pixelstuff
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Posts posted by pixelstuff
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45 minutes ago, Petar Petrenko said:
What they don't mention there are modern photo editor features like font and vector layers or live filters.
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1 hour ago, srg said:
Obviously V3 will be different...I will definitely stay in V2 till I can then I'll switch to Photoshop.
Hopefully better different and worth the upgrade.
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2 hours ago, Bobby Henderson said:
Since private equity minded business guys are involved I feel certain they may put a good amount of Canva-spam inside those desktop applications.
I wouldn't bet on that. I would guess it will be like the Stock window with Pixabay and Pexels content, possibly expandable, or as an extra tab in the New Document dialog.
Hopefully, unlike what Microsoft is doing recently with Windows Pro, Canva realizes professional apps shouldn't do things which might be distracting if the user isn't requesting it. Out of sight and out of mind, but also easy to access if needed.
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18 hours ago, Aurea Ratio said:
I need serious customers who together form and create a serious forum. Can't you see the absurdity in a serious thread surrounded by the usual? No, I miss real professionals or deeply serious and experienced creatives who are completely focused on creating and not on filling letters on the internet.
Do you have an example of a serious forum from another company?
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9 minutes ago, Aurea Ratio said:
Is there a separate forum for serious customers who use the software for serious purposes? I ask because every time I visit the forum, I get the impression that there are incredibly many people in this forum who use it more as a warming room and for social purposes. Even this thread about something really pervasive, which can have drastic or significant consequences for several million customers, ends up wildly unserious.
There is more focus and serious users in even smaller open source forums, so I am speechless at the absence of a forum with a network of serious users of the software when the forum is hosted by the company behind the programs. It is just not helpful or trustworthy for allegedly professional software, and the content becomes significantly more serious and focused when you visit Reddit or other places.
Anyway, I'm going back to passive spectator mode, I'm probably not the only one holding back on asking about professional or advanced challenges when it's the same few who always answer here, not the right few in the specific context being asked about, and moreover, not the professional few in that context.
Having stated one's opinion thousands of times does not confer professional expertise. That's what the internet has proven.
I think in most scenarios the company website contains mostly questions focused on specific tools in their specific apps or bugs in their software. When people are asking general questions about industry practices they go to general forums that are not tied to a specific company. Because like R C-R suggested, unless you are writing a tutorial or collaborating on a shared project, the actual tool is less important than the final product.
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14 minutes ago, William Overington said:
I am not seeking numbers, I am asking what kinds of roles and activity are regarded as mid-range professionals and high-end professionals.
And, following on, what facilities that Affinity products do not have at present would they be seeking to become implemented in Affinity products.
William
Obviously, high-end professionals use Adobe software, if you don't use Adobe then you are not a high-end professional. The no true Scotsman fallacy.
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4 hours ago, SirPL said:
There's one thing I don't get. What does the Canva has out of this transaction? Like for real, they put 1B $ on the table for just a logo on a splash screen? How Canva profits from this acquisition?
My guess would be that Canva is wanting to compete more directly with Adobe to some degree, but they didn't want to start from scratch. So they may be planning to beef up the current Affinity apps with connections into their cloud system, like cloud storge or seamless import of Canva templates into the Affinity apps. They may expand the professional apps beyond the three currently in production, like Lightroom or Dreamweaver clones (no telling if they want to get into video). They might even go the Microsoft path of creating desktop apps and a stripped down web based app that looks similar.
Basically they are probably hoping to save time from building a professional suite from scratch and the main reason for wanting a professional suite is to go after some of Adobe's monopoly market share.
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3 hours ago, R C-R said:
The only reason I mentioned it was because I have never seen a commercial for Canva on any other streaming service besides in Prime Video, nor on any broadcast or cable TV networks. So I am a bit curious about if this is the start of trying to reach a broader viewing audience or what.
The comment about Affinity was just in case anybody wanted to know if it was mentioned.
That makes me wondering if Amazon it doing targeted ads in their Prime Video service. Perhaps you hadn't previously seen Canva ads because you never searched for Canva prior to the acquisition and those new searches were somehow cross referenced to your Amazon account or IP number or whatever.
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Really, if I make a suggestion and they implement the feature, the reward for me is that feature becoming a reality without having to spend thousands of dollars to build it myself.
