rubs

It is important to help users make informed decisions. However, I really hope the team do not view this post as another attack. Rather an articulate voice of inquiry considering where Serif are aiming to position these products in the market moving forward.

Publisher beta is moved regularly to the cloudfront servers and the download reliability and speed benefit for autoupdate is excellent. I would suggest we use the same for Mac & Windows Designer and Photo

The betas are hosted with Amazon S3 in East Virginia, USA. The store versions use CloudFront to distribute the files to locations around the World to speed up the download. If the beta downloads slowly, it will be your ISPs connection to the S3 location in USA.

Click here to download the latest beta
 
Status: Customer Beta
Purpose: Features, Improvements, Fixes
Requirements: A valid product key (for Affinity Store purchases), or an installation of the full retail version from the Microsoft Store

As this is a beta it is considered to be not suitable for production use. This means that you should not attempt to use it for commercial purposes or for any other activity that you may be adversely affected by the application failing, including the total loss of any documents. 

We hope you enjoy the latest build, and as always, if you've got any problems, please don't hesitate to post here and we'll get back to you as soon as we can. Thanks once again for your continued feedback.

If you have a general question about the software, please head over to the Questions Forum, or if you have any suggestions, please head over to the Feature Requests forum.
 
Tools
We've overhauled most of the core tools, adding subtle new features to make you more productive:
Node tool has a new 'Transform Mode' which provides a containing box for the selected nodes and allows for more freeform editing of the nodes. Node and Pen tools have an utterly amazing Construction mode which gives easy access to common construction features to help you build complicated shapes or intersections accurately and easily, giving you simple access to parallels, right angles, reflected and mirrored angles, in addition to circular construction snaps and all construction intersections. This really needs a video to show how to use it - but it's awesome. Pen tool now has a 'rubber band' mode and also a mode to allow future curves to be added to the current object's curves (for example, the character 'a' is constructed of two curves in a single 'curve object' and this mode makes that construction simpler). Node tool can now auto-snap nodes if you drag a node from one curve over the top of a node from another (selected) curve and pause, it will offer to snap to the same geometry as the node you're hovering over (i.e.  modify the on and off-curve nodes to match). This is really useful for trying to reconstruct areas of one curve from another curve. Node tool now allows for lasso selection of nodes by holding the Alt/Ctrl key and dragging a selection lasso. Pencil tool now offers a 'sculpt' mode that allows for extending or manipulating curves in a more natural way. More to come in this area soon. Many tools now allow for 'Alignment widgets' which you can toggle the visibility of in the context toolbar. When enabled you can visually adjust the alignment or even, for example, 'align to centre, snapped to the left edge of this object' by simply click/dragging. Fill tool correctly allows editing of skewed fill handles and newly-created skewed fills draw much nicer now. Ruler origin can be edited by simply dragging the area where the rulers intersect each other - it can even be snapped onto objects in the document. Guides can be edited in most tools by simply dragging a guide in the ruler area. Grid setup is now more interactive: origin can be dragged, axis scale adjusted and angle adjusted on-document, complete with snapping to objects and angles in the document to help you reconstruct useful grids from finished artworks or sketches. By enabling 'Edit in Plane' on the new Isometric Studio, tools can edit objects and appear to make those edits along the currently active plane - extremely useful for artists who enjoy working with any axonometric projections. You can now drag the rotation centre point (when enabled on the context toolbar) while holding Ctrl and it will translate the object - this is actually very useful for positioning and snapping objects relative to others. Shapes tools now have presets so you can create your own favourite shape setups and more easily use them again. There are just far too many subtle tool changes to mention here, but hopefully you'll find the tools much improved
 
General
New brushes, styles and assets are now shipped with the product. Visible bleed (accessed from the View menu) so you can more easily design into the bleed area - a common feature request. “Alternate futures” for document history have been added. Traditionally, if you roll back the undo history then do something else all your changes after that point are lost. Designer will now display a small branch icon in the history tab when you do this. Pressing that button will cycle between all the different “futures” after that history entry - meaning you will never lose work you have done. New 'Isometric' Studio makes it easy to setup and work with various axonometric projections within the application. HEIF images can now be loaded directly into Designer. If they contain a depth map, this will also be loaded as a second layer. Because depth maps are typically lower resolution than the main image, optional “smart” upsampling will be performed. Designer now supports custom document presets - a popular feature request. A new blend mode - Linear Burn - has been added. New “Move inside / outside” commands have been added - useful for quickly clipping/unclipping. New "Merge curves/Separate curves" commands. Grids now have an editable number of angle subdivisions. The Hard Mix blend mode has been improved. Numerous text improvements have been made - including new features such as bullets and numbering. Significant PDF import / export improvements and fixes. Added support for per-monitor ICC profiles (previously we only used the primary monitor's ICC profile) in the document view (controls still use the primary monitor's ICC profile, which will hopefully be fixed in the future).  
Brushes
Designer 1.7 introduces a new “sub-brush” mechanism, developed in conjunction with Paolo Limoncelli (DAUB® Brushes). This exciting feature allows any brush to have a list of other brushes attached which will draw at the same time. Each sub-brush has a fully separate and customisable set of dynamics. You can control when the sub-brushes are drawn and how they blend with the main brush. Symmetry (up to 32-way) is now supported - including on-canvas controls and optional mirroring. Wet edges and accumulation are now available on colour brushes and brushes with HSL variance. Brushes with multiple nozzle textures have always chosen the nozzle at random. In 1.7, the nozzle choice has a dynamic controller and ramp for greater control. All pixel brush tools now support left and right arrow keys for rotation - a common feature request.
Adjustments
The HSL adjustment layer has been rewritten. It now supports custom hue ranges, a new algorithm, new UI and picker controls. The Levels adjustment layer now supports output levels - a common feature request. The White Balance adjustment layer has been rewritten. The Selective Colour adjustment layer has been rewritten. PSD import / export of adjustments has been improved. The Vibrance adjustment layer has been rewritten. The Recolour adjustment layer has gained a lightness slider.  
Fixes
Numerous other bug fixes - too many to list!

