Jump to content
You must now use your email address to sign in [click for more info] ×

JGD

Members
  • Posts

    518
  • Joined

Everything posted by JGD

  1. Ah, yes. I am absolutely not calling that into question, and seeing how I only started using DTP apps in 2003, with QuarkXPress 6.x, I personally wouldn't know any better. My point was just that DTP apps intended to emulate age-old conventions… including footnotes, which, yes, had existed in metal typesetting for a loooooong time.
  2. Sure. But you do realize that there is quite a big functional overlap between word processors and DTP apps, right? It's mostly a UX thing pertaining to their lineage (as I made very clear from my, err, convoluted example workflow in LOo Writer, which to me is just a DTP app, only F/OSS and with extra steps. And way uglier, at that, but still more bearable, usable and interoperable than Scribus, of course). From a historical and functional standpoint, word processors are basically just glorified digital typewriter emulators onto which additional DTP functionality has been grafted over the years… footnotes and endnotes definitely falling under the latter category, IMHO. And if you want to look at from the opposite angle, DTP apps are just digital “typewriters” (or, better yet, descendants of actual digital typewriters, which were a – really powerful – thing) on a lot of steroids (and you could replace “typewriters” with phototypesetting terminals, hot metal typesetting machines before them, yadda yadda… Roughly speaking, and disregarding all the justification wizardry they offered and which only really advanced digital typewriters by IBM and the likes would eventually rival, they all had keyboards and allowed you to typeset stuff; no more, no less), which basically makes them really close cousins, or stepbrothers, or whatever, to word processors. To-may-to, to-mah-to, po-tay-to, po-tah-to. I won't do any more of this historiography of DTP tools, word processors or typewriters at the moment (because, incidentally, I have one class on typographic metrics values to prepare and, not-so-funnily enough, just ran into yet another annoying quirk of AD regarding “universal” guidelines which definitely warrants yet another standalone post here in the forums), but I'm willing to bet that even Aldus PageMaker had footnotes and endnotes quite early on, let alone InDesign or QuarkXPress. 🤷🏻‍♂️ Yes, APub is very affordable by comparison, but existing DTP apps have been, by their very function of serving standards and conventions that have been somewhat frozen for hundreds of years now, stagnant for decades as well. The only thing Serif has to do is catch up, and catch up they really must if they want to capture this market in earnest.
  3. Add another one to the list of those who not only need footnotes (something any basic word processor under the sun offers, mind you), but also who'll agree to disagree with your disagreement. I've been posting all sorts of really demanding comments in these forums for years (clearly not as many as you, but I've always liked to measure my output in quality over quantity), and not even a bad experience I had with a Serif developer (yes, I've had one) soured my relationship with the company, as their stance then didn't even come close to your posturing now (hey, at least they were defending their own work – something to which I always give a pass –, they don't need your help for that… And if they do need help, that's what moderators are here for). This is a user forum where users come to find solutions for their problems (whether they're something there's already a solution for, can be solved through a workaround or – as is sadly the case – can only be addressed by Serif developers at some point down the road), so I'll kindly ask you to leave us be and let us discuss what we actually need from our professional tools like adults. If we can't put pressure on a company of which we're paying customers (and potential ongoing customers still, at least when it comes to future paid updates, which I fully expect to come out one of these days), what use are the forums, anyway? Might as well shut the whole thing down and call it a night. 🙄 Just another two cents, on the subject of shortcomings, expectations and the consequences of not fixing the former and meeting the latter in a timely manner: I am now a full-blown MA teacher, with an entire class of 28 Advanced Typography students counting on me for guidance (I've been giving hint upon hint about it to Serif devs for years now, by the way), and we're now actively discussing, amongst Faculty, whether to steer our students towards Serif's Affinity apps (which are cheap enough for them to buy, even in a poor country like ours) or to just let them keep pirating CC by default like there's no tomorrow. As the latter is what they'll run into on professional studios, and what they may even be able to afford themselves if and when they set up their own freelance practices and declare it as a tax-deductible monthly expense, I guess this is still not the year when I – who my Design Department teachers/colleagues fully trust on this matter, as it seems I'm the most hardcore Affinity user and potential full-time switcher in there (incidentally, I was just “dogfooding” myself before by typesetting a basic two-page brief for my students in APub, and… well, to my surprise, no automatic footnotes for me, which means I should've stuck with my – wait for it – LibreOffice.org template¹ 🤦‍♂️) – will advise them to tell the students to take the plunge and make the switch. Sorry! 