- SrPx, William Overington and user_0815
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41 minutes ago, William Overington said:
Because Canva would not have the benefit resulting from what I had suggested to them if I had not suggested it to them.
William
I think the issue is that ideas just aren't worth much on their own. You need enough information about the idea to essentially become patentable. Meaning the real value of an idea is in knowing how to implement the idea. Once you have that much of the idea spelled out, then why not go ahead and patent it then sell the patent. (Because that is what patent law was designed for, protecting valuable ideas.)
Saying you'd like to see a car that stays clean without ever needing a wash, isn't worth much if no one knows how to build it. However, if you can tell someone how to build such a car, that might be worth some money. And also worth patenting.
Saying you want Affinity Photo to use A.I. to fill in selections with matching scenery isn't worth much. If you can tell them how to build the A.I. logic and integrate it into the U.I. that might be valuable. However there are already examples of that out in the world, so probably not too valuable. If it were really unique it would be patentable, but in this case implementation would be more like a one time labor fee kind of valuable, not a royalty per sale kind of value.
Telling Affinity you want to see layer notifications for each missing font instead of a global notification that only lasts five seconds, isn't very valuable. It would be a handy feature, but 99.9% of the effort comes in developing the logic and then writing it into the proper language. Even if Affinity wanted to pay for that idea, how do you measure the value it added to the overall software package? It is one of a few thousand or more features and might not even be something most care about. Nice to have, but no one is buying the software just for that.
It just seems like a nearly impossible task to place value on customer ideas that are so simple they wouldn't already qualify for a patent.
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6 hours ago, William Overington said:
A parallel is with a designer who is asked to design a logo for a new product, say sportswear. The designer listens to the directors of the sportswear business as they make their ten minute presentation of their needs, then the designer takes ten minutes, using Affinity Designer, to design a finished logo for them, that logo to be iadvertisements and on thousands and thousands of the sportswear items. How much should the designer be paid?
What you described is an example where the designer did all the work to make the idea from the sportswear business (a logo that communicates such and such) become a reality. Likewise Affinity is doing all the work to implement a user idea from the forums like the logo designer did. The sportwear business paid the logo designer and forum users are paying Affinity.
For your parallel to match up with Affinity paying for ideas, the logo designer should be paying the sportswear business for their idea. That would be silly.
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5 hours ago, William Overington said:
Regarding Pledge 4,
Will Affinity publish a statement of the process by which ideas and feedback are assessed please?
If Affinity takes up an idea suggested by an end user and as a result Canva earns more money than it otherwise would have done, will Canva pay any money to the person who suggested the idea?
William
In general, ideas aren't worth much unless they also come with a blueprint on how to build them.
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11 hours ago, PaoloT said:
Just an hypothesis: because the operating system is not developed by Serif, but by Microsoft?
Serif doesn't need to make the operating system, just use the API already built in.
Windows Tablets like the Surface Pro and 2-in-1s where the keyboards flip around backwards, have a desktop and tablet mode that can automatically change based on the keyboard or manually in the U.I. to trigger third party apps to adjust their interface to be touch friendly or mouse/keyboard friendly.
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3 hours ago, Raptosauru5 said:
I hope I am wrong, but I don't feel good about this.
Canva is not nowhere near to what I would call a "Professional software", compared to Affinity.
If Canva starts pushing their oversimplified design practices and pricing model, it will just become another garbage Figma...
...I hope I am completely wrong and Affinity will become even better then before.
Let's hope Canva purchased Serif because they wanted something a lot different than what they've currently built, including the Affinity brand name.
- SrPx and Raptosauru5
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54 minutes ago, jimh12345 said:
Good God, man, this is pure gold. You ran it up the flagpole and I, for one, salute it.
Can you translate what it means in regular language? Aside from a bunch of unrelated idioms strung together, I couldn't figure out what it was trying to say. After reading it twice I decided someone was just playing around with an LLM.
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22 minutes ago, JGD said:
define “a couple years”.
A couple years means two years. Microsoft said they will discontinue support for MS Publisher in October 2026 and no longer include the app in their Microsoft 365 suite.
It is possible the users of MS Publisher won't bother looking for something new or they'll try to cram the work into Word, but who knows. Some might be in the market for a low cost replacement.
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2 hours ago, NM_ said:
Problem is, they are developing it as a web app
Photopea is also a web app, a decade old now, but functions like a local app, just running in the browser. So having web app underpinnings won't necessarily mean it can't function like a professional desktop app.
