furtonb

Hi MEB,
Thanks for the feedback. The global colours were mixed into this discussion by others in the previous replies. I don't expect anything at this point regarding this feature – this thread has been going on for multiple years without any concrete promises, which renders it clear to me, that I'm not in your primary audience, which is acceptable to me, as I do my drawings elsewhere primarily. I had similar feelings with this thread as I had with the ones prior to Affinity Publisher's release – there was no clear communication to the release dates, those being pushed over and over, nor is it clear to me, that anything will happen soon: yes, it could be certain, that Designer 21.3 will have some feature that makes it possible to do something similar than the "select same". That's something I expect to hear from our politicians. Jokes aside, sorry.
I think there had been mentions about the way the Corona development is happening: they have a very clear Trello timeline about the expected deadlines and features to be implemented: https://trello.com/b/dgI8vjDb/corona-road-map-cinema-4d
I know it is a different field with a different scope, but to answer your question, I would expect something like this. Right now you offer insight in the form of this thread: https://forum.affinity.serif.com/index.php?/topic/842-affinity-designer-feature-roadmap/
I understand that you have other priorities, and I am in no position to expect you to change this. I am working in a completely different field, where the promised scope and the expected deadline come hand in hand, not in the form of "it's done when it's done", even if it comes to maintaining support.
Another perspective of mine on this: if someone would be in the need of cleaning up externally created drawings, he/she would instantly see the desperate need for this feature, where this could save ridiculous amounts of work. I work with a lot of software on a daily basis, for a ~seamless workflow I am using some kind of built-in selection tools, Designer being left outside the circle for this reason. Anything else basically has a workaround, or Designer is more than capable of doing, making other files workable is not doable with the time constraints I usually have. But we are talking almost half a decade gone since the initial wish. With this in mind, I flip your question: I don't know what else do you expect from your users in this thread.
 
edit: grammar

I'm jealous. I can only speak English and can't even speak that very well.
I manage by speaking English louder. We are all taught that in primary school  

Jesus Christ, this has evolved one of the most commented topics in the "Suggestions for Affinity Designer on Desktop" subforum.
This has been 4,5 years since the initial post, this is kind of infuriating: I don't know about the compound of your user base, but I hardly can imagine, that all of them would be solely graphic designers. I myself is an architect, which is very related to drawing stuff, but Affinity Designer is not my main tool, but I have it to complement my workflow, to make competition drawings fancier, to clean things up, etc. But I cannot do this, because after importing such PDFs/SVGs (ehm, DWG support?), it takes an insane amount of time to order things to a managable manner: in Illustrator, we had the "select same" options. I will go further: this is the "standard" of the selection process to me, this is a screenshot of ARCHICAD. I'm not going to expect this to happen, because this software is over 30 years old now and costs a few magnitude more than any of your products:

 
But to confuse the need for such things with global colours show, that not even the user base has the proper idea why this is important. Yes, if I create documents from scratch, I can use them, but lets say I have a masterplan with tens of thousands of lines, where colour, linetype, thickness can be the differentiating thing, please don't expect me to manually select all the "dashed red hairlines" in my file, because that's just not cutting it. Speaking of cutting: I guess some other out there is dealing with laser cutting from time to time, where the intensity and the speed can be controlled with colours with many machines. If I have a file (again, created in an external source), I would like to recolour everything to the necessary colours. The use cases of this feature would not be  "in-the-application" workflow, rather "to-the-application" workflow, when you don't have an illustration set up in Designer's terms. Right now, it is painstakingly manual. 
To sum it up, there is a plenty of people out there willing to support this company, because Adobe is not feasible for them. Many of these are supposedly not graphic designers. If you are not going to implement features, that are important for them, it is completely fine with me, but the lack of meaningful feedback makes people fed up. It seems to me, that there is a tendency for me to find features that are not "artistic" and has no love on the development side. I understand that you are developing a fairly new set of products, which has unforeseen delays and complications, but what I miss is the feedback. Right now there are no input from the development here, if someone would explain the situation why its not yet done, why it won't be done, what are the more important things, focus areas for you, then it is fine. But that is by far not the case!
 

