JGD

Nah, it should stay open until the heat death of the universe or for as long as the forums themselves are open (whichever comes first). You see, we speculated a lot, and there will be a lot of told-yo-so's to be said (which side will be doing so remains to be seen). And not just final, definitive ones (hopefully not, because the only definitive ones would be about worst-case scenarios), but at every crucial juncture.

I mean, yeah, that article’s title makes even more sense now, considering how regulators would see an acquisition of Canva by Adobe as even more of a problem… Overall, from what I’ve read today, I am a bit less concerned about Canva’s future in that regard. The jury is, sadly, still out on Affinity’s future inside of the “Canva family”, as they like to call it, but Flourish’s apparently preserved identity does seem to be a positive indicator (I actually had some colleague suggest it as a tool during one of our PhD seminars and I didn’t even suspect it was owned by Canva, so there’s that). It does seem to be cloud- and subscription-based, on a freemium model, and maybe it already was before, which would mean they already had extra synergies with Canva as a company. The latter suddenly having perpetual licenses and offline apps in their portfolio would indeed represent a pivot, or a diversification, on their business model, and if they stick to it and respect us all in the process, and further shield themselves from hostile takeovers, hey, more power to them, I guess. 🤷‍♂️

They could, however, have reasons to kill products that compete with Canva. Though it’s patently obvious that they target slightly different segments of the market, and that they’re adjacent enough for Affinity to be a bit of an upsell/upgrade, which might give Canva an edge over Figma or whatever lower-priced clone – offered under an equally lower-priced subscription tier, of course – Adobe may create or acquire at some point. As I’ve said: this all comes down to how greedy, complacent and/or shortsighted Canva’s executives may be in the future. Yes, they may see the cheap perpetual licenses with no extensive on-line sync and collaboration features as a gateway for more profitable – or at least more consistent as far as revenue is concerned – subscriptions, but the case for them being able to milk us all due to an independent option like Affinity – especially Affinity Publisher, even in its incomplete, RTL- and multiline-composer-less form! – no longer being available can also be made. For Affinity’s perpetual licenses to be completely safe, the folks over at VectorStyler and those at Pixelmator would have to partner up and somehow concoct a PageDesigner (sorry, FOSS peepz, Inkscape+Gimp+Scribus just don’t cut it on a technical level, because they’re frankly horrible in different ways and aren’t integrated in any meaningful way like LibreOffice is, so they don’t even have that redeeming quality going for them) and start eating away at both Adobe’s and Canva’s user base with the perpetual licenses they also based their business model on, because that’s how healthy markets work, with proper checks and balances, and not as duopolies. And I’m not even joking about this; with one company based in Salo, Finland, and the other in Vilnius, Lithuania, they’re practically neighbours when compared to the Canva-Serif pairing, and almost on the same longitude, let alone the same time zone. Heck, if either team was up to learning the other’s exceptionally weird native language, they might even properly merge and still be able to visit their loved ones every now and then after a short flight or 11-hour drive (or shorter, after that newfangled Finland-Estonia tunnel under the Baltic Sea is finished, of course, and let’s not forget the high-speed train corridor that’s being built over there as well). And, to wit and from a geopolitical/economical/regulatory standpoint, because I did mention the US’s and someone else mentioned the Aussie context as well, it would neatly split all actors between the behemoth that is the US, the historical Commonwealth (yes, we can see how synergies across it are easier, that’s not being called into question) and the EU (especially the Baltics and the Finns, which might very well stick together or at least forge powerful alliances even in a post-EU scenario, for reasons I’m pretty sure I won’t have to elaborate on here), thus keeping things a bit more cohesive and compartmentalized, i.e. safer from acquisitions across those “borders”. It would be a huge win for us all as consumers. 🤷‍♂️

