palette. For palettes I intend to use in more than one document, I save them as application palettes & give them a descriptive name. That way, there is no need for a separate window to sort through what could be hundreds of different files in different folders, & it minimizes confusion about what the palette is for. Does this not work for you?

For what it is worth, the Mac OS allows name changes in Finder for files open in Affinity Designer or Affinity Photo & the name change will be updated in the Affinity app. However, moving a file to the trash in Finder causes Affinity to pop up a notice that the file must close:

Click on your "license" tag at the top of this page (just under the topic title) & you will find many other similarly tagged topics that explain this in detail.

1. There is no Copy Merged in Affinity Designer, only in Affinity Photo. 2. Copy Merged does what the name implies: everything in all visible layers within the active selection are placed on the clipboard as a single merged pixel selection. It does not matter which (if any) layers are selected or if "Edit all layers" is enabled or not, & any part of vector objects within the active selection will be rasterized into the merged pixel selection along with everything else. It does not just target an image or any other layer.

Do you mean to another copy of Affinity Photo on another computer or to another user account on one computer? If so, I don't think that is officially supported, but it might be possible by copying the adjustments.propcol file (or whatever the equivalent for Windows might be) from one user instance to another.

??? Several techniques mentioned in the Cutting Out video are non-destructive. James Ritson even uses the word "non-destructively" at about the 1:17 mark.

Thanks, but I am already familiar with the purpose testing cycles -- how smart I am about that is a different subject I prefer not to dwell on. Anyway, as your first link (with its interesting typo!) makes clear, outside alpha testers must be willing & able to provide detailed technical feedback during what could be numerous test cycles before a product reaches beta stage; & to do so with incomplete documentation, missing features, & plenty of crashes. Finding qualified outside testers is not easy & retaining them for the duration is harder still. For products that include proprietary technology, NDA's & other legal protections are the norm & further limit the pool of suitable testers. That takes me back to my question about if or when alpha testing of APub by end users might actually be valuable, & to whom. I doubt anybody outside Serif is qualified to answer that. They do not seem very keen on the idea. I assume they have good reasons for that.

Vector objects are usually defined geometrically as one continuous path. It is not possible to do that with multiple, unconnected paths so to create cutouts in a closed path some kind of compound object is required. In Affinity, boolean geometric operations usually create "(Curves)" (note the plural) objects in the Layers panel, or with the alt/option key held down during creation, "(Compound)" ones. The primary benefits of using marching ants selections for making cutouts from raster images are to enable making selections based on pixel properties instead of tediously drawing hard edged vector paths, & to use algorithms to refine edges so they blend into other raster images without jagged edges.

Do you really want to save a vector path for this or just the "marching ants" selection normally used for cutting out, masking, copying, etc.? If the latter, you can select the mask layer & from the Select menu use "Selection from Layer" to get the "marching ants" selection back again & refine it or reuse it as is. You can also save the selection to a spare channel or to a separate file.

In Preferences > User Interface, make sure "Monochromatic Iconography" is unchecked.

By using the Pen Tool you are creating vector shapes (curves). It isn't impossible to use them for cutting out parts of an image but it is much easier to use the selection tools for that. The Affinity Photo - Cutting Out video tutorial show how that works. You can do this using the boolean ("Geometry") choices.

Just sign in at https://affinity.store/ then click on your name at the top of the page. Click on the Downloads & Product Keys icon that appears & you should be taken to a page with the download links. The name of the file is correct. It contains a single macro of about 4 KB in a macros category wrapper.

What OS (Mac or Windows) are you using? What is the version number of your Affinity Designer?

Nope. It is also a question of what an out-of-company chain of testing reveals to competitors about products in development, the expectations created about features & functions that might not make it into beta or final release versions for one reason or another, the company resources required to manage & evaluate feedback, resolving/observing any licensing conditions for third party code that might be considered for incorporation into the app, not making things easy for patent trolls, & so on.

Of course. But my question is what situation(s) might there be where alpha testing of APub by end users actually would be valuable? If there are, what would be the value to end users or to Serif? The Affinity apps are not open source software. They rely heavily on closed source, proprietary code. For what should be obvious reasons the developers are not going to open that up to public scrutiny. So I do not understand what the users asking for access to an alpha version expect to gain by that.