Jesus Christ, this has evolved one of the most commented topics in the "Suggestions for Affinity Designer on Desktop" subforum.
This has been 4,5 years since the initial post, this is kind of infuriating: I don't know about the compound of your user base, but I hardly can imagine, that all of them would be solely graphic designers. I myself is an architect, which is very related to drawing stuff, but Affinity Designer is not my main tool, but I have it to complement my workflow, to make competition drawings fancier, to clean things up, etc. But I cannot do this, because after importing such PDFs/SVGs (ehm, DWG support?), it takes an insane amount of time to order things to a managable manner: in Illustrator, we had the "select same" options. I will go further: this is the "standard" of the selection process to me, this is a screenshot of ARCHICAD. I'm not going to expect this to happen, because this software is over 30 years old now and costs a few magnitude more than any of your products:

 
But to confuse the need for such things with global colours show, that not even the user base has the proper idea why this is important. Yes, if I create documents from scratch, I can use them, but lets say I have a masterplan with tens of thousands of lines, where colour, linetype, thickness can be the differentiating thing, please don't expect me to manually select all the "dashed red hairlines" in my file, because that's just not cutting it. Speaking of cutting: I guess some other out there is dealing with laser cutting from time to time, where the intensity and the speed can be controlled with colours with many machines. If I have a file (again, created in an external source), I would like to recolour everything to the necessary colours. The use cases of this feature would not be  "in-the-application" workflow, rather "to-the-application" workflow, when you don't have an illustration set up in Designer's terms. Right now, it is painstakingly manual. 
To sum it up, there is a plenty of people out there willing to support this company, because Adobe is not feasible for them. Many of these are supposedly not graphic designers. If you are not going to implement features, that are important for them, it is completely fine with me, but the lack of meaningful feedback makes people fed up. It seems to me, that there is a tendency for me to find features that are not "artistic" and has no love on the development side. I understand that you are developing a fairly new set of products, which has unforeseen delays and complications, but what I miss is the feedback. Right now there are no input from the development here, if someone would explain the situation why its not yet done, why it won't be done, what are the more important things, focus areas for you, then it is fine. But that is by far not the case!
 

Jesus Christ, this has evolved one of the most commented topics in the "Suggestions for Affinity Designer on Desktop" subforum.
This has been 4,5 years since the initial post, this is kind of infuriating: I don't know about the compound of your user base, but I hardly can imagine, that all of them would be solely graphic designers. I myself is an architect, which is very related to drawing stuff, but Affinity Designer is not my main tool, but I have it to complement my workflow, to make competition drawings fancier, to clean things up, etc. But I cannot do this, because after importing such PDFs/SVGs (ehm, DWG support?), it takes an insane amount of time to order things to a managable manner: in Illustrator, we had the "select same" options. I will go further: this is the "standard" of the selection process to me, this is a screenshot of ARCHICAD. I'm not going to expect this to happen, because this software is over 30 years old now and costs a few magnitude more than any of your products:

 
But to confuse the need for such things with global colours show, that not even the user base has the proper idea why this is important. Yes, if I create documents from scratch, I can use them, but lets say I have a masterplan with tens of thousands of lines, where colour, linetype, thickness can be the differentiating thing, please don't expect me to manually select all the "dashed red hairlines" in my file, because that's just not cutting it. Speaking of cutting: I guess some other out there is dealing with laser cutting from time to time, where the intensity and the speed can be controlled with colours with many machines. If I have a file (again, created in an external source), I would like to recolour everything to the necessary colours. The use cases of this feature would not be  "in-the-application" workflow, rather "to-the-application" workflow, when you don't have an illustration set up in Designer's terms. Right now, it is painstakingly manual. 
To sum it up, there is a plenty of people out there willing to support this company, because Adobe is not feasible for them. Many of these are supposedly not graphic designers. If you are not going to implement features, that are important for them, it is completely fine with me, but the lack of meaningful feedback makes people fed up. It seems to me, that there is a tendency for me to find features that are not "artistic" and has no love on the development side. I understand that you are developing a fairly new set of products, which has unforeseen delays and complications, but what I miss is the feedback. Right now there are no input from the development here, if someone would explain the situation why its not yet done, why it won't be done, what are the more important things, focus areas for you, then it is fine. But that is by far not the case!
 