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1 hour ago, SrPx said:
...keeping Affinity how it is (even if not making a faster pace! just allowing its survival), slowly gaining terrain to Adobe in certain parcels, does seem a lot smarter, requiring a lot lower investment, yet actively grabbing more market.
This is basically what Google is doing with ChromeOS. They didn't come out of the gate swinging with a major effort to compete directly with Windows or MacOS, but instead found a niche and then gradually chipped away at the borders to their competitors. They are now on the verge of competing with the big boys.
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13 minutes ago, firstdefence said:
Select the Move tool 'V' on the keyboard, then select image layer and the transform options should become active.
@pixelstuff doesn't the perspective tool distort the original design so that its no longer an accurate facsimile of the scanned document.
It seems to me that is exactly what you want. You already have a distorted scan, you are wanting to reverse distort it basically.
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10 minutes ago, walt.farrell said:
Physical location is not terribly important, though it has some effect.
In case you're not familiar with Brooks's work, it's about how you can't just throw twice as many people at a project and finish in half the time. IBM provided that in the early days of the S/360 mainframe.
Something similar happens in computers, where having 2x the number of cores does not give you 2x the speed.
That reminds me of some of the comments from the Star Citizen developers talking about how studios in different time zones does have some benefits when one team working on something finds a bug in another system, they can pass the info to the other studio on the other side of the world who works on it while everyone is asleep, then when the first team comes back into work the next day it's fixed.
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27 minutes ago, JimSlade said:
How do I enable the transform panel? It's visible but everything disabled.
Her is an example of what I have.
The horizontal lines are not at right angles to the vertical lines.
Those look like they are perpendicular to me. When I drop it into Affinity Photo and pull guides out they follow along perfectly.
EDIT: Wait, I zoomed in closer and see what you are talking about. The perspective tool should work fine for fixing it.
You can see in the upper right corner how far I shifted the right side down, leaving a transparent area.
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19 hours ago, Ben Wiens said:
iPad Pro=Surface Pro
Sure I would like the Affinity Suite on my Samsung Galaxy Note 20 Ultra 5G because it would be great to sync and work on files on both devices and this phone is pretty big and powerful, and there are tablets that are even more capable. But Affinity Publisher isn't available on the iPhone either. Think about it, Apple has created a bigger device with a 12.9 inch screen called the iPad running a more advanced operating system than the phone. But in the Android world the tablets pretty much use phone software even though they are often phablets or tablets. But Microsoft Surface tablets are available in the 13 inch form factor running full Windows which will run the regular Windows Affinity Suite while the Apple iPads are actually running a lesser Affinity Suite. Both the iPad Pro and the Surface Pro with similar specs are roughly the same price at C$1,500. So why are people complaining then, there is another solution in the Windows world that is even better than in the Apple world?It's all Microsoft's fault
Oh, the problem is Android is used on most phones that aren't Apple and this simple operating system has just got popular and it's use has extended beyond what is practical, so really Android is resulting in a big headache for society and Samsung is part of the problem as they used to sell Windows tablets but no more. But this is Microsoft's fault really. Apple phones don't run on Android, they run on an Apple iOS. Had Microsoft done it's job properly, all the other phones would be running on the Windows Phone operating system. I had one of these phones and they were great and this would have killed Android. Had Windows phones been popular, all the small inexpensive tablets would be running full Windows and running Affinity Suite would be no problem.The ideal device mix
I've thought about work flow on different devices for several years now and here are my ideas. The ideal is that people have three compatible devices. (1) A 100 mm (4 inch) screen wrist phone running advanced Windows watch or Apple watch software. (2) A 200 mm (8 inch) screen device running full Windows or Mac tablet software optimized for small devices which would include phone software. (3) A 400 mm (16 inch) screen 2 in 1 convertible laptop running full Windows or Mac software, plugged in to a 27 inch monitor at home or office.I've wondered why Affinity hasn't taken the touch interface from the iPad and created an optional Windows Tablet mode for the desktop app when running on Surface Pro tablets. That would be a really nice feature and presumably most of the logic and UI design has been figured out already. They would just need to connect the front end to the back end.
Canva
in Affinity on Desktop Questions (macOS and Windows)
Posted
If worse comes to worse, Windows Paint has layers now. The competition is ramping up!