JGD

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

Yep. +1000 on this request. Of all the minor but recurrent annoyances with Affinity apps, this seems to be the one I run into and confuse me the most. And if my nit-picky and grandiose feedback history is anything to go by, that really is saying something. Since Affinity Designer is still a bit limited for my uses but already great to do quick edits on PDFs, I've been using it a lot, along with Publisher to add vector stuff (such as signatures) and do other edits to documents exported from Word and other apps… But I also use it a lot to create macOS icons (I just hate seeing apps with non-Big Sur-looking ones, so I've been customizing the late-comers), and time and time again I end up exporting letters in .PDF into .iconset folders. And since Affinity apps don't support the universal, Apple HIG-compliant method (or even a non-compliant contextual menu, like in Adobe apps) of right-clicking on the file name on titlebars or tab bars to locate the files on the Finder, I always have to reopen the export dialog, and sometimes even to reopen the file, just to figure out where the heck did it end up that time. It is, indeed, infuriating.

Here's the issue, and if you carefully re-read what you've just wrote and even what I wrote you'll understand, because it's pretty much self-evident: These are workarounds. All of them. And really convoluted, inelegant, not that flexible ones at that. Also, what you've just suggested, I had already figured out on my own (and some variation of it is probably described by myself somewhere on this thread, albeit without illustrations), mind you. It's the whole going back-and-forth between being outside and inside of artboards that's the problem, because… trying to stay outside of them is “contrary” to Serif's philosophy, you are basically fighting against the application at every corner. And while these workarounds may work for projects with very simple artwork, like the squiggly line demo you've just shown, they immediately fall apart with multi-universal-layer documents. I know this for a fact because I did do a lot of such projects, and I tried to recreate them on AD to the best of my ability. It doesn't work (or not without you wanting to just defenestrate your computer, that is). They fall apart because then you have to repeat them with every. single. layer. And perform extraneous mouse movements and clicks, and do constant object-dragging in the Layers palette, for every. single. object. Now multiply layers by the dozens and objects by the thousands, and do the math. Let's not beat around the bush here: the real problem is there's not a one-stop-shop, set-it-once-and-fuggedaboutit toggle box where you can just change the interaction model altogether – kind of like the one that allows you to switch between Ai's and Corel's selection tool paradigm – and be done with it. And to add insult to injury, there aren't even shortcuts such as the ones I've suggested to make those highly repetitive workarounds easier and more tenable. As for “making use of the features it offers” (emphasis yours): no $***, Sherlock. Yeah, that's obviously an option for some, or even the majority of their current, digital illustration-heavy user base, but if I could do just that, and if that was good enough by my standards or even sustainable in a professional environment, do you think I – or anyone else for that matter – would be here on the forums… *checks notes* making these feature requests in the first place? 😂 Come on, man, you're welcome to make interesting observations and offer suggestions of your own, but asking us, loyal, paying customers, to just suck it up and try to make do with subpar tools (which are subpar for no good reason other than some veeeery debatable – but reversible, or at least not necessarily exclusive – philosophical choices made early on, and not really due to any inherent technical limitation) and let Serif devs live in their cool little echo chamber, instead of putting the user forum – specifically designed to accommodate feature suggestions and requests – to good use, just won't fly… As for the time I still spend here in the forums fighting against windmills, even with a freaking PhD project to do and a thesis to write, well… I'm just taking one for the team (the “team” being my students and my colleagues), because if we do get our way, I know this will end up saving hundreds or even thousands of person-hours in the long run. No, really; in the real world of graphic design, complex jobs which warrant these features are more than common enough to justify their implementation, this isn't just some capricious tug-of-war I'm having here with Serif just for the heck of it.

All fair points, both on this and your earlier post. I like your idea, and would very much prefer to use margin notes in many of my multi-column layouts. AFAIK, those would also be a total PITA to achieve in APub in a semi-automated fashion, but do correct me if I'm wrong.

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.

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.

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. 😬

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

Sooooo… Affinity Photo just appeared on WWDC. I take it that we will be moving over to TestFlight once macOS Monterey drops?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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…

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.

The bug is still not fixed in 1.9.0 GM. Just pointing that out.

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!

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.

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.

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.