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Hi @Mark Ingram, were you able to reproduce the problem in your tests?

I've recently used the contour effect. It's great, but unfortunately it crashes too often when editing multiple grouped objects at the same time.

I believe the BMP format is pretty obsolete for many years now so I understand if Serif chooses not to implement an export filter. I use Inno Setup too, but it's the only dev tool I use that still does not accept PNGs AFAIK. The task runner / ImageMagick idea is the best idea for continuous export, but for sporadic use the venerable IrfanView is great. It is super fast, can import / export hundreds of bitmap formats, has a command-line interface and batch options and is completely free (Windows only, sorry).

This is great news, Ben. Looking forward to seeing some nasty bugs fixed too.

I understand the feeling, in the very beginning I also found this behavior quite strange and I thought it was a bug. But now I'm used to it and I can see the benefit of easily experimenting with blending, adjustments, effects and so on, especially when you have many layers. Just select the objects you want and apply the effect. If it's not right, then undo -- it will keep the selection -- then try another one. This feature is unique to Affinity Designer, I really like it.

Thanks for listening, and thanks for your answer. AD is my main design tool, I use it on a daily basis. I'm a big advocate of it among fellow designers, and I've already produced hundreds (thousands?) of work files with it. So I'm not going anywhere soon But I feel it's important to know whether these showstoppers will be addressed or not (and when), but I'm not seeing any answers. Please look here for more thoughts. Thanks again.

@SrPx, you raise some interesting questions. I'd like to skip some parts and focus on the main issues. We all know Serif is a small team with lots of complex things to do. They obviously knew from the inception that this would be a very huge task, but they nevertheless did it and I think the results are terrific. Otherwise I'd still be stuck with Corel / Illustrator / Xara. Last year I migrated to Affinity Designer after 20+ years of using Xara as my main tool, and I don't regret it at all. Affinity is a fantastic vision of its own, and think they should make all efforts to make sure every product does what it should in the best way possible. However many things in Designer (can't say much about Photo, sorry) just don't work as expected, some never did. I believe there are a few bad consequences to this. Existing users may get tired; just take a look around here in the forum. New users may be reluctant to use it when they are aware of the problems. My fellow UI designers are still using Xara despite my efforts to "sell" AD as a better tool for UI design. Another known fact is that most news are about new products and iPad versions. This is all very exciting, of course, but they will obviously add their own new problems to an already huge list. (I keep track of those. I have a personal record with hundreds of entries, I'll glad to share them with anyone interested.) I think the effort to deliver those new products may be preventing better QA, that's what I'm concerned about. Finally, I hope the Serif guys will acknowledge that I always try to contribute positively and never had a bad word about them or anyone else, and never will. I double as a software developer and tester, so I'm pretty much aware of the complexity of their jobs and I have nothing but respect for them. I wish others would also contribute with their viewpoints to make our debate richer. Best regards.

This post is almost one year old and these bugs are there for quite some time now, but nothing was fixed yet. I believe we'll have to live with them (and many other problems) for long. It seems the company focus is elsewhere. Artboards, constraints and symbols are advanced features, probably most users don't need them. I'm really sorry to say this, but at this point I feel the Serif team is probably too busy releasing new products. Software quality and experience improvement are not priorities anymore.

By now I assume they are not bothering with this problem and many other serious bugs that were reported a long time ago. They are too busy developing new products..

So far, so good. No crashes yet! Fingers crossed.

Will do, thanks!

...and please zoom out, pan, zoom in, then repeat many times. CPU and GPU usage will go up.

Good! While you're at it, please also consider copying attributes from selected text, selecting another part of the same text (or another text), then paste attributes. Currently this is not possible AFAIK.

Good to know you're working on it. As for reproducing the problem, try disabling any external video cards and enabling the internal Intel graphics. Then perhaps try opening real projects with many artboards and lots of text. Editing the text for a few minutes usually slows things down.

There are no real differences between the two versions. Technically, Affinity software is always beta because it has hundreds of known bugs. So I tend to use the latest version available, keeping an eye on new bugs.