@PaulEC did well in apologizing, and I won’t pile up on your colleagues with basic assumptions, either. But you do know that both things can be true, right? Having dedicated themselves honestly to the products and the company, and still having gotten a golden parachute of sorts and leaving said company in the hands of another whose licensing model – which, let’s face it, was at least half of the reason many of your current customers picked your products in the first place – is completely antithetical to that of Serif, I mean. Which, no matter which way you slice it, is what effectively happened here. If anything happens to Affinity, it will completely and irreversibly tarnish their legacy, I’m afraid, and you also know that, and you also know we’ll be here in the forums to remind you of it before the bosses at Canva turn off the lights. Anyway, I won’t dwell too much on that, and just add another €0,02; this just made me realise that Serif would have actually done better in having offered a hybrid subscription/perpetual model from the get-go, perhaps with faster releases. It would’ve either prevented this mess in the first place, or make us believe that Canva would at least have a great working example of a hybrid model to learn from and accept into its portfolio. But nah, the optics of this are definitely not as rosy as your pledges paint it. We will only barely trust Canva – and, by extension, Serif employees and Serif as a subsidiary, because that’s the new hierarchy now – and be at ease after a few hybrid releases, with proper reassurances that we won’t ever lose access to our apps and our files in at least some capacity (again, Typeface.app’s licensing model comes to mind, and it would be great if Canva actually opened up about their future plans and pledged on whatever model they have coming). Yeah, it’s a terrible position to be in, and I don’t envy you, but if you’ve ever been through a breakup, an infidelity episode, or whatever, surely you know how these things work. It’s hard to regain trust once it’s broken, and the company they picked, the naïveté of thinking that such a set of pledges wouldn’t be necessary at all on day 1 but then also thinking they would be enough moving forward, etc., doesn’t bode well at all for the future. Only time and the actual goods will fix it, and I’m not just talking about v2.5 and v2.x, but also v3 and beyond. We will trust those pledges when we see them being delivered upon and when we can finally say “ah, Canva changed its ways, its target market and business model, and became more flexible and welcoming towards us, just like Serif was”. It would have to be a bit like the Apple+NeXT “merger”, with Serif sort of taking over or at least heavily influencing the culture of the combined corporate entity, and being such a smaller team on a different continent, and being blatantly called just “the last piece of the puzzle” (what “puzzle”? World domination? I know I wouldn’t want to be reduced to that, especially if the products I was responsible for were supposedly the higher tier ones, oof), nah, mate, it ain’t happenin’. Oh, but there’s more! No matter how any of this plays out, Canva itself, and by extension everything contained therein, also has to survive the inevitable IPO (ahh, see, there’s your “world domination”), that its cash-lusting VC backers will inevitably push for. Which may obviously include an acquisition by Adobe itself during a monopoly-friendly US administration, something we all know is always around the corner. Do you also want to deny that plain, painful and obvious truth behind this entire charade? 🤔 We trusted you, at Serif, to not to sell out to Adobe, on account of it being a longstanding competitor, like Quark or Corel, and especially on being small and having survived all these years to an onslaught of acquisition attempts which we’re sure you were a target of… I suspect we’ll never trust Canva as much, even after an extra decade of bold and exciting Affinity versions and perpetual licenses, because… you’ve guessed it, Macromedia and spineless shareholders. We’ve seen this exact scenario play out before, and there’s nothing you, or Canva, or anyone else for that matter can ever do to make us forget it, it will always be on the back of our minds. 🤷‍♂️ And yep, I know this is a 180° turn over an earlier comment of mine, sorry, but I hadn’t heard about the whole VC and investment fund situation, nor that Canva’s founders and owners were such zillionaires already… I really thought their product, while certainly big, was not that popular and pervasive, but now I do and I’m still in a bit of a shock. Moving back to CC does seem almost like a sensible move, IMHO, because opportunity costs and investment in new tools are absolutely part of any such equation (you know that, and I’ve always held Serif employees to account regarding this factor even when discussing product features themselves, let alone momentous business decisions like this one). And you also know I’m a teacher who’s been warning my students of all those sorts of caveats regarding Affinity, and now I have an extra big one to add to the top of the list. We’ll obviously be installing your software on our machines and providing them with access to it because, yes, you may become the next “Macromedia” and the alternative industry standard, but also warning them about seriously learning how to use CC because it’s still the standard in the corporate world and… you may indeed become the next “Macromedia” and be gobbled up. What a mess, yikes! 😬

I mean… They may look at Adobe and the fact that there’s nobody else with a complete DTP package (never was, in fact… Macromedia only had FreeHand, Flash and Dreamweaver), do their math and realize they’re willing to leave on the table one or two out of the three million of perpetual licenses that Serif sold, because maybe they convert at least a third of them to a more expensive subscription and finance the app with the proceeds from their main Canva customer base. The math doesn’t work in our favour, I’m afraid.

While I get your fears, I do trust the Aussies and the Brits to indeed take on Adobe instead of selling out. It’s the kind of hugely monopolistic transaction that would certainly raise all sorts of antitrust alarms, as did the Figma one before it. Heck, it would be even worse because Affinity, if it is to remain in Canva’s line up as-is or even in remotely similar form, is the only credible, cross-platform, commercial alternative to three of Adobe’s most important CC apps. That the Macromedia acquisition was ever allowed in the first place is what truly boggles the mind…

P.S.: Where’s the equivalent video from Canva, where its bosses show their faces and undersign their part of the pledge? Where are their user accounts in their forums to interact with us directly like you all did? I don’t think it might undermine your authority, quite the contrary, and it would go a long way to show they’re serious about professional design tools, not just hellbent in acquiring IP.

