Mithferion

When you see it in good use you can understand why it is so popular.
Best regards!

Hi Dave,
 
its non-trivial to produce a mathematical offset from a cubic bezier that is correct. It is however possible to produce an offset that is ‘good enough’ that you’d never know it wasn’t right. We already have this code. I’ve said before that I intend to rewrite the expand strokes function to produce the actual offset curves in this fashion rather than re-fitting the expanded geometry as we currently do. I will implement this as soon as I’m able. To be clear, this is very important and will be done as soon as I can - but it is not trivial to implement and needs to be done carefully (ie not in a rush!) or the results will be just a different kind of wrong!
 
thanks,
Matt

I admit, I didn't understand why the tool was much needed, but that example is very convincing.

For some cases, like when you have several overlaping figures, that Tool saves you a lot of time, for example:
Best regards!

Your files haven't been converted - I don't know of any program which will overwrite RAW files and certainly not AP.  What's happened is that AP is now the default program for opening these files and I'm assuming you're seeing the AP icon when you list them in Windows Explorer.  Unfortunately I don't understand why LR is having problems, but I'd start by right clicking one of your RAW files, Open with and then selecting LR.  There should be an option to make that the default program - select that and then see if it resolves your problem.  I haven't seen any other reports of LR having problems with AP, so I'm not optimistic, but at least it's a starting point!

I'll add Sketch import soon. I actually already had a .sketch importer that imported their old file format (back when it was using Mac-native file serialisation) but I didn't tell anyone outside the company about it as I figured until our support for multi-lines and fills was working then we couldn't render documents perfectly. Now that they've updated to a very easily parseable solution I'll just have to rewrite it a bit. Our back-end already supports multiple lines and fills, but our UI does not, so we just need to add that ability...
 
Our PSD, PDF and SVG import/export will always receive updates to improve functionality and compatibility - and our SVG import/export is currently being looked at...
 
I can't comment on future products and services, but I will suggest to you that you may not need a 'Sketch viewer' or export to Sketch format... and you may be very motivated to stay 'in-house' with Affinity...

How about these versions?
 


S-Form_01.afdesign
S-Form_02.afdesign
 
 
With this type of drawing you have full control over curves, ends, strokes and even line style. If you are satisfied with the sketch, you can use the function "Expand Stroke" and get curves version.

@v_kyr I tried that already - it does not really solve my issue, when I have to modify the shape afterwards.
@Mithferion This is a very good approach - at least this allows me to have the "construction set" of my S shape in an artboard, in case the shape has to be modified later on - thank you for the good idea!

Using two circles:
Draw them Snap them Convert them to curves Create a node in the strategic points Break and delete. And there you have it
 
Best regards!

Some news:
 
For anyone who wants to give it a try.
Best regards.

I think they want to solve some problems currently present within the Boolean operations before building something like a Shape Builder Tool.
Best regards!

Thanks for pointing me in the right direction @Mithferion even if it is sad news. 

Hi there!
Here is a Topic where this is discussed (Spoiler Alert, Affinity won't be able to do so).
Best regards!

When they can no longer innovate they accumulate. As for scrum ... agreement to a point from someone who relished finding a better, easier way to get something done. (my computer is filled with batch files ) But too often scrum is a manager blindly yelling "make it happen" or firing people to "save money" leaving an impossible workload for those who are left. THey will do the best they can but then parts of the business starts failing. Watch their customer support help desks and you will get a good idea of where a company is. That is the first place they cut.
It often amazes me how corporations will squeeze the pennies so thightly in their fist that they miss the dollars flowing out the bottom.

Good morning. 
At the moment, it is necessary to bear in mind that a company must provide a quality product, work quickly, efficiently and at reasonable cost (be competitive). 
Sérif understands this very well and strives to provide tools that meet the needs of image professionals.
But it's a long job, because the specific needs of each person are different.
It is therefore necessary to make a choice that is not always the one we hope for and some people may feel forgotten. That's why it's important to express yourself.
But we can express ourselves without verbal violence and with courtesy (fair play). The ideal software does not exist.
I visited an Adobe forum, believe me, the reported bugs are numerous, the requests of functionalities, just as numerous.
Arrogance reigns there too, and that is a shame.
I have the impression that Serif is more attentive, closer to its users than Adobe. 
It's ONLY my feeling.
Yours sincerely.
Translated with www.DeepL.com/Translator (Sorry).

