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It would help to know if you are using the Mac or Windows version of Photo, & what camera is producing the NEF files. RAW file support is per camera model, not per RAW file type (like NEF) because different camera models from the same maker (like Nikon) may use different RAW formats, all identified with the same 'umbrella' format name & file extension (like .nef).

Christmas is now almost a year away. Hopefully, we will see the beta long before then. ;)

Adding slightly to what Lee said, on a Mac the default keyboard shortcut for showing/hiding the Toolbar is Option-Command-T (⌥⌘T). The Tab key will toggle on & off the entire UI (Studio, Tool panel, etc.), leaving only the workspace visible. You probably hit one of these shortcuts by mistake. If you think you will never want to use these keyboard shortcuts, or use them for something else, you can delete them from Preferences > Keyboard Shortcuts > [persona] > View, where "[persona]" is the applicable Affinity Persona. They will still be available from the View menu, just not trigger-able from the keyboard.

From what I can tell, all Chip.de offers for download are either old, out of date 10 day trial versions for Mac or old, expired public beta versions for Windows from their own servers. I don't know anything about Chip.de but I doubt Serif/Affinity has authorized this. In general I suggest avoiding this kind of third party download site because an increasing number of them want you to use their 'special' downloaders that include other potentially unwanted programs ("PUP's") as a dubious 'bonus' for using their site. Instead, I strongly suggest downloading these things only from a trusted source like the developer's own site, for example through https://affinity.serif.com/ Currently, there are no trial versions for Windows available, but they have promised that they will be available in the first few weeks of 2017. There is a Mac trial version for Designer (U.S. sign up link is https://affinity.serif.com/en-us/signup/trial/designer/) but I believe the current Mac Photo version is also not yet quite ready for downloading.

There should be four 'slides' on the left of the Mac Welcome screen, that show in sequence a 'See what's new in 1.5.4,' a promo for the Designer Book, a link for getting the Grade UI, & a promo for Photo 1.5 slide. There should be a row of four dots at the bottom indicating which slide is shown & "<" & ">" buttons on the left & right sides of the slide to manually move among them. Some users have reported that the Grade UI slide does not appear if a firewall or a privacy blocker like Little Snitch prevents the app from "phoning home" -- perhaps that is what is happening for you?

In View > Studio is there a checkmark next to Assets (and/or Constraints, Symbols, etc.)? If so, it means the panel is open somewhere, either as a floating (detached) window or 'docked' somewhere in the Studio, either in its own section or as a tab in a panel group. There can be both left & right Studio panels, so make sure neither is set to hidden (at the bottom of the View > Studio menu items). The individual panels of tab groups can sometimes be hard to see because their names may be abbreviated to just a few letters to fit all the tabs into the group, so look carefully in any crowded tab groups to see if the missing ones might be there. If none of this helps, the last item on the View > Studio menu, "Reset Studio," may, although be aware that will reset all Studio panels to factory defaults & you may have to re-enable any that don't initially appear. If even that doesn't help, you may need to reset the app by holding down the CMD key (Mac) when you launch the app & reverting everything to factory defaults by checking all the boxes in the 'Clear User Data' window that pops up, but this will set everything to factory defaults, so do this only as a last resort.

I don't understand why you expect there to be a "same color" after you have applied a gradient to an object's fill. The gradient replaces the solid color; it isn't an overlay or mask or anything like that. If you use the Fill tool to change the fill type from solid to linear, radial, etc. & then change it back to solid, this will change the color to the first of the gradient's endpoint stop colors. If you leave the object filled with the gradient and one of its endpoint or an added intermediate stop color is the original solid color, you could select that color stop with the Fill tool active & then in the Color or Swatches Studio panel drag the eyedropper in that panel onto that panel's large color circle to copy it to the small color sample circle at the right of the eyedropper icon. Then you could use that sample in the usual way to set the fill of another object to that color. Otherwise, as has already been suggested, create a document or application Swatches palette for your project & add all your solid colors to it.

This topic explains in detail how to get the resources. Note in particular Patrick Connor's reply.

Answered in your near duplicate topic here.

From the Affinity Photo help topic "Cropping and straightening" (emphasis added): In other words, because the Affinity apps are designed to be non-destructiove wherever possible, it is working as intended. To crop destructively, you can rasterize the layer(s) after applying the crop, or just leave things as they are & export a destructively cropped version of the document.

Customer beta versions for each product (Mac & Windows, AD & AP) are available from links in the first posts in the respective sub-forums of the Affinity Beta Support forums.