A couple of observations on the recent news, as a very special tester and the guy who suggested Serif bet the farm on Affinity at a time they were seemingly already doing it in secret (yes, remember that e-mail you got back in 2014, where I even quoted Churchill? That was me): • The video that was posted on the news page was not very reassuring, and any PR specialist will tell you that. • The pledge is all well and good, but it is not legally binding and, I take it, was not posted right away upon the announcement of the acquisition; and while the negotiations were done in two months and that does seem to be a very short time when it comes to these things, was it that difficult to have said pledge ready to go on day one? Another PR disaster, IMHO. • Canva doesn’t have the best reputation overall, as a tool, among professional designers; however, they do seem to be loaded with cash, and their explanation that there is not much of an overlap in functionality, but perhaps in target market (i.e., some Canva users may want and actually be able to graduate from it to Affinity, or use it as a more advanced editing tool for objects even if they stay largely within the confines of Canva, kind of like you can already do across Affinity apps, and Affinity users may benefit from collaborative tools, for sure), does make sense, and sure, there may be some synergies, and Canva might be able to undercut Adobe both in subscription price – because we all know a subscription is coming, let’s not fool ourselves – and flexibility – if it makes financial sense and they don’t get too greedy, yes, them offering perpetual or semi-perpetual (à la Typeface.app) licenses, for which Affinity is famous for, may remain a thing. And yes, we can’t be hypocrites and complain about Canva not valuing design as a professional pathway if they do indeed make good on their promises and start promoting their newly acquired serious tools and tutorials, which may lead people into making decent amateur design or even studying it at some level, and to Canva not just being part of the problem but also providing the solution. Heck, the files produced in Canva may even become better on a technical level if they move towards Serif tech at some point. • Canva also has bad reputation when it comes to AI, and while we don’t expect them to drop it, we may give it the benefit of the doubt out of necessity. Expect, however, thorough sifting of EULAs, and maybe even lawsuits if user creations are ever mined for content. • We’ve been burned in the past, and none of this is very surprising, only sad. In hindsight, it’s patently obvious that Serif was lacking the resources to keep up with Adobe after their seemingly vertiginous pace during the early years. • The promises of missing features being added to V2 are all well and good, but in a sense, they are a bit too good; some of us suspect the team is just trying to wrap it up, and that indeed V3 is shaping up to be a very boring cash-grab, or mostly Canva-focused (because that integration will surely take time and can only really start now, if it does become a thing), and us losing access one day to V2 activations is also a concerning prospect (the indefinite maintenance of activation servers for as long as Canva exists as a corporate entity, and maybe even some properly laid out exit strategy in case it goes belly up, should be part of the pledge itself, spelled out in writing or even added to the very EULAs, and become legally binding, between Canva and us, the customers). • Until all these fears are well and properly assuaged, I – and, I suspect, many others – won’t even bother with giving suggestions for my pet features on the betas, the topmost – variable font support – having been the first one mentioned in said video and on the pledge. Why should I, if Adobe already offers it in such stable form, and me having to switch back to CC may become a reality? Not until V3 rolls around as a truly groundbreaking, perpetually-licensed set of apps, and especially not now when Affinity devs are loaded with cash and could and should hire proper testers and pay for proper focus groups, instead of relying on community efforts. You see, you had a tacit, unwritten agreement with your testers, in that we knew you were, staying with the Churchillian metaphor, the strapped-for-cash underdogs that were fighting the good fight, and with this acquisition you obviously lost a lot of that goodwill and the tiny bit that remains is now on probation, if not on thin ice. With Canva being just the lesser and more affordable and flexible of two evils – at least for the time being –, we’re now just your customers, not your fighting buddies, sorry. That is not to say that you won’t keep fighting, but you’ll also have to do so to get at least our basic confidence back (not just to get new switchers from Adobe, which I still hope you do as long as you’re not trapping them into a technological dead end), and you won’t get unbridled word-of-mouth from us anymore because obviously we will warn our colleagues, students, etc. of all the corporate shenanigan and technical caveats (i.e. Affinity, in its free educational/non-profit version, is nice to learn just in case it turns into an alternative standard, but not safe enough to bet an entire portfolio on it lest it’s canned or something, and definitely even less of a safe option in its commercial incarnation for the same reason, and I hope Canva realizes this and doesn’t nix perpetual licenses based on understandably skewed sales numbers). V2.x, and especially V3 and beyond will be crucial in that regard. TL;DR: nice as all of you at Serif may be as people, unless Canva allows you to interact with the community as you always did, and treats the community according to its very special ethos and idiosyncrasies, you likely lost us all for good, and will see at best a cooling down period until we see you all make good on your pledges. It’s not vindictiveness, it’s just basic human behaviour; why would we, as old Macromedia users, old Creative Suite users, old Plus users, etc., keep blindly investing our time and mental energy in the development and improvement of this piece of software after having been so thoroughly burned, time and time again, by greedy corporate entities and technology transitions? My €0,02.