Hello Affinity fans
Today I drawn flamingos, interesting long-legged birds.
I have made not use of textures, patterns, pixel layers or brushes, I just wanted a very simple illustration, just shapes, pen and gradients.
Give a look at the illustration, drawn in Affinity Designer and tell me what do you think, leave your feed backs, write positive and negative
 
The full project here on behance

From the Draw Persona.
Select the Artboards you want to export.
 
Use these Settings.
 
This is the result.
 
Best regards!

Well, here I go again.
DISCLAIMER. I don't pretend to defend nor attack anyone, just to point out some things for the better.
 
Working as a BI/EPM Consultant, I know that as well: customers (Vice Presidents, Directors and Managers) yell at you, curse your entire family and tell you the way you are going to die. I know all of that but I ignore it:
Their behavior is unprofessional too. That's a way to intimidate and control but I don't fall for that. I come back at a later meeting with the solution (the valid point they did have) and that's it but (go to the next paragraph)...
 
The difference I see here is that I am in the same as you: I am a customer, and everyone else here is. You normally have one project per client at a time, but here we have professionals around the globe with different needs. We now can argue about this feature and how it works for many many designers, but even that won't represent the 100%. Now, Ben said they are going to try and add it. I support the idea of adding it. That's it. As I told you before: there are better ways to communicate your needs (Ben still doesn't get why this feature is so relevant, I guess), so, don't be like your customers and users.
You've made valid points and I understood them, but hey, when I don't make myself clear I try another way to explain.
Also, consider how long it took for big companies to implement simple features (like Cropping, in Illustrator).
 
Either way of meeting with the clients has advantages and disadvantages. Let's try to make the best out of it.
 
Correct me if I'm wrong but you are refering to this:
  - "Affinity Designer is the fastest, smoothest, most precise vector graphic design software available".
If that's the case: I agree with you, this feature will add and contribute in that department.
 
The example you brought about Adobe was neither from a small company and it took two years for them to restore previous functionality, so I guess this happens even with the big fish.
 
What everyone has been talking about was this. Right? Right? 

 
Again, this is for both sides, Serif and us. Looking forward to see this feature in Designer.
Best regards!
 
 
 

At least so far as CS6 ('cause I won't rent business-critical software), Illustrator still can't actually crop a raster image; it can only mask it.
For the benefit of those who may not have "been there," Illustrator trailed versions (i.e., years) behind its historic nemesis, FreeHand, in all these areas:
Editing in Preview Mode. (In other words, simply being able to edit paths with their stroke and fill attributes showing.)
Compound Paths. (Making a path with a hole in it.)
Clipping Paths. (Ex: filling outlined text with a raster image.)
Performing alignment and distribution on Anchor Points (nodes). (Still sub-par compared to FreeHand because Illustrator's insistence on two separate primary selection tools effectively prevents it from "knowing the difference" between a path being selected at the object level, as opposed to merely having all its nodes selected.)
Page 2. Egads! What a concept! The garment-rending, sackcloth-and-ashes outrage from Illustrator devotees (who had practically zero experience with FreeHand or any other drawing program) anytime the need for multiple pages was even mentioned, was just laughable. Why, it was going to be the end of the world; the coming of the apocalypse; illustrators everywhere would be committing hara-kiri!
Predictably, many of those same users now no doubt couldn't live without it. Many probably think Adobe invented the idea. And Illustrator's treatment of it is still cumbersome compared to FreeHand's more straightforward interface.
Basic Math Operators in Value Fields. Another one still inferior to FreeHand's. Illustrator can still only manage a single type of operator in an expression (i.e., multiplication/division or addition/subtraction, but not both).
User-Defined Arrowheads. And man, what a hack job of an interface!
Converging Perspective Grids. Adobe had to acquire FreeHand to copy this one.
That's just off the top of my memory. I could go on.
I've said it here before, and I'll say it as long as it takes: Simple market share no more correlates to functional superiority in drawing software than it does in, say,  motorcycles (my other passion). Illustrator is not the program to emulate. I've seen evidence sufficient to convince me the spunky Affinity Team probably gets that. Some feature requesters...I'm not so sure.
And yeah, time is of the essence in the current window of opportunity opened by Adobe's Customer-alienating licensing change. But compared to the pace of Illustrator's development over decades, development progress of the Affinity line is lightspeed.
JET
 
 
 

Thanks MEB. More than happy to share my work while I still fiddle around with various techniques. Last two days I was playing around with AP's native blend mode instead of the cumbersome luminosity masks. Was a bit counter-intuitive at first but once you get the hang of it, it produces stellar results. I'll stick to them for a while  
 
Background story here on my FB page.

