WilliamH

Hi, I'm William.
Mac-adept, DTP/design since 1988, former Freehand addict (since v1) and extremely happy to have found a very serious competitor for the expensive dragon named Illustrator - which I was forced to love the day Apple killed Rosetta.
 
Affinity designer feels great already - even while not finished.
It reminds me somewhat of Laserpaint, the first app ever to combine vector and bitmap, ages ago. I feel so young again!
I hope AD will get a good plug in system like AI once had [e.g. scriptographer (now http://paperjs.org/)]
Will do my best to give feedback and make AD mature to the max.
 
So, I got the ßeta and would love to aquire an official license - but how do I buy one? :huh:

Love to read FreeHand is not forgotten ;-) Thanks

Maybe the devs can work on that last 2% if you share the specifics and sample files demonstrating any issues? Good to strive for perfection.
 
I expect one problem with the artwork originating in Australia is that it comes in upside down, I reckon that can be detected and fixed.

Actually, I don't think we ever said we wanted to be a substitute for FH. We added FH import because there was clear demand, and we listened to requests on this forum from people who were FH users. If those requests didn't match our app, we didn't use them.
 
As MEB says, we are writing a new app, not just making a direct replacement for every other design app. Don't confuse us supporting common file formats as us replacing those apps outright. We have a very unique document model that allows us to do way more than other apps. We have a unique file format that gives us faster raster saving and loading than other apps, and allows us to deal with massive raster documents in a way that other apps can't. We have a more diverse set of live shapes, which we intend to build on.
 
We hope that Affinity will become the go-to suite for many people. You can argue about workflows and muscle memory, but every app out there has its owns methods and quirks, and people adopt them. Sometimes taking on these things just because one app did them before is not the best approach. We will never please everyone doing that. A number of threads on this forum show how polar people's views can be about a single feature. Who is more right? In the end we will try make the best choices based on our overall plan.
 
All views are welcome, but we can't make everyone happy all the time. You never know, in time you might refer to the way we did things in as much nostalgic light as AI and FH.

It would be a nice idea, I don't see the need of making an non-editable object.

I love the possibility to stretch a curve directly (no need to control both handles). And I like the “organic forms” we can achieve with that options.
 
But there are situations where we would need to stretch curves maintaining handles direction (even if that handles are not horizontal or vertical)
 
My suggestion is:
 
— Direct manipulation of curve ---> actual behavior
 
— SHIFT + direct manipulation of curve ---> modify curve maintaining handles direction
 
Next capture shows a practical case maintaining HV handles (very useful for corners):
 

Discovered Affinity and have been pleasantly surprised with it.  I've been a longtime professional user of Freehand, and it would be such a treasure to see
Affinity friendly toward these native files.  Many Freehand users have tried Illustrator but are not pleased with it's design and function.
 
Is there any hope for Affinity to bridge this gap? At least allowing FHMX files to open in the application.  Hope I'm not alone on this...I know of many designers that
would welcome Affinity if it offered this option.
 
Curiously watching the development...