@Patrick Connor I am very happy to see positive feedback on my penultimate post, by the way. As for the other right above this one, where I mentioned writing papers and giving the industry as a whole a proper jolt, I really meant it. As a typography user, creator and educator, I am not too happy about the current lacking – nay, half-assed, if I may be so blunt – implementation of variable OTF fonts in software packages; sure, it… works, and we need it also in Affinity regardless of its current state, but we can and should do better as a collective. Very conveniently, as part of my PhD, I still have to publish a second paper until the end of next year, and even after that, we – sadly, or thankfully, I guess I'll figure out in due time if I can handle the pressure – in our research centre have to fill a certain biennial quota of publications, so… we might as well make truly useful ones. Patents seem to be highly valued over there as well, and my supervisor has some experience with those (you know, with his calligraphy app for the iPad and whatnot) and I wouldn't mind joining him in that club, so… if you're interested in taking the reins and really setting trends, hit me up. We're actually both part of a team of ten researchers, all working on this kind of stuff, but I'd say we're the ones more technologically-minded of the bunch, and it also bears reminding that Prof. Brandão has always been a strong advocate of Affinity and other tech underdogs (Glyphs.app, with whose developers we keep close contact and whose support we consistently get for our teaching endeavours, also comes to mind). If you want to check us and our work out, you can find us at https://typo.fa.ulisboa.pt/en/about/ .

This one takes the cake… Even the completely discombobulated Microsoft, which has a great typography department but still fails to support something as basic as OpenType ligatures across the entirety of the Office Suite (hey, if I want ligatures in my Excel spreadsheets, I want them, g*dammit… 😂 Now, in all seriousness, it irks me to no end having to use legacy fi and fl Unicode characters in PowerPoint, which I sometimes use for presentations in typography events), seems to be progressing in the right direction… I will also add that if Serif isn't in contact with other developers, or at the very least with specialized academics and type designers, with developing standards in mind, they should. Variable typefaces are a veritable UX conundrum, and I completely feel the developers' pain in trying to support something as… anarchic as the variable OTF format, not just at the technical, behind-the-scenes level, but especially at the user-facing one. Yes, all those text-based parameters and sliders make OpenType features, with its predetermined names grounded in tradition, seem user-friendly by comparison, I know. If you want my €0,02? Type designers being, err, experts in vector design, perhaps a future variable OTF version/spec should let them add specialized glyphs as visual labels/aids for their custom variable axes' end-, mid- and even custom points, which would then be used automatically by graphic design software packages. Hey, maybe I will even write a paper on that… Any of you peepz in?