🤷‍♂️ ______________________ ¹ Crazy as this may sound, I'll actually be typesetting – as in, literally writing the work files and preparing the final versions for digital and print production – my entire PhD thesis (and have been typesetting all my papers and reports so far) in LOo Writer, of all solutions; MS Word on the Mac doesn't support vector images or DTP-like master pages and baseline guides, and strips out all index and cross-reference links when exporting to PDF, whereas neither InDesign, InCopy or APub support Zotero or Mendeley CSL field codes and automatic bibliography generation (and you won't see me asking for support for those in APub here, as not even the huge, 80lb monopolist gorilla will support them either), without which I might as well write the whole damned thing on a typewriter instead, and even if Scribus did at some point, I'd rather gouge my eyes out than subject myself to using it. But hey, APub will still be included at the very end of the print version workflow/pipeline, as LOo only supports RGB and I'll also be forced to open my final PDFs and manually change, one spread at a time, all the text to C0M0Y0K100 from whatever dark-brown-looking mess r0g0b0 is automatically converted into. 😬
  4. Ahh, shucks. Well, if only I could replicate my Zotero + LO setup, which I can't do without, on an iPad, I would've splurged on a new one (maybe a Pro?) for myself a long, looooong time ago. Until then, it's “MacBook something” territory only for me. 🤷🏻‍♂️ Maybe I'll get an el cheapo iPad Air/plain iPad or one of its successors when either of these two inevitably bite the dust.
  5. Cool to know! My ancient iPad 3 can't run any of those, sadly… That's why I had no idea of that was an issue in iPadOS. Will my mum's iPad Mini… 3? 4? be able to run them, by the way? I may be getting it as a hand-me-down rather soon, ant it could be a useful additional platform for some uses.
  6. That'd be a cool move indeed. I've been using it on iOS for both NetNewsWire and Zotero, and it works great. Well, maybe you can't comment on it either way, but it's certainly funny to imagine Apple just assuming you would eventually do so and using AP as an example without even consulting you. The only sticking point is whether the Betas would replace the latest stable MAS version (for those who did originally acquire their own licence from there), because that's how it usually works in iOS. That might be a problem for this kind of pro apps, as it would make testing Betas and work on ongoing projects on the same machine a bit of a hassle, but I hope Apple allows you to get around the issue by using a different app identifier just like you currently do. On an unrelated note but still on the topic of WWDC, it was also interesting to see, after the hugely prominent photos from Lisbon they've shown some years ago, the odd little Portuguese easter egg thrown in there again… I guess they were priming us all for the Maps improvements.
  7. You do understand that by explicitly saying what not to expect, they might be giving hints to their competitors both on which areas those might improve, and maybe even on what features they were indeed working on by elimination, right?
  8. I mean, Mac OS X / OS X / macOS went up to 10.15, and Tiger even had point updates all the way up to 10.4.11, so it's nothing unheard of. And think of all the Spinal Tap jokes we could then make, too.
  9. Sooooo… Affinity Photo just appeared on WWDC. I take it that we will be moving over to TestFlight once macOS Monterey drops?
  10. There used to be a rather public roadmap of really basic functionality. Easy pickings, if you will. Now there's still one, either for point releases, or for the upcoming – who knows when – 2.x branch, except it's kept secret for competitive reasons. I would say this is still the place to request new features. I am as disappointed as you in this, but at the same time happy to know I'm not the only one who cares. Also, if you know other people who do and would buy Affinity apps if these features were available, do invite them over to the forum. They can get their hands on trial versions while they're at it, too, and, who knows, maybe even give more feedback in other areas.
  11. Quick update: the bug is still present in the latest 1.9.2 beta. I know, it's low priority (because Separated Mode is undoubtedly a low priority at Serif), but still. Bugs that outright crash the software should never be low priority.
  12. Quick update: the bug is still not fixed in the latest 1.9.2 betas. This time, the shift is negative instead of positive, and slightly less dramatic, which doesn't make the toolbar look as ugly and broken as before when switching personas for the first time after launch or mode switching, but it's still noticeable.