All I can tell you is it works fine for me. However, I did leave out a step between 5 & 6, which is to deselect the now named layer -- just pressing Return only sets the name & adds the "Set description" step to the macro. Deselecting it is a separate step but either way, "Set description" is added to the macro. Which app version & platform (Mac or Windows) are you using? That might explain the difference.

So what would you want to happen if you run that kind of macro on a document that does not have a layer named "sky"? EDIT: Try this: 1. Open a new document. (It will have no layers.) 2. In the Macro panel, click Record. 3. From the Layers panel or Layer menu, add a new layer. 4. In the Layers panel, click on the new layer in the text area & give it a name. 5. Press Return to deselect it. 6. Click on the layer again in the layers panel to select it. Steps 1-5 should be recorded with no problems. At Step 6 you should get a popup giving you a choice of what to select, one of which should be the layer by the name you just gave it. Does that all happen? If not, what does?

Did you try to set the description of some other layer besides the one that was selected when the macro started? I don't think you can do that for the same reason you can't set the current selection to anything other than the one already selected when you start recording the macro: since there could be any number of layers when you play a macro, there is no way for it to know which of them to select.

If you mean the embedded EXIF date metadata, for the export formats that support that, there is the "Embed metadata" setting in the "More" section of the Export dialog that does that. If you mean the file's date-time info (like creation or modification date) then no, Affinity Photo has no control over that. That info is maintained by the OS & stored separately in the file system. Since that info is needed for things like determining when files need to be backed up or what the most recent version is, & its format is dependent on the type of file system in use, in general the OS should be allowed to update it as needed.

One of the fundamental differences between the two operating systems is Macs have an (almost) always present menu bar at the top of the screen that does not belong to any one application. It has no direct counterpart in Windows. This menu bar contains items supplied by the current (frontmost) app like the File & Edit menus, but it also contains other things, some of which are supplied by the OS. This article includes more info about this. As it says, this menu bar can be hidden in two ways, with a system-wide preference setting & by using full screen mode from within an app, which hides the menu, the Desktop, & everything else that does not belong to the app. Because Windows does not have this shared menu bar, menu items like File & Edit must be placed in a menu bar in an app's window.

The Select menu items "Select Next" & "Select Previous" (and the keyboard shortcuts for them) are in Affinity Designer, but not in Affinity Photo.

Gary, it would help if you told us if you are using Windows or Mac OS. The three color dots only appear on Mac windows, & only when the app is not in full screen mode, so we are still guessing about that.

Sometimes just signing out & back into the Mac App Store will show app updates that for one reason or another were not showing up in the "Updates" tab.

The requests/suggestions are certainly more plentiful & diverse than before. A few of them do strike me as a bit weird, but I don't know if the overall ratio of weird to not weird is any different. I think part of the apparent weirdness is there are now a substantial number of users of Windows only apps here, like the Serif Plus & CorelDraw products, so some things they are used to in those apps may seem weird to Mac users. Similarly, the Windows & Mac OS's are enough different "under the hood" that users of one platform will find some things weird about how their system level features are used in the Affinity apps on the other one.

In AD, you can save an entire Artboard as an asset. If you create a new AD document of any size without the "Create artboard" option checked, & then drag & drop an artboard asset onto the canvas as the next step, it will automatically replace the canvas with the artboard, retaining its dimensions (& any guides it includes, too). So for example, you could create a DVD template in an artboard, add it to Assets, & use it as above. You may have to change or set document units to whatever ones you prefer, but it is still a very quick way to get what you want.

@Daniele Salvatore: I don't know if it the same for Windows but on Macs, for both AD & AP there is a "Save Thumbnails with documents" option in Preferences > General that must be enabled (checked) to see document previews instead of the Affinity logos. If you have that option in the Windows versions, make sure it is enabled.

I have noticed basically the same thing as Aammppaa just mentioned, but with this difference: On a Mac, using AD "Insert behind selection" works for adding a new pixel layer or new object behind (below) the currently selected one, but not for adding an empty new 'regular' layer from the Layer menu or with the "Add layer" button on the Layers panel.

I am not sure but I do not think there is any way to disable this. As for workarounds, it would help to know which OS you use & which mouse. Some mouse drivers allow for custom settings for scroll speed/sensitivity, some on a per app basis. Apart from that, maybe consider in investing in a different mouse....

You must have a layer selected, & it must be a pixel layer (identified with "(Pixel)" in the Layers panel) for the tool to work.