Fritz_H

Trying hard to disagree at any cost, hm? I pointed out clearly that incompatibility is NOT common, it can easily be addressed by the developer and even a "save as <old version>" is common practice. None of that is provided by Serif. I can not think of any reason why a customer like you does intentionally disagree to a relevant feature and useful improvement for all those victims of Serif who lost many hours of work due to Bugs in pre-Beta Software sold as "V2.0".

What's the difference between Microsoft 365 and Office 2021? - Microsoft Support For some unknown reason, you keep talking about the different license-models. That´s not the point here...

Office 365 is more or less the same as Office 2019. (which is not fully true since Office 365 receives new features every now and then.. recently they added a writing-style-optimizer etc..) Office 2016 and older are different products with a different feature set. 2007? really? we discuss incompatibility from V(n) to V(n+1). Office 2007 is 3 or 4 Releases ago (2010, 2013, 2016, 2019) since we are now at Office 2021.

In these cases: 1. the updates are free 2. the updates provided an improvement over the previous version. both is not the case when comparing V1.x vs V2.x Compatibility depends on the data-structure in the file. Microsoft uses (some type of) XML. Feature A Option A.1 Parameter x Parameter y Option A.2 sub-option A.2.1 Parameter x Parameter y etc. etc. Features that are unknown to the old software are simply skipped. That way lots of contents may be preserved. useful since: 1. usually only some of the new features are used in a document (80:20-Rule 80% of users use only 20% of the available feature-set) 2. Serif did not add that many new basic features to V2.0 Google offered me this: How to Save a PSD File for Older Versions of Photoshop (lifewire.com) "When you open a newer Photoshop PSD file in an older Photoshop version, the new features of Photoshop don't carry over when the file is opened in a version that doesn't contain these features." There is no reason why a V 2.x file which contains only V1.x-features (an image, a text-box and perhaps a Gaussian-Blur live-filter) can not be opened by V1.x Of course: if the V2.x file contains the (for most) useless normal-map stuff, this will be lost/skipped when opened in V1.x I think, Serif made this incompatibility intentionally since it is possible and common: I already mentioned MS Word. Other major developers offer at least to save to older formats: Drawing file format compatibility in AutoCAD | AutoCAD | Autodesk Knowledge Network (Btw: there is a new AutoCAD-Version every year = file-compatibility is given in chunks of multiple releases.. => AutoCAD 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022 and 2023 share the same, compatible file-format...)

Serif-FAQ: "As you would expect, V1 will not be able to open V2 documents,.." wrong. I expect that V(n-1) does open files from V(n). Ever heard of a software called Microsoft Word? Guess what: Files created with Word 365 can be opened with Word 2019, 2016, 2013, 2010, and 2007. Features that are not available in an earlier version are ignored but the document and most of it´s contents are available. Please: no discussion about "this is not possible..." it simply is possible; Serif just did not implement it. Lack of time? Lack of knowledge? attempt to force customers to fully migrate to V2.0? We don´t know...

Spam created by an AI-Chatbot?

Direct Draw Surface - Format DirectDraw Surface - Wikipedia

I guess, in 2023 we may expect that applications handle this scaling automatically...

Screenshots wären praktischer...

Those guides I can drag from the ruler. In Version 1 they are blue - not useful on a blue background...

after asking google that DDS means: how "many" Users out there actually need this? 5%

Fully agreed. Instead of going from "well.. yes" (lots of promising ideas that need some polishing..) to "Hell, Yes!" Serif went to "well, well, well... perhaps."

@Andreas Gewies hm.. Serif can´t even provide a flawless V2-Version. According to the posts in this forum the most recent versions are slow, unstable and still lack most of the user-requested (sometimes basic) features... And you suggest to spread out the available development-manpower to even more products? sure?

Diagrams? https://www.diagrams.net/

True, in times of AI, ChatGPT etc.. we may expect that tools/cursors etc.. automatically change the color, depending on the background. BTW: does V2 finally offer to change the color of guides?

I don´t know if the following is language-specific but in german we say, that people do not read/understand/"process" a NOT in a message. Wording-Suggestion: "This operation can not be undone." (I know, still contains a "not" ...) but the real question is: WHY?

I guess, I suggested multiple times to consult usability-experts... but as it seems, Serif is still searching for such service-providers...

Having to do something different to achieve the same result is a sign of bad usability.

The fact, that users specifically complain about the GUI-size of the Affinity-Applications and not about the GUIs of all applications on their setup in general makes clear: Solely and only the Affinity-GUIs are too small. Therefore: telling the user to re-scale the whole Operating System - Interface just to make one Application less hard to use is inappropriate. Perhaps Serif is overwhelmed by their success and now suffers from the same lack of IT-staff as all of Europe does. (probably even worsened by the Brexit..)

@bt1138 and @Franciose R (sorry, did not find the Cédille on my german keyboard..) Please don´t get me wrong: it´s not purely about the money: for me it´s mainly about the fact that paying expresses appreciation and recognition of the work of Serif which (to me) mainly consists of ignoring user-requests. Esp. since none of the updates addresses the complaints/suggestions we all know from this forum.. (Variable fonts? improved UI?, improved UX? Image-Browser? etc. etc.)

Hi @Granddaddy thanks for your reply. "99.99 USD" - I really hope this price is excluding taxes since the price in Europe including taxes is 119,99€ (= 127,25 USD) "MS Publisher 2000 font selection was broken by Windows update some months ago" - well, that MS software is more than 20 years old and Affinity Products have been affected by that MS Update too... "I couldn't pass up a bargain" - that´s what makes me think back and forth "I have some confidence that Serif will.." - well, sadly I am pretty sure Serif will continue with their habit to ignore User-requests. But thanks again for your thoughts.

Some time ago I purchased all 3 licenses just to support Serif (although I hardly ever use Designer or Publisher). I found a lot of room for improvement in Photo 1 and offered my suggestions in this forum. Other postings showed that there are many more people out there complaining about usability issues like I did. Sadly Serif decided to .. well... do whatever they did, but as it seems they did not address the usability issues (for example a far too tiny UI). Even worse: as recent postings show, they did not even provide a solid = speedy product for their preferred platform: MacOS. It´s already hard for me as a Windows-User, to accept that I have to pay the same price for a worse product. But to see that there is no backwards-compatibility, no UI/UX improvements, hardly any of the basics addressed... this makes me wonder: pay 50€ for a product that still does not make me happy? What do you think?

I know, Serif said: " I can't tell you when this will happen..." but: will the new installer be available BEFORE the time limited -40% offer ends? Thanks.

That´s true. But on the other hand: that feature was long overdue...

Mr. Connor DID reply - but not provide any hint if this change-request will be forwarded to the DEV team or not. During the time of version 1.x this was a common part of Serif-Team - Feedback.