Adobe seems to support them just fine. Of course, they are both the creators and main implementers of the PDF format, and creators, distributors and heavy promoters of variable OTF fonts, seeing how it's just a development of their old Multiple Master format (seriously, the other day I was playing around with a really old version of Illustrator, running on System 7.6 on top of Basilisk II, and I was absolutely shocked at just how similar the interface for manipulating Type I MM fonts was to their current implementation), so they obviously have their work cut out for them. Unless Adobe, Corel et al. have some sort of weird patents, it should be just a case of opening their files and reverse-engineer them. Voilá, presto! Anyway, and AFAIK from my own look into it way back when, Adobe's apps just take whatever interpolated values you picked and export the end result as bespoke, automatically-generated and embedded fonts for the relevant text strings (yes, a separate one for each combination of variables), so there's no need for converting stuff to curves, losing the ability to select text or ballooning file sizes, the works. Of course, when reimporting, you absolutely must have also an embedded Illustrator file stream, otherwise you're completely screwed. Perhaps you could look into making your own implementation of PDF files with embedded .afdesign or .SVG streams, or just metadata for the relevant text strings to save on file size, so that one could in theory reconstitute those multiple resulting fonts into their parent variable OTF fonts/styles? As others have said, variable OTF fonts are just not going away; not this time, and especially not with the might of Adobe TypeKit and Google Fonts behind them. Heck, even I wrote a paper on those; you can check it out in my ORCiD page in my bio if you want. And, as I've said before, my students are really using them in earnest (… as attested in said paper), which means that when they leave the Uni and enter the workforce, they'll either keep using Adobe CC, or switch to something else altogether, like Sketch. I know you don't like to hear this, and please don't shoot the messenger, but… I did warn Serif (a company called, of all names… SERIF!) years in advance of just how relevant and pervasive they would become. 🤷‍♂️ I cannot stress this enough, and to all the people rightly clamouring for RTL support: variable OTF font support should be included in a splashy v.2.x update (not a v.2.x.x one, but a full-blown point update, and maybe even a jump to v.2.5 for good measure), and RTL could very well wait for v.3… Allow me to explain: the RTL market is not even considering Affinity apps at the moment, at all, so they're not exactly invested in them, whereas a lot of designers, be they young and aspiring or established veterans, may have bought Affinity 1.x (let alone 2.x, because this thread and all related discussions date back to the v.1 days, if I may remind you all), with the expectation of it being a professional package somewhat approaching feature-parity with its peers (in their Latin-centric bubble, for sure, but it is undeniable that the vast majority of the design market in the West indeed doesn't need RTL; and full disclaimer: I'm a type designer with two finished but as of yet not commercially available fonts which support Arabic, so I fully understand what's at stake and feel RTL users' pain). And variable fonts being an external development, long in the making and over which Serif does not have much control, they are something third-party developers must adapt to and properly support, ASAP, and not the other way around. As I've said, the penalty can actually be people switching back to whatever software package they were using before, or to a different alternative to the proverbial 800lb gorilla in the middle of the room, just so they can stay up-to-date and competitive. The best way Serif can ensure people stay in the Affinity bandwagon for v.3 is to give them the bare essentials, and typography being the basis of design (think about it; other media and visual resources such as, say, photography or illustration can exist in standalone form, but not typography, or not to the same extent), yep, supporting the most popular formats available is as essential as being able to import and export in all popular vector and bitmap formats. Would you like being limited in what camera, or drawing tablet, or brush packs, or whatever you could buy for your creative endeavours because your supposedly very much up-to-date software package of choice refused to support them? Now extend the same exercise to something as basic as typefaces…

I will say this: my MA students, future designers, ARE using variable fonts as we speak. I have been warning Serif developers all this time, and they won't listen. They have several high-value users and testers connected to the industry and academia at the highest level, following – nay, setting – the trends (guess what I'm about to do when I finish my PhD in… typography education? 🙄), and yet… here we are. Let's just ignore the 500lb pink gorilla in the middle of the room that is Adobe (they created the format, after all, and had already come up with Multiple Master fonts before it – I tried those on an ancient version of Ai running on a Basilisk II System 7 VM, and it's shockingly similar to the current implementation, down to the generic parameter sliders, so I'm guessing it just failed due to lack of support from type design applications, third party vector and photo editing and DTP apps, etc.), and look at one of Serif's actual competitors on the Mac, Sketch: https://www.sketch.com/blog/variable-fonts-improved-opentype-support-and-a-new-data-plugin-whats-new-in-sketch/ Sketch v.59, from 20-freaking-19, from four years ago, back when Affinity v.2 was just a blip on the radar (likely an internal Alpha, or a set of notes on a whiteboard, or something), supported variable fonts. Sure, Sketch is very much geared towards web and UX design, but there had been already such a request here in the forums the year before, as was already requested 2016 and heavily commented by yours truly the next year onwards! And I'm commenting here because a musician friend of mine (a musician who works in banking, not one of my design students, so you can see just how mainstream these can and will become), who uses a Mac, wants do do his own design work and variable fonts came up in conversation; I recommended him either Affinity or Sketch, but I'm guessing that if he enjoys playing with those, you won't get his patronage, and through no fault other than your own. 🤷‍♂️ Seven years, guys. Seven years. And at least six years of me warning you that it would eventually become a serious omission. There are now people, both here in the forums and out of them, literally skipping on the v.2 upgrade (or on Affinity altogether) because of this. This can't be a v.3 feature, it *has* to be added to v.2 at some point. No ifs, no buts.