Jesus Christ, this has evolved one of the most commented topics in the "Suggestions for Affinity Designer on Desktop" subforum.
This has been 4,5 years since the initial post, this is kind of infuriating: I don't know about the compound of your user base, but I hardly can imagine, that all of them would be solely graphic designers. I myself is an architect, which is very related to drawing stuff, but Affinity Designer is not my main tool, but I have it to complement my workflow, to make competition drawings fancier, to clean things up, etc. But I cannot do this, because after importing such PDFs/SVGs (ehm, DWG support?), it takes an insane amount of time to order things to a managable manner: in Illustrator, we had the "select same" options. I will go further: this is the "standard" of the selection process to me, this is a screenshot of ARCHICAD. I'm not going to expect this to happen, because this software is over 30 years old now and costs a few magnitude more than any of your products:

 
But to confuse the need for such things with global colours show, that not even the user base has the proper idea why this is important. Yes, if I create documents from scratch, I can use them, but lets say I have a masterplan with tens of thousands of lines, where colour, linetype, thickness can be the differentiating thing, please don't expect me to manually select all the "dashed red hairlines" in my file, because that's just not cutting it. Speaking of cutting: I guess some other out there is dealing with laser cutting from time to time, where the intensity and the speed can be controlled with colours with many machines. If I have a file (again, created in an external source), I would like to recolour everything to the necessary colours. The use cases of this feature would not be  "in-the-application" workflow, rather "to-the-application" workflow, when you don't have an illustration set up in Designer's terms. Right now, it is painstakingly manual. 
To sum it up, there is a plenty of people out there willing to support this company, because Adobe is not feasible for them. Many of these are supposedly not graphic designers. If you are not going to implement features, that are important for them, it is completely fine with me, but the lack of meaningful feedback makes people fed up. It seems to me, that there is a tendency for me to find features that are not "artistic" and has no love on the development side. I understand that you are developing a fairly new set of products, which has unforeseen delays and complications, but what I miss is the feedback. Right now there are no input from the development here, if someone would explain the situation why its not yet done, why it won't be done, what are the more important things, focus areas for you, then it is fine. But that is by far not the case!
 

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.

Wow, this is not an encouraging thread.. lol.. To all the mods, advanced users and Affinity staff, whatever the user complaint is, the reply "Affinity never claimed to be a replacement for Adobe" is a horrible, horrible response. If this software is being marketed as a professional graphic design tool, and it most certainly is, then the idea of using it to replace Adobe products is implied simply by Adobe's current dominance in that space. We all know that Adobe enjoys a relative monopoly as the defacto solution for digital design.  I would hazard to guess that most Affinity users are here to replace Adobe. Especially since Adobe has decided to take advantage of its market position to over charge massively for its subscription model, completely alienating freelancers and any other users that aren't large agencies... So when you respond with that tact it looks very bad, silly and defensive. It doesn't communicate that the Affinity team is committed to publishing professional software that meets the needs of its diverse customer base. Having a lot of impassioned users who want to make the product better is good problems, not bad ones. Now I am wondering if Affinity is actually serious or not. It will be a shame if not, because the software is already really good and innovative, and there is a huge market opportunity right now.. All in all this Forum is a great example of why Forums in general are a crappy way to handle customer service. As a user I have no idea what Serif really thinks about Affinity Designer, and what they are committed to doing with the software. Instead I get a bunch of "Advanced Users" with their own opinions and perspectives..