I saw the other day a TV show where they put kids to guess how to make work one of those tape playback machines. No clue...The girl got angry as no one had told her the tape had to be inside, lol...
And that machine made my childhood(teen age, mostly) so different, as used it for loading Spectrum games, connected to a regular CRT TV (first one in B/W, lol).  Indeed the only "computer" that had seen before the Spectrum were the arcade machines in pubs. We were not even in the euro, yet. The kids now have born with technology, are being handled tablets at the age of 3 (kind of not sure personally about if this is a great thing...). Till 15 that I had no personal computers (but went to friends' houses who had, hehe. Indeed could make a sort of coded game with friends). Then came the monochrome XT computers (glorious green and purple), then the AT, I still have my old 286. Can't get ride of it somehow...That thing already allowed to create graphics pretty well (what we today could only qualify as pixel art, of course. I did not know that around 20 years later I'd be doing again that sort of art for a phone company...I dreamed about it, tho.)
 
It was my teen years...My childhood's toys were a bit less technology related :


 
Kids today don't know what they are missing.... 

Even among those who were there from the beginning at Bell Labs do not all agree on how much 'family resemblance' there is among the various systems that are POSIX or SUS compliant.
 
BTW, not only have I 'looked into this,' I met some of those AT&T crazies (& believe me, the term fits!) back around 1983, when they were celebrating the breakup of the Bell System that allowed AT&T to commercialize Unix & caused the rift with the academic community.
 
Bottom line: don't believe everything you read on the Internet about this. All is not as it seems to be.

Steady on.  Not a great way to motivate us.
 
Priorities doesn't necessary just mean what we think is important, but also what things have to be done in a certain order, and whether those things collectively also are more important than other features which need attention. It is also a balance of how much work is actually involved in what might appear to be a small feature.
 
I have just spent months refactoring a lot of our internal tools in order to facilitate faster future development and enabling editing features across tools.  This was a big task, but the few changes and additions I have made off the back of this have already demonstrated that this was time well spent.  Now, as a user you will have no idea of the scale of the work involved in changing our internal framework while preserving the current functionality of our tools.
 
Software development is a fluid beast.  Only as our code base expanded did it become clear that things could be achieved in a different/better way.  Due to a lot of commitments already made, the changes I wanted to make got pushed back a number of times. I have now made them, and 1.7 will come with some significant additions - though the scale of work to implement them might still not be obvious to the end user.
 
This thread is to show a raft of new (hopefully innovative) features that are in the pipeline, and you are accusing us of pretty much doing nothing to improve the software...!? All of these additions will achieve 99% of the use cases that have been thrown up (while not tying you to a very limiting grid based drawing method) - the only exception being the ONE use case where you want to be able to easily replicate sets of curves built previously using known grid positions for handles. (If I am missing the other use cases, you will have to explain them individually). AND, I have already made many comments as to why this feature will conflict with our current tool usage, but I think I have even said that we will try and add it.  So what is the problem?  You are not going to be getting 1.7 Beta just yet anyway, so why is this turning into a rant?  We have heard your request, and while I would personally argue that placing curve handles on grid produces a very limited artistic scope, I will accept it is the way you like to work.

After thinking about this, now I count myself among the people that ask for this feature and I do so believing that it will benefit both sides: users and Serif.
Best regards!

I understand what you say, Mark. And I really appreciate your effort and I engourage you to keep the good work.
Now, about this feature, the talk we had with Ben left me thinking about some things:
It's something that covers several use cases and it's used by a lot of people (I've read on the Internetz). It's not just that it's used, it's an important part of technical drawing and design workflows; even to the point that that single feature will prevent someone from adopting Designer. Maybe Ben or some of us don't use nor understand the full impact this has, but I can tell you that I remember scenarios where I would have loved to count with this. So, I encourage the Team to consider this little thing and what it represents. After that, I hope you integrate this in your internal roadmap and see it in a future release.
Best regards!
P. S.: I ignore if Photoshop has this, but I also hope seeing this one in Photo.