Great! In related news, I managed to iron out the latest kinks on that machine (apparently you shouldn't be cheap when it comes to buying small-size, SuperDrive, to full-size, hard drive/SSD SATA III adapters, as they have a tendency to trigger all sorts of R/W errors – that wasn't the issue behind my woes with Affinity, but it made me seriously rethink my strategy, and is now fortunately fixed for good), and have it updated to all the latest versions of macOS and my apps, including Affinity v.2.1.0 GM. What's more, it even runs great on a 2009 Unibody MacBook, unlike the latest versions of CC. There's a reason why I keep using those old Macs around and kind of expect Affinity to run on them, because I'm just spoiled; it boggles the mind that it actually runs so well on hardware of such vintage, but it is what it is. In any case, I know what I'm potentially getting myself into, and have budgeted for getting a new 13'' or maybe one of those upcoming 15'' MacBook Airs on a moment's notice, just in case. All in all, it's a win-win situation, as the longer I postpone that purchase, the better the machine I can get by then, and as I'm just writing a PhD thesis and not doing much design work these days, it's not like I really need a very powerful laptop at this point (and if I do, that's what the Mac Studio is here on my desk for). 🙃

Fair enough. It's in no way comparable with Apple not supporting me booting my Mac or running my user account off of an external drive (especially the latter, something which their default install definitely allows even without reducing security settings). I guess I was still pretty mad about AppleCare giving me the finger over that (my Mac Studio borked itself around the same time after installing a measly point update, macOS 13.3.0, and I had to eschew the second option, which I preferred, in favour of the first one, which after some growing pains and tweaking in Onyx, is finally working for me)… We're good. But hey, APub does work now, so we should be extra good. It just goes to show just how resilient and compatible macOS still is, despite these weird new “holes” or “special needs” Apple keeps introducing in it regardless of ISA, because something something forced obsolescence greenwashing. In any case, I believe I should still send you bug reports and logs from this Mac and a now also unsupported 2015 MacBook Pro (especially that one, considering just how much more recent it is). You can read them, or ignore them, but… as they say, it's free data! Also, there seems to be a precedent of you looking at those despite obviously not supporting it officially, so… you know, precedents and stuff. Kind of like, hum, your entire legal system works. 🙄 I'm not demanding anything unreasonable, and would never consider your product broken or you as being negligent, and leave any bad reviews or whatever, over any of Affinity's apps borking themselves due to something obviously OCLP/Metal/SSE-related (there's a not-so-recent version of Photoshop, for instance, that is no longer compatible with the 2009 MacBook due to the lack of SSE4.2 extensions on its Penryn processor, for instance, and there's nothing anyone can do in the way of patching – not even Adobe, lest you start referring me to your EULA, like your boss did on the thread I'm linking to below, because I don't hack apps other than sometimes pasting custom icons on their information panel – to make it work, so that machine is defo on its way out). As a rule of thumb, I tend not to waste your time with anything very obviously hack-related and… as they say, “no lowballers, I know what I've got”, and what I've got is a geriatric machine (😂), and never made a secret of that here in the forums (see “precedents” above). It's just that I'm selling the 2017 5K iMac ASAP and, after that, if the mere fact that I'm using what you aptly call an “unsupported configuration” prevents me from asking you to at least look into bugs (if they're unfixable, or completely OCLP/Metal/SSE/whatchamacallit-related, yes, that is that and I don't expect you to bend over backwards to support my exotic configuration in particular, but it may be am obviously generic bug and I MAY be helping other users in reporting it), I guess I won't be able to help you much (with, say, stuff such as smaller glitches on an otherwise perfectly functioning computer – which my machine definitely wasn't the other day, and my bad, that one's on me because, as I said, I was completely on edge and mad beyond belief at Apple and anything Mac-related –, and it feels as if I'm being punished for being, you know, honest – or obvious Serif UI glitches – yes, these sorts of hacks do cause some general macOS UI glitches on occasion, but they are very easy to tell as such and are quickly fixed anyway –, especially considering the old MacBook's built-in display is non-Retina, and I no longer have any of those connected to a newer model such as my very much supported Mac Studio. Now, is there some passive-aggressiveness in my tone? Yes, there is. At least I'm open about it, and on why it is so. 🤷‍♂️ We have a bit of a history here in the forums (not with you personally, I believe, but when I say “we”, I mean “some Serif devs and me”, and “me and Serif as a company”, including binding contracts signed and all), and to quote you, “we've been down this road before”, except over much more serious stuff, such as a very sensible, not at all outrageous idea of mine being called… what was the word? Ah, yes, “stupid”. Once again, a non-snarky, noncommittal, boilerplate response would suffice, methinks. Or maybe an even nicer “we may look into it, but it's not a priority because this is an unsupported configuration, and if we find it's due to that, there won't be much we can do about that” (and you could even be lying and wait for the problem to fix itself, which it might still if it hadn't already by the time you answered 😂). Or, since the problem fixed itself, the even easier and more neutral radio silence. Do I, the communication design major (my qualifications specifically in communication and marketing stopped at the measly BFA level, mind you), seriously have to teach you corporate speak as well? I should start giving out company-wide workshops, sheesh! 🤦‍♂️