I don't post much on these forums but I do regularly follow the discussions and check out what's happening with the roadmaps and betas. A bit of context before I continue. I've practiced as a graphic designer specializing in branding and web for the last 10+ years and used Adobe products for as long as I can remember. I stopped upgrading once Adobe released CC because I saw no reason to upgrade from CS6. Last year I started a comprehensive review of all my tools and workflow to see if there was a "better" option out there. Eventually I settled on Figma for UI and prototyping and started looking seriously at Affinity.
Overall I've been impressed with Photo. For my workflow, there's really nothing it can't handle and there's some nice functional options with snapping controls, exporting and handling of vector objects that I don't get with CS6. Where things fall apart is team integration with agency work where I have to deliver PSDs. Photo does an admirable job of importing and exporting PSD's but unfortunately we can't export a PSD with editable type. So... that is a hard stop that adds an extra step of adding type in CS6. 
I also purchased Designer recently because I was fed up with the travesty that snapping is in AI CS6 and the lack of an updated pantone book. Again there are wonderful features that aid my workflow with how Designer deals with clipping masks, symbols, grids, and snapping. For most of my work, Designer functions quite well but sadly it feels less intuitive and polished than Photo. There were definitely some hurdles with how Affinity deals with open paths and joining paths, but primarily, file delivery is a problem. I need to be able to deliver files that can be easily edited using the Adobe suite and that's proven... difficult with Designer. EPS has it's limitations and it also seems that Adobe cheats by embedding a full AI inside the EPS that it actually loads when you open an EPS generated by AI. SVG is the only other real option here as PDF also has issues. It seems that there are other odd limitations, for example setting strokes to anything other than centered expands the stroke and getting gradients to open as vectors took some effort. That partly opens the door to pulling the illustrations into AI to export but does require an extra step of adjusting the design to make sure it functions correctly for handoff.
So, what does that have to do with this thread? Well, in a vacuum, Affinity functions well for my needs and significantly improves my workflow but once I have to deal with file handoff Affinity adds inefficiency to my workflow. Roadmap wise, things are a bit murky and the timeline is undefined with the further complication of support for the new iPad versions and the upcoming Publisher. Unfortunately that means I can't expect any change in the foreseeable future and Photo and Designer, while capable of professional level work, just can't play ball as part of a team that 99% controlled by Adobe. Give me the ability to seamlessly handoff files and we're golden until then, Adobe wins. 
e: I'm still planning to use Photo and Designer for non agency work, because it meets all the needs I've had and significantly boosts my workflow efficiency but it's definitely not a one stop solution. 

I have both programs (Designer and Photo) for some time. Changes in the new versions are very small and incredibly slow. Both programs are very nice, but... Unfortunately, Illustrator and Photoshop are miles away, it's a different world. Publisher will certainly be interesting software. But I would greatly welcome the progress with Designer and Photo.
Sometimes I'm very frustrated at Affinity. I wonder how many of us have returned to Adobe.
I'm still working with Affinity. But how long?

I paid for it over 4 years ago, when updates were rolling out all the time. I'm still unable to switch from Illustrator, because some AD solutions are making the workflow painfully slow. 
Right now I'm trying to figure out, why using a shortcut twice makes it switch to a previously used one... Whose crazy idea was that?? In illustrator, no matter how many times I click "T" tool, it's still I Text Tool, in AD, "T" can become anything, depending on what was used next, so I have to be careful all the time not to accidentally press it twice, as I'm using shortcuts constantly and switching between them. In Illustrator - I don't think about it ever, a shortcut is a shortcut! to one particular tool! AD drives me crazy.
And I'm also unable to use Undo > Redo history, because when going 10 steps back, I need to be very careful not to select any object with a mouse, because if I do, all Redo history is gone, as AD is counting object selection as an action. Another crazy idea that makes the workflow a pain. 
AD is good, for beginners, who have plenty time to play with it. If you're in a hurry and want to finish something fast, it not always the best solution. 

@MEB And again a year has passed since you wrote "It will come on a future version. Please bear with us." And nothing happened. You see why that's very frustrating, don't you? I love  AD - in 2019 alone I created two DER SPIEGEL covers with it! And yes, I work with global colors when possible. But that's not more than a bad work around! It's like telling people to put a blue and a yellow layer on multiply when they want green! It's just so hard to comprehend why you guys don't realize what a basic MUST this feature is!

Since the most requested (based on the reply count) are technical illustration related, it would be awesome to have an official response on all of them, whether we can expect Designer to strengthen this side as well in the future.
To be honest, although I've bought Designer for both macOS and iOS, they are mainly collecting the dust on my virtual shelf, because it is just that pain in the [ ° ] when it comes to dealing with technical drawings – which is basically 90% of my time during any chosen workday. The time required to organise my document to a workable manner (sorting through tens of thousands of different lines, fills, etc.) is not really worth to me. 
I hope though, that this will change in the foreseeable future, if not, please be clear about it.
 

Since the most requested (based on the reply count) are technical illustration related, it would be awesome to have an official response on all of them, whether we can expect Designer to strengthen this side as well in the future.
To be honest, although I've bought Designer for both macOS and iOS, they are mainly collecting the dust on my virtual shelf, because it is just that pain in the [ ° ] when it comes to dealing with technical drawings – which is basically 90% of my time during any chosen workday. The time required to organise my document to a workable manner (sorting through tens of thousands of different lines, fills, etc.) is not really worth to me. 
I hope though, that this will change in the foreseeable future, if not, please be clear about it.
 

