svicalifornia

Command-clicking on a document window's title text should show the filesystem path to the document in a drop-down menu (see attached). Choosing any location from the menu should open that location in the Finder, for quick access to other files in that location. This has been a system-wide Mac OS convention since the early '90s. You'll find it on just about every app that deals with documents, with the notable and disappointing exception of Affinity Designer. Apple documents the expected behavior here: https://developer.apple.com/library/content/documentation/Cocoa/Conceptual/WinPanel/Tasks/SettingWindowTitle.html Though it may seem like an unimportant feature, it is second-nature to many Mac users, and every one of us who needs to locate an open Designer file in the Finder will be cursing Serif for the lack of this feature as they manually hunt around for the file. It's just not good business to annoy your users in this fashion when a much easier solution is practically given to you by the OS. Please remedy this as soon as possible.

@Herbert123 Thanks for the detailed response and explanation. I think that both modes are useful. In web and UI design, it is often important to see the surrounding design context when working in isolation on a particular group, so I greatly prefer "in-place" isolation mode as I described it above, editing in the same window with other objects grayed-out but still visible. I can also see the use case to edit nested objects (of a group, symbol, or embedded/smart object) in a separate window. I think that both modes should be available via contextual menu. However, I use in-place isolation mode very often, and from an HCI perspective, double-click is the fastest way to go from locating an object with the pointer and entering isolation mode. Adding a keystroke or contextual menu drag only makes the action more complicated and frustrating for users who do it all the time. But I understand that some users such as yourself don't appreciate having isolation mode bound to double-click, so that should be configurable via Preferences (either a simple checkbox to enable control isolation mode via double-click, or a selector to choose whether double-click controls isolation mode, some other action, or nothing at all). That's also a cool feature, but it's very different (and to me, less useful) from the isolation mode requested in this thread. For those of us who use isolation mode often, it's important to manage a hierarchy of nested groups one level at a time. For example, I can group a few objects into a cell, and then group a few cells into a row, and then group a few rows into a table, and group a few buttons outside the table into another row, and group that row with the other table, and group that relative to some other page elements, and so on. And then I can use double-click to traverse in and out of this hierarchy, keeping sub-groups grouped and nudging or resizing their contents together. Your proposal for a way to reach deep into a hierarchy to select individual objects may also be useful at times, but I rely on the ability to manage subgroups and maintain the relative size and position of their contents, so resizing or repositioning individual objects at the bottom of the hierarchy is a much less common use case for me.

@Herbert123 It appears that multiple designers in this thread conside isolation mode not only useful but essential. That's "a dose of reality" for you. Why are you double-clicking objects in Illustrator (or Affinity Designer) if you don't intend to enter isolation mode? What are you thinking should happen when you double-click? How is "entering groups with two clicks" different from double-clicking? When you try to single click an object inside a group but accidentally click outside it, then you exit isolation mode? With accidental stray clicks being a fairly common occurrence, how is single-click-to-exit better than double-click-to-exit? How can you drag to select a region of objects inside a group when single-clicking outside the group causes the exit of isolation mode?

Isolation mode should also work on symbols. In other words, symbols should be treated as groups for the purposes of isolation mode. This fits well with how symbols are shown as similar to groups in the Layers panel. (EDIT: I just noticed that symbols behave as groups only if the symbol is created from an actual group. I also noticed that when selecting multiple ungrouped objects, then clicking Create from the Symbols panel, it will create a separate symbol for each object, instead of one grouped symbol. This seems like a bug, at least unexpected behavior compared to how symbols work in other popular drawing programs.)

Isolation mode is very important. Layers and cmd-shift-click are poor substitutes, and frankly, the lack of isolation mode makes it difficult for me to take Affinity Designer seriously. Several design programs (Freehand, Canvas, IntelliDraw, and others) have had this since the '90s. Here's how it should work: 1. Double-click the group to enter isolation on its objects. All other objects on the page should be redrawn with their opacity multiplied by 50%, and the corresponding rows for those objects in the Layers panel should also be drawn at 50% opacity, to indicate that those objects are not editable in the current isolation mode. 2. Select, edit, delete the objects in the isolated group, or draw new objects, which will immediately become part of the isolated group. 3. Double-click a nested group to isolate its objects. 4. Double-click outside the objects of the currently isolated group to exit ("go back") one level of isolation. After isolating a nested group, going back once should bring you back to isolating the parent group. If there is no parent group, then you exit isolation mode completely and return to editing the entire document. This should be straightforward to implement with a stack of isolation mode contexts, each indicating an isolated group, in progressive order of nesting. Selection tools will need to check for membership in the current isolated group (last context added to the isolation stack). Other tools will need to create new objects within the current isolated group. The renderer will need to draw objects outside the isolated group with multiplicative 50% opacity. It's important to note that isolation mode should have no effect on the layer or object metadata that gets saved on the document. It should not actually lock or unlock other layers or objects, nor change their actual opacity. It is merely an edit mode that isolates operations to the objects of the isolated group. Several of the features added in 1.5 are superfluous compared to isolation mode as described here. Isolation mode should now become a top priority.

+1 for grid presets that could be transferred to other documents.

It should be possible to only have one axis in a grid, for columnar layouts common in web and print design. Those use cases don't really need a second axis, and all the unnecessary horizontal grid lines are distracting in that context.

+1 I have the same use case as lordgiotto. Would love to specify an offset for the start of the grid. Or alternatively: top, bottom, left, and right margins. So you could have a triangular grid, inside of a bounding rectangle, with margins along the edges. The main reason for this, of course, is to see what our web page and print layouts will look like with surrounding whitespace, as they will have in the finished product.