Interestingly, the issue solved itself, so maybe it was indeed due to something wrong in my setup… Something was seriously amiss with the macOS 13.3.1 + OCLP 0.6.3 combo, as it was causing all sorts of weird glitches (such as macOS services and QuickLook not being able to access audio files – my alert sound, Sonumi, was being cut short, for instance –, icons and images not being properly rendered, etc., all issues reminiscent of broken SATA cables but, at the end of the day, software-related – and I did check they were, by accessing this Mac's internal SSDs through Target Disk Mode without any issues, other than KP'ing both an Intel iMac and my M1 Mac Studio when using a Thunderbolt 2 cable instead of my trusty FireWire 800 one connected to a string of dongles, which means I've found yet another software/firmware issue squarely on Apple devs' side). At first I reverted only the bootloader (not the post-install root patches) to OCLP 0.6.2's to some effect; most glitches were gone, but APub was still crashing on launch. But it seems the OCLP dev team got wind of these issues and released an updated build yesterday, 0.6.4, which fixed most issues, including APub's. Only Camo Studio seems to be acting up still, and crashing on launch as well, but this Mac has an integrated iSight/FaceTime camera which works fine, so it's not a big deal.

Hi! I know my configuration isn't exactly supported by Apple, but seeing how the non-Beta and even the latest Betas of APub worked just fine on my MacBookPro9,2 (Mid 2012) running macOS Ventura 13.3 under OCLP, I was led to think that that would still be the case at least until v3 of the suite came along, so here goes: Affinity Publisher, plain and simply, doesn't work. It loads right up until the splash screen, and then crashes. In case you need some more logs than the crash log already uploaded, I'll be happy to provide them. Also, I will update to macOS 13.3.1 shortly, and check whether it works or not. I'm also aware that resetting its preferences might help, but if I could get away without resetting the entire thing, I'd much rather not do it. Affinity Publisher 2 Beta-2023-04-14-023106.ips

Whoops, spoke too soon. It doesn't work on my MacBookPro9,2 (Mid 2012) running Ventura under OpenCore Legacy Patcher. It seems that it works for a split second, and then goes back to not working.

Hi guys! I've recently had a big issue with my Mac Studio: when updating it from macOS 13.2.1 to 13.3 my user account, which was stored on an external drive, borked itself, and then I couldn't add e-mail accounts or get iCloud to work when recreating it. I had to change tack and install macOS on the external drive and boot from it instead, and am now in the process of manually restoring all my apps and their settings. Enter the Affinity suite… Importing my MAS-bought v1's ~/Library/Containers folders worked flawlessly, but I can't say the same for all my ~/Library/Application Support folders for both v2 public release versions (bought from Serif's store) and the beta versions. I've tried everything, and checked both this thread and the reference post it links to. I also noticed that I still had a naming discrepancy on Affinity Designer 2 Beta's Studio preset naming conventions (the files on my Time Machine backup still followed the “com.seriflabs.affinitydesigner2.Studio.Preset.[persona].[preset name].preset” convention, instead of the seemingly current “com.seriflabs.Studio.Preset.[persona].[preset name].preset” one, but Photo and Publisher don't exhibit this behaviour), but regardless of what I did (such as recreating new Studio presets with the same names and replacing them with my original, backed-up files, and in Affinity Designer Beta 2's case, by also renaming them to follow said current convention), NOTHING worked. I mean, are you guys using some hidden, undocumented internal database that I'm missing? What use is exposing these files to the end user, or document their locations here in the forum, if Affinity apps don't recognize them nor have a way of manually import them anyway? I honestly don't feel like recreating ELEVEN persona presets by hand across all three apps all over again (and I'm lucky to have kept my V1 presets, otherwise that wouldn't even be an option and I'd have to do it by memory and take twice as long). And yes, I'm sure using the Migration Assistant app would automagically copy some hidden files with some special sauce that I'm missing, but considering what happened to my entire setup, which makes me want to avoid said app like the plague and start anew (incidentally, a recommended course of action from time to time, to lose old cruft from vintage macOS versions tailored to entirely different ISAs and installed on machines with different peripherals and apps altogether), and the fact that Affinity apps are supposed to be professional products for professional settings (where backup policies may not always conform to whatever Apple deems to be the standard), I would expect a greater degree of resilience, transparency and portability when it comes to user setting files. On the other hand, I can easily and successfully import Workspace files in the extremely vintage and otherwise finicky Adobe CC apps just by restoring them to their proper places in the Finder. Just saying…

Well, it seems my issue with Dark Reader has been solved (likely on your end?).