That doesn't come close to the only reason why you select same... It's isn't all about changing colours, plus even if that's what you want to do then you often don't want to ruin your colour swatches and what if you want to change, say, blue fills but not blue strokes? Globals can help in a very limited number of cases. But often it's nothing to do with simply swapping a colour, I use it more for selections and stroke weights.
That's why it's such a fundamental tool for a vector app and why it's so disappointing that's it's still not in after getting on for 5 years and seems it won't be in 1.7 either. This plus a list of other things and very little progress being made are making wonder if it ever will be a real AI alternative and whether I'll ever be able to switch to it for my work.

Same as B4ttleCat, by using Adobe Illustrator.
There's no workaround to this feature.
You'll have to love manually selecting a zillion of objects without mistake (an interesting psychometric task, sure).
Funny I haven't totaly given up on AD and still checking this forum every 6 months or so. Seeing for how long the issue has been around, I suggest that the moderators should write a sticky post "Tomorrow, AD gets the oft-requested selection by attribute". This would save them some time (ok, not that we get feedback on the issue very often).

Yes, numerical input for curves should be implemented in my opinion too.

Yes, numerical input for curves should be implemented in my opinion too.

I'm also looking forward to this. 
For clarity sake this feature request involves two things:
the ability to save the RAW edits. (maybe as a separate file, or embedded in the DNG one).  The ability to adjust the RAW edits after you developed them The first one might be the most important one. The second one needs the first one to function in the way Photoshop has implemented this using smart objects. This works by basically referencing the original raw file + edits to they can be adjusted later on. 
Maybe in the future it would be nice to align the develop 'studio' to have the same or more features than Adobe Camera Raw so you could load up those sidecar files to have (roughly) the same edits. Honestly I think Photoshop's raw converter is much better (I'm sorry to admit) so I see no reason not to catch up and implement the same features. 
OP seems to refer to just the first feature. 

@ Hokusai
There is nothing megalomanic in posting the truth, the fact that there is no viable work-around for 'true' arrowheads, in a form usable as obviously many want and even need to use them. There is no need for "In my opinion", "I think", or "To me" when stating what many others have, in your own words,  already stated since the beta version of Affinity Designer.
It could be argued that in life there is a 'work-around' for almost everything but that is not a valid reason for them to have to exist, or be used, in anything where they should be expected to exist as a basic, even essential, component.
If anyone, including the very silent development team, can think of, or even give an anywhere near possible reason why they did not exist from the start, or why they have not been added already then I will from that point on stop reading this thread and continue to (impatiently) await their introduction.
As a Serif 'devote' I do not mean to 'belittle' in any way the Affinity development team, who have done fantastic work, but it is not good practise to leave your customers, many of them new to using Serif products and whose business you have been 'fighting for', trying to "guess about their reasons for the omission" of something that to many is obviously an essential part of the program (app).
My only "guess" is that Designer's original concept was as an 'Artistic' program (app) with no thought for those of use who have a more 'practical' use for it........ and who, with (some) respect, may not have the time to keep finding and using work-arounds.
Nor is it good business practice to tell your customers when they are continuously and vociferously asking for something "you will get it when we are (good and) ready", without giving a valid reason for the delay, or a realist time for when the omission will be rectified.
If in my 40 years in sales and marketing I had told a new customers when they asked why an essential component had been missed to "find a work-around for yourself", our "you will get it sometime in the unspecified future" then that customer would not, in a highly competitive market, have been a customer for very long.
That is my opinion.

I work around it by not using AD, I use Illustrator (and that's a bummer).

Thanks, that would be awesome!
In the meantime there are alternatives – such as saving a PDF and exploding it after importing, but that's not what I'm looking for in the long run.
Keep up the good work!

Hello @furtonb,
are you referring to 'Capitalise first letter of sentences' in preferences? This is working for me. When it's turned off nothing gets capitalised.
d.

When you create a "New Document" you have the option "Document Units:" which you can set to mm. Then you ruler, guides... will all be in mm.
The "Document Setup" on the toolbox bar can also be used to change to whatever measurement unit you want later.

Simple answer: You can’t. For the time being, a master contains these elements, which have not to be modified on layout page.
The simplest solution: If you have elements, which have to change page-wise, you have to copy the page/the element and change it as you like.