  13. Yep, mystery solved! It did work, and I also tried resetting AD to its keyboard shortcut defaults, and it still works. So it was macOS itself that was propping up this all along, to the best of its ability. The verdict is in: Affinity's custom keyboard shortcut system DOES NOT WORK for custom Studio Preset menu items. Period. They will appear in that box, but it's just for show in that dialog. If the user doesn't add them in System Preferences in the first place they won't actually work, and adding them in Affinity apps doesn't make any functional difference. Please look into this and fix it… While I'm at it, please try to fix this on BOTH sides, namely the issues I mentioned, which are still a valid concern. It is GREAT that Affinity apps seem to honour shortcuts set at system-level (I haven't looked into it, but now I'm curious to see if those actually work properly for static, non-dynamically-generated menu items; Edit: they do!), like most other Mac apps, but at least try to make those work consistently, all the time. You see, some amateur and prosumer users, who may have no need for very extensive and portable keyboard shortcut set presets, may prefer setting the few ones they do need in System Preferences instead. Also, Apple's own built-in system does have an advantage over yours, in that those shortcuts are universal and not persona-specific (I should also add that having Separated Mode as some sort of a set of sub-personas makes it unnecessarily confusing, IMHO), thus making for a much quicker and easier setup for those items that are indeed common to all personas, in fact. That would actually benefit professional users like myself, as I'd much rather do, for menu items such as this one, a 1-step operation * 3 in System Preferences for the entire suite than a 6-step one for AD and APub, and a 10-step one for AP (5 personas * 2 modes = 10 custom shortcuts for the same command, phew!) using your custom system, even if it meant that said shortcut wasn't added to your super-duper portable keyboard shortcut set file (I know my few, most important keyboard shortcuts by heart, and setting them up in a new computer or macOS install is a breeze anyway). Having both systems work and coexist peacefully is, therefore, a must for all users.
  14. Oh, I should add that it seems that I've cheated, and that this functionality doesn't work at all on its own. It just so happens that I had added those shortcuts in System Preferences > Keyboard > Shortcuts for the Betas and it worked okay-ish, suffering from all the bugs I mentioned but still usable after being coaxed through the first use. Go figure! I will try these system shortcuts on the GM releases with your defaults just to see if it still works.
  15. See? AD is a) not loading my custom keyboard shortcut set on launch: … which means that b) I have to manually load my set for them to even appear: … but c) that still doesn't make them appear on the menu: These discrepancies are, IMHO, a big no-no in UX. This is a serious bug and should never happen. There are at least three reasonable assumptions on functionality – presets should load automatically, loading presets manually should always work and states should be consistent all across the UI – being broken here…
  16. Hi. I wanted to report a regression on this bug. As of 1.9.0 GM, the trick described above no longer works. What's worse, now, when I go to the Preferences > Keyboard Shortcuts panel, the custom shortcuts I created for my studio presets are just gone. Not even reloading the keyboard shortcut preset will make them work (they will appear on the preferences dialog, but not on the menu itself). Oh, and while attempting to take a screenshot of it, upon clicking the Close button, I got AD to SBOD on me and bring my entire system to a crawl, just great. You really have to look into this. Adobe got this right, and so should you. I know, maybe this is a macOS issue or whatever, but please, figure some workaround or something… This should work just transparently. Thanks.
  17. That's pretty much it. Please add proxy icons, adhering to each OS's conventions (in the Mac's case, they should be Option/right-clickable and show a selectable file path menu so you can go directly to any of its containing folders). Separated Mode windows should behave just like in any other app, including Adobe ones, but you could one-up the competition and instead of just having a “Show in Finder” option in tabbed documents, having proxy items there as well would be great. But hey, if you can't implement those for some reason, sure, at least give us that option. Thanks!
  18. Cool! Also, if you really want to go the extra mile, maybe you can add a subscription feature for getting thread updates via e-mail, à la Github, with direct links to the relevant pages (or maybe the option is already here and I'm just missing it? Either way, it should also be prominent and easy to toggle). Being the tinkerer that I am, I've been messing with macOS patching lately so I could shoehorn Big Sur onto my 2012 MBP (it's been running it like a champ since 11.0.1 and even better now with the 11.1 update, which was a pain to install but is totally worth it), and the help I've been getting from fellow users but especially getting those updates delivered right into my inbox, with said direct links, has been absolutely invaluable.