I'm having this issue now on v.2.0.4 (release), but at least it's fixed in the latest Beta (the workaround I've found was to copy whatever object that had the gradient I want to edit, paste it into a new file in the Beta, edit the noise values there, and finally copy and paste the object back into the release version)… Well, it seems this is a frequent regression and that Serif devs should pay more attention to this particular feature. 😬

Thank you for your swift feedback! If you find it, or open a new venue for that, that would be great. I don't recall us frequently having issues with the forum itself, but it may happen, so having it would. be nice. Also, while this bug/decision doesn't exactly stop me from using the Forums, for some users with special needs it may be more of an issue.

That is all well and good, except… the suggestion made here (using Dark Reader) did work, and all of a sudden (and after years of working fine, mind you), stopped working. The fact that you offer a suite of apps that supports dark and light UI modes, and almost anything in between (-ish, but the range, while not including neutral grey as your competitors do, is indeed impressive), and don't offer the same courtesy in the user forums (when the platform you're using apparently supports it!) is beyond me and tells me two things: that a) you don't get why dark themes are an important for usability in the first place and/or b) your left hand doesn't know what the right hand is doing. At this point, in AD 2023 (even LOo caved in and finally offered a dark themed version of LibreOffice!), I consider this a bug on top of a bad decision overall, not a simple oversight, and our comments not as a “feature request”, but as a collective “bug report”. And this will be more meta yet: there are no threads for giving feedback on issues with Affinity's main website, its online store or the forum itself, so… where else are we supposed to report issues with these? Twitter? Facebook?

I'm using a Mac Studio with an M1 Max processor (the base model) and 64 GB of RAM, and now running on Ventura 13.2.1. I haven't tested this on my old 13'' 2012 MacBook Pro (also running the latest version of macOS, thanks to OpenCore Legacy Patcher), but will be sure to check it out if I have the time. I've just managed to reproduce this crash with yet another icon template, but am now in the process of installing an update that just came out, so let's see if it fixes this bug. Considering how this bug was reported in December and a few updates, which seemingly didn't fix the bug, were out in the meantime, I'm not holding my breath, though… Edit: at first it seemed as if the bug was fixed, but upon trying to change the destination folder, boom, got the dreaded beachball again. Guys, seriously? This is a really troublesome bug, as batch exporting slices is a very important part of UI design workflows… Do you really need more than two months to fix this? Edit #2: the workaround posted by @Heinrichdsf and @Rriver now does seem to get the “Export Slices” button “unstuck” after successfully exporting at least one layer, but this is all too “voodoo-like” for my taste. Not every user will be savvy enough to try that sort of thing on their own or check the forums, and just assume the app is completely broken. Edit #3: after enrolling in the new Beta program, downloading the first v.2.1.0 beta .dmg and updating it through Sparkle to v.2.1.0.1709, the bug seems to be fixed. Further testing with other icon template files will be needed until I can confidently say I cannot reproduce it anymore but, so far, it's looking promising (as I indeed couldn't reproduce it, at least with one of the last few files that triggered it). Guess I may have spoken, well, not exactly too soon, but right as the dev team was getting around to fixing this. Good job!

By the way, I did manage to get out of the loop, by manually exporting an individual slice (through a click on the rightmost square-and-arrow widget/button, not the “Export Slices” one).

Hi guys. I've been trying to export an icon file into several .PNG slices, and the Export Slices dialog consistently makes AD2 irrecoverably hang. This is an old bug that also affected, IIRC, AD1, but it seems to have gotten worse; before it was intermittent, but now it seems to have borked this functionality altogether (I can try with other similar files, however). If you want, I can also send you the file for you to test on. I've also recorded a small video of it in action; you can't see the beachball cursor, because of some weird limitation in QuickTime, but believe me, it's there and it appears just a few seconds after the dialog opens (also, even if I quickly try to change to a different destination folder, those clicks aren't ever registered). Affinity Slices crash.mov