Clayton

It seems like this could be accomplished nicely as part of a symbols system. Create a symbol, rotate several copies around a corner point, and then edit the master (in context). This could benefit especially from one of my wishlist items for AD's future symbol handling: Snapping to geometry inside instances (most apps treat them like they treat bitmaps).

These tools would be amazing. Tangent snapping alone would be incredible for a wide range of applications from logo design to scientific illustration, not just isometric technical illustration.

What you're describing here is more of a competitor to Adobe Bridge than to Lightroom. Which is all well and good, but there's a reason Lightroom is a separate product, whereas Bridge is just bundled with Creative Suite / Cloud. I think this just speaks to different ways we use the software, but I can say definitively that LR's editing tools are about way more than just batch editing. There is actually overlap between LR and Photoshop, in that the develop section of LR is essentially Photoshop's Adobe Camera Raw importer in a different UI (and the different context of live, nondestructive developing versus developing once and creating a new PSD). In that light, I think it would make perfect sense if Serif's LR competitor had a similar develop persona to AP, just with different, workflow-related personas around it (such as "organize" and "publish" personas).

I'm not too familiar with Affinity Photo, but my understanding is that to use the develop persona by itself, you still need to create a new .afphoto file. If I'm wrong, and the develop persona can just save to metadata, well... Maybe I'm not fundamentally against requiring a roundtrip to AP then. :) Still, I would disagree that Lightroom is just "storage with some editing tacked on." LR's develop tools are incredibly powerful, and I think what I'd most like to see is for Serif's new app to leverage AP's RAW tools in an integrated way.

I would actually fundamentally disagree with this. What I love about Lightroom is that it's not Photoshop, that it has only the "photo development" tools I need, and that everything is non-destructuve. I tweak the majority of the photos I keep, and a major benefit of Lightroom's develop workflow is that you're always working with the original RAW file – each adjusted version is just a few kilobytes of metadata rather than another 10MB copy of the original. And that's to say nothing of not having all the layers and tools in the way when you just want to work on tonal and optical adjustments. Put another way, Photoshop and Affinity Photo are photo-illustration tools, while Lightroom is a photography tool. My hope is that Serif's DAM leans solidly in the photography direction.

Speaking of hunting for layers in the layer panel: One small feature that would make working with complex documents much easier is the option to auto-scroll to the selected object. There are probably times when you don't want to lose your place in the list, and thus this might make a better toggle within the panel as opposed to a global application preference, but however it might be implemented, it's definitely on my wishlist!

I have to agree about the artboard tool hiding behind the move tool. It took me way too long to figure it out at first (and I design user interfaces for a living!). I think the problem is that the other two tools that have floating palettes, smart shapes and text, each contain very clearly related functionality, while the move tool and the artboard tool are much more tangentially related. It's far less obvious what to expect from long-clicking on the move tool than it is from the smart shapes or text tools. If the goal is to keep the number of tools in the toolbar below a certain number, I'd definitely move the rounded rectangle tool into a floating palette behind the rectangle tool before I'd hide the artboard tool. It really should be a top-level tool.

Should it still be possible to add corner effects to artboards? Seems like this should be taken out along with boolean operations. Same goes for converting artboards to curves and setting rotation center.

Yeah, I think this is one of those things that makes perfect sense on the development side but doesn't really make much sense from the user side. The distinction between a "normal" document and a single-artboard document feels strange. Why shouldn't all documents start out as single-artboard documents? What's the advantage to not having a pasteboard by default?

So cool to finally see artboards in AD! A few observations: "Insert artboard" with the "document" size selected seems like it should make a blank copy of the current artboard. Instead, it makes a new artboard the size of all artboards, which results in exponentially larger artboards. This is probably a bug. :) The "v" shortcut to cycle the selection tool only works some of the time (in the other case, it cycles the selection tool "on" and "off" rather than choosing the artboard tool). It would be preferable to always be able to cycle it to the artboard tool with the keyboard. This is probably something that will come with future Affinity Publisher development, but it would be nice to have the option to automatically rearrange artboards. The pasteboard behavior is perfect. Having a shape crop as it leaves the artboard, but reappear once it's completely off, is the behavior Adobe should have thought of 10 years ago. You guys totally nailed it. It took me awhile to figure out that I could change the color of an artboard to get rid of the transparency grid. Not sure what you could do to make it more discoverable, but it's a great feature!

Ah, good to know. I just found what might be a related bug: modifier keys for some extended characters aren't working (e.g. option-R for ®).

It looks like this beta removed the shortcut to switch between the Artistic and Frame text tools. I liked hitting T!

I think there's an opportunity for Serif to improve a lot on Adobe's implementation of this feature. I wonder, rather than have a menu option with a modal, could this be integrated into the transform panel itself?

Long-term, I hope this is something Serif gets into, but for now, I'm pretty happy with Lightroom. Given that it's a much newer Adobe product, it has a more modern codebase and UI paradigm, and there are also still somewhat significant improvements in each new version. All that said, Adobe doesn't have a fire lit under them anymore with Apple dropping Aperture, so we'll see if LR starts to stagnate or become a subscription-only product. And even if it does neither, I have no doubt Serif would do some pretty cool things with the DAM / nondestructive photo developer concept.

Glad to see you're changing to option-drag for clone. One more thing that would be nice with cloning would be toggling: Currently, releasing the clone modifier doesn't cancel the clone operation (the original stays there after you lift your finger), but in most other apps, it toggles.

I agree, touching the outline should be the default; it's better because in general, you don't have to drag as far to select the same group of objects. I've used quite a few vector applications over the years, and I think only one of them used the "contained" marquee rule instead of the "touching" rule. And I'm not even sure if I'm remembering correctly because it was about ten years ago. :) If nothing else, it should be an option in preferences.