  19. Hi Chris, You're welcome. As always, I'm more than happy to help you out as I can. Regarding this lack of feedback, if I may suggest a feature for the betas (or even the stable releases) which might encourage users to report bugs, perhaps you could make use of the newly introduced Serif account login functionality and offer users a dialog box from which new bug report posts could be posted directly to the forum? You know, kind of like those prominent feedback buttons Microsoft uses in Office apps. You can't really miss those, and perhaps a bug report button right next the account login could also do the trick for Affinity apps.
  20. Hah, my bad. 😅 Ok, I see we're all on the same page… Yes, it's disheartening indeed, but we shouldn't let the foot off the pedal anyway. And more than disheartening, it's frustrating just to think just how easy some of these would be to fix. Or maybe not exactly easy, but easier than creating entirely new features from scratch. And, at this point, with so many people complaining about absolutely basic stuff like this, that just looks to have been put out there in a rushed and incomplete fashion, it's high time the Serif management team rethinks their priorities. Yes, competing with Adobe on features (either by upstaging them with innovative ones or just achieving some semblance of parity) is important and all, but come on… They really could and should do much better. It's just a matter of basic respect (or, in this case, lack thereof) for Apple's HIG or just established UX principles.
  21. @Kal, I like that you're paying attention to the topic, and all, but that is definitely not what this request was about. Tiling windows was never something we were clamouring for here, and recent macOS versions are great for that by default even in non-fullscreen mode, in that they automatically snap edges in a very elegant way. Sure, it works for that use case, even if it looks a bit kludgy (and I believe it is; the combination of Separated Mode and macOS's default fullscreen mode, whether with tiled windows or not, is still a bit of a disaster – and there's a reason why Adobe doesn't support it –, as the toolbar will obscure important UI elements like the rulers), but it doesn't address the impracticality of not having dockable toolbars, toolboxes and palettes, and windows smart enough to avoid them if they can. The large majority of Mac apps got these very basic concepts just right since the late '80s, and many modern ones still do, so why the heck should we cut Serif devs any slack here? We're talking about decades upon decades of accrued, tried and tested UX knowledge here. In any case, I will just say this: if you need fo perform 13 steps – if you just added two more, it would've been a nice nod to Radiohead, har – in Affinity apps to achieve something that can be done in both Photoshop 2021 and FontLab 7 – two currently shipping apps with a decent classic Mac palette model – in just one step (i.e. respectively turning off Application Frame, or tearing off the toolbars and palettes you wish to have in floating mode and snapping/docking them to the screen edges instead), clearly their entire UX underpinnings are broken/wrong by design and need more work. I said it before and I'll say it again: Separated Mode was, and still is, an afterthought. The fact that it has glaring cosmetic bugs in Big Sur, both on the latest stable release and the latest betas makes me even more certain that a) nobody at Serif tested something as basic as Persona switching in Separated Mode because nobody uses it at all, and it wasn't detected by beta testers either because anyone who cares for it doesn't use it much, as it's so sucky. I finally got around to it (and ended up running into several other issues, because of course I did), as I did some outside-of-the-box thinking and realised that if I just chucked the toolbar to the bottom and lined up the toolbox to the bottom-left corner, like in the enclosed screenshot, I could at least work with it without being constantly enraged at these shortcomings. Sure, having a different Studio layout in Affinity Photo isn't great for muscle memory, and having toolbars next to the menu bar also makes more sense from a Fitt's Law perspective (having the Dock constantly pop up by accident is a bit intrusive, and I may end up pruning it and putting it on the left screen edge if I end up working with AP a lot, but then I won't be able to summon it on my secondary screen), but being able to compare photos, quickly switch between several ones just by picking them on a visible stack, etc., is absolutely invaluable. As you can see, I found a much better workaround, so this is no longer a hill I'm willing to die on… But I still feel that the very existence of a thread that is now more than a year old, regarding a glaring shortcoming that has been plaguing an important feature since its very inception and which hasn't been addressed at all (I mean, have any devs chimed in here yet?), is a bit concerning.