I guess @rubs means setting you can choose in "performance" settings where you can choose your GPU as renderer. That may bring to mind acceleration. Anyways - is the acceleration planned at all for PC version?

Ah. Right, that setting is just for presenting the document to the screen, the work of rendering the content is still done on the CPU. We do have plans for GPU acceleration, I have started it, but the trouble with Windows is, there is far greater variation in potential hardware, in comparison to the macOS ecosystem. 

Of course there will be opinions both ways, I would prefer to have the option and be able to set it by default with a simple checkbox on the context sensitive toolbar "Select through holes" or something that sounds less lame. This trips me up daily when im trying to make complicated combined-circle based objects like character eyeballs.

Any conversion from PNG to BMP and vice-versa should be pixel-perfect since both formats are lossless. Bad results are often due to use of JPEG images or scaling. It would be best for you to upload both images here so we can see what's going on. Cheers!

rubs,
I too hope that Designer continues to evolve in a positive way and I think it will seeing how dedicated the developers are and how passionate the users are about making it better by making requests, suggestions and bug reports. 
Hokusai

Hokusai,
Affinity Designer is now my main UX design tool, and I use it very heavily on a daily basis since the first Windows beta. I think it has one of the best UIs around and certainly the best workflow for my tasks. As a professional UX tester, I tend to take bugs quite seriously. I keep a record of all AD issues I know of, and I also use this forum mainly to report and discuss them, helping the team wherever possible.
As for the platforms, most problems I know of seem to be common to PCs and Macs. All things about artboards, symbols, grouping, compounds, constraints, export persona, adjustments, etc. seem to reside in the main code AFAIK. But I also know there are performance problems and some other issues that are specific to the Windows version.
Anyway, AD is still my main and tool and will continue to be, hopefully for a long time. I hope it evolves in a positive way. This obviously includes keeping the platform as stable and bug-free as possible.

Thanks for taking the time to read and respond to my post! I'm sure you get it, but for anyone else who may have been misconstrued by my wording: I am not expecting Affinity to be as feature rich or bug free as Adobe Illustrator, software which has had dozens and dozens of releases over the course of many, many years. What I am saying though is that for Affinity to be taken seriously then there needs to be clear leadership on the part of the Customer Service and Development team to handle customer feedback proactively. The standard in today's business climate, like it or not, is that there be a fairly high level of transparency in the planning and execution of software development. It is also disingenuous, and therefore self destructive, to compete for Adobe's business from a marketing standpoint, then when it comes to delivery using the "we're too small to compete" excuse. I would also mention that being smaller than Adobe is actually an immense strength in terms of development agility. Anyway, I am rambling.. In closing there is a huge market for design software that is untapped, and it is growing all the time as more and more people turn to the gig economy to realize their financial goals. Hopefully Serif is poised and determined to serve that market.

IrfanView is indeed great, but it’s only free for non-commercial use. Having said that, a commercial licence is just ten euros.

i will like to see a sdk or api system which will allow developer make plugins and hack for affinity products.
 
i believe with this feature affinity products and awareness will grow faster and also we will see some amazing stuffs from user.
 
please consider this so i can build some amazing stuff for prototyping .
 
 Thanks

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.

Hi,
TLDR; Just because we haven't fixed your issues yet, doesn't mean we're not working hard and fixing important bugs.
I'm genuinely very sorry that you've been impacted by these issues that affect your productivity and I really do apologise that they have clouded your enjoyment of the product to such a large degree. No reported bugs are ever forgotten, nor are they ignored. They will be fixed as soon as we can get to them. As you're aware, these issues haven't been addressed yet and they are important for your use-case. I know I'm probably asking the impossible, but do also consider that there were other issues that may have been similarly adversely affecting users in other areas of the application and that we have been fixing all of these issues as quickly as we can.
Again, I know my apologies will go no way towards making you feel better, but you have them anyway - and also my reassurance that the issues will get tended to.
Many thanks,Matt

Is there a schedule for fixing this bug? It's been almost 2 years since it's been reported and the bug is still there.

Great news! Hopefully we've solved the issue now. 

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

This coming Friday will be our 44th wedding anniversary. We've had many great Friday the 13th anniversaries. But maybe another old adage comes into play, Lucky in ____, unlucky in love, only reversed. Never been lucky in most parts of my life, except whom I married.
And I walk under ladders all the time.

Well, I've always heard that but I'm not superstitious.  I've also heard that walking under a ladder is unlucky.  That could be true, especially if the person on the ladder dropped something as you walked under.  Many tall buildings don't even have a floor numbered 13 which is totally silly.  But a lot of people believe in those old myths. 

Xara Designer has a very nice Spiral tool too, and it's a joy to use. Here's a quick example:
 
 

Right now I've just crashed AD while moving artboards around. I just sent the bug report. I can send you the offending file if you want.

Hi Dominik,
 
Just use the Move tool. Zoom to around 10% and you'll easily get a crash. Tested in two different machines, same results. See video below.
 

I think using the selection color and line styles (or other visual indicators in the selection) would be great for this and other uses. See here for a related idea concerning using the selection color for symbols:

@John at Esscont Excellent! Glad to have helped John. The Surface Studio is an excellent piece of kit and Affinity looks great on it. I hope you and your wife enjoy it for many years to come . I've taken note of your suggestions and feedback, so thanks for that too.
 
@rubs I have checked in a fix for that, thanks for reporting. It will be picked up in the next build.