  22. Hi guys. As I said on my last bug report, I've been putting Separated Mode through its paces, and have been founding a few bugs. So here's the other one I'm reporting today: whenever I switch, in Separated Mode, from a Persona to another, the entire contents of the toolbar shift upwards, as shown in the following screenshot: After the first switch, the toolbar buttons will be shifted upwards on all Personas until I toggle Separated Mode off and on again, or quit the offending app and relaunch, but the bug will always manifests itself on the first switch afterwards. This bug is relatively recent, affects the entire suite (once again, I decided to pick the AP forum as it's the app I'm likeliest to use in such a way that I'll run into it) in both stable and beta releases and is, I believe, Big Sur-specific, as I can reproduce it both on my Retina 5K iMac and 2012 MacBook Pro running macOS 11.0.1 but can't do so in my only Catalina machine, a 2010 MacBook. It is, as far as I could ascertain, strictly cosmetic, but seeing how it's present in both MAS and beta releases, it kind lends some credence to my theory that not many people at Serif use it at all, and not many professionals do so either on account of its overall suckiness. I'm sorry that I didn't catch this earlier on the Big Sur betas, but guys, it's an entire interface mode that not only is broken by design, but now also looks the part and crashes all apps in the suite for good measure.
  23. Hi guys, So, I've been testing Separated Mode on Affinity apps lately (I still think Serif's implementation is utterly broken, in that the toolbar and toolbox don't dock to the screen edges and document windows don't avoid them, like in all classic Mac apps, but I decided that if I need Separated Mode I can live with just chucking the toolbar to the bottom and be done with it), and I've been running into some bugs (that's the other one I reported today; it's not as serious, as it can't result in data loss, but still glaring and telling). Here's the one I found today: if I launch Affinity Photo and had Separated Mode set up beforehand and the Welcome panel open*, issuing the “Affinity Photo Beta > Check for Updates” menu command instantly crashes the app. If, however, I toggle Separated Mode off and on again (or if, alternatively, I toggle it off beforehand, launch AP in regular mode and toggle it back on), and then perform the update check, AP doesn't crash. The bug is also reproducible in the latest AD and APub betas, but I decided to post it in this sub-forum, as AP is the only Affinity app I ever intend on using in Separated Mode.** As for versions, it is both reproducible in the latest betas of the suite (AP 1.9.0.206 / AD 1.9.0.10 / APub 1.9.0.857) and even on older ones (AP 1.9.0 / AD 1.9.0.9 / APub 1.9.0); also, I tested the latter on my older MacBook running Catalina, because I hadn't used that computer in a while and knew I still had those in there, and took the time to update them to the latest ones and redo the test on that computer as well to the same results, so it's not just a Big Sur-specific thing. Interestingly, those older versions did spawn the Update window automatically, so what's crashing the app is not the window itself spawning but very the act of issuing the corresponding menu command. (*) Edit: Still on the topic of open windows/panels, I did some further testing and realised the Welcome panel may be the culprit here, as closing it before manually issuing the “Check for Updates” menu command also prevents the crash. Please bear in mind, though, that the presence of both the Update window and the Welcome panel on the screen doesn't seem to be the problem here, as 1.9.0 / 1.9.0.9 spawned those on launch and worked without issue. Also, the crash is reproducible even after closing the Welcome panel and manually reopening it through the “Window > Welcome…” menu command. Regarding the stable, non-MAS versions of Affinity apps, I'm not sure if this bug is reproducible on those, as I bought the entire suite from MAS way back when and can't test your custom – is it Sparkle-based? – update mechanism outside of the betas, but you might want to check that out as well. If you want, I can send you the related crash logs for all three apps. ________________________________________________________________ (**) Again, this is due to the inherent variability in document sizes and overall unique document philosophy and workflows in photography editing; accordingly, Photoshop is also the only CS/CC app I kept on using in classic mode after Adobe made application frames in document-centric workflows a thing on the Mac – they were aping tabs on Safari 1, as if that ever translated well to Photoshop, where dragging layers from one document to another is only possible with floating windows, but it's a good thing their old default model always was, and still is, very nice and properly kept. Personally, I loathe using photo editing tools in the inexplicably popular “Monolithic Mode”, and I know I'm not alone in this. You see, this was a trend you shouldn't have focused too much on emulating as not only the default, but the only usable option for the entire suite, and little UX details like the ones mentioned in that extensive feature suggestion I linked to absolutely matter.
  24. Hi Sean! I've tested this again and it's still not completely fixed, but progressing in the right direction. The shortcuts are still not recognised after launching the app, but I only have to open the Window > Studio Presets submenu; from the moment my preset and the corresponding shortcut are visible, the shortcut works.
×
×
  • Create New...

Important Information

Terms of Use | Privacy Policy | Guidelines | We have placed cookies on your device to help make this website better. You can adjust your cookie settings, otherwise we'll assume you're okay to continue.