JGD

To be fair to Serif, Adobe, et al., that's a bit of an over-reaction on your part. As long as you set up your layers properly when starting a new project, and take care to add objects to their rightful layers, it works fine. It's not like you can't collapse layers by clicking the disclosure triangle [from ▼ to ▶︎ ] to hide those objects. There you have it, a clean and quiet Layers panel all over again. What you've mentioned is only tangentially related to what we're discussing here, but I feel I should clarify that. No matter what layer model Serif or others are using (be it the current one, or the one I and others are proposing on this thread), that layer collapsing thing will always be there, so there's no need to worry about that.

Ok. Let's start by this point: you can't absolutely speak for the competition. I would bet a kidney that Adobe et al. used a non-WYSIWYG object dragging model in the 1980s because of technological limitations. As for you, I'd also bet that you started with a WYSIWYG model, first and foremost, because you could and that was the expected behaviour in most OSes for dragging operations (everything is WYSIWYG now; icons, windows, etc.), and then rationalised your choices (and did some heavy testing, yes) to make sure your model worked as best as it could. But you did keep it too simple and, indeed, threw the baby out with the bathwater, sorry. But let me focus on this snippet for a while: Are you referring to the “expected behaviour” from a user standpoint, or from your standpoint as coders? Anyhoo, I digress. I never intended to propose “snapping to invisible objects”, never in a million years, and if my phrasing came out as such, I'm sorry. Let me get this clear, once and for all: when I speak about “ghosts”, I speak about visible objects, in their original position but clearly depicted as “ghosts” (since the opposite would be rather similar to the competition, and, yes, non-WYSIWYG in the sense that id wouldn't show their final placement with the actual, predictable final looks after releasing the mouse), because they are a trail being left behind which will soon disappear. Do you know those racing games, where you can race against your translucent self[ves] in time-trial mode? That's the kind of “ghosts” I'm talking about. Ben, like Professor Brandão, I'm not some ignoramus, either. As I've said before, many times, I do not hold a degree in UX nor ever coded an app of my own, but I've been playing with software for 27 years now and specifically with design software and reading on the subject for at least 19. I studied Ergonomics during my BFA and first MA, and I know what affordances are; I know what UX forgiveness is; I know how visual cues work. I even had to endure entire semesters on subjects such as communication theory, semiotics and visual perception. And recently I've been reading on really advanced visual cognition science stuff, i.e. Hofstadter et al., for my MA dissertation. I know how this stuff can cascade rather quickly into an unusable mess if improperly implemented, and I would never suggest something as… ridiculously unintuitive as a visually unpredictable interaction model. So yes, I know this would be busier, with smart guides popping left and right and whatnot (even more so than they do already, yes ), but everything would be visible and predictable at all times. On this point, I'm very sorry I can't provide you with a “silver-bullet” demo right now that would completely and incontrovertibly sell my case. I could provide you with a workable proof-of-concept demo right away, but judging from what I've read, I'm sure you'd shoot it down because it would be “little benefit for too much work”. But sometimes I'm using Ai and the thought “I couldn't absolutely do this at all in Affinity Designer without wanting to defenestrate my Magic Mouse 2 and gnaw my own hands off” crosses my mind, so as soon as I hit one of those use cases I'll whip up a quick demo and post it here (and rest assured, since I have some free time now, and will be preparing some type design workshops very soon and giving them in October, that will likely happen sooner rather than later… And if I do have the extra time, I'll scour old files to see if I can find one of those examples a bit quicker). And only then, I'm guessing, will you have enough material to discuss it in an internal Serif meeting, which is perfectly reasonable because you do have a lot of stuff on your plate right now and should prioritise stuff heavily, yes. But I'm really that confident that you will, and that I'm making a strong case of a high cost-to-benefit ratio feature. But I will stress something important here, regarding your second-to-last statement: of course I'm not suggesting that the only use case for that would be bounding-box snapping. Nope. That would be kinda useless (and, for that, sure, maybe using guides or some other workaround might make sense, except you've also debunked that for me already). I mean all kinds of snapping (nodes, edges, centre-points, mid-points, the works). Snapping any and everything to any and everything else, between ghost and final position. And since the “ghost” will be visible, its functionally won't be any different from duplicating and dragging, except the “pseudo-duplicate” (i.e. ghost!) goes *poof!* after the drag operation. I mean, this much should have become obvious by now, and if you ever test it (like, say, in the aforementioned competition, but if you ever wish to code that for yourselves you'll realise the result is the same), you'll realise it's not nearly as unintuitive or busy as you're painting it. I know, because I've been using that object dragging interaction model since 2004 with nary an issue. Exactamundo. Except, as I've said, it's not just the bounds. We've been talking about “bounds”, because the easiest example object we've all been using is the simple, boring rectangle, whose bounds match its outline, hence your confusion. I don't really care about bounds, as those are always orthogonal and, more often than not, do not match the stuff I want to move and snap around. This gets way more complex and interesting when we start dealing with polygons and other regular and irregular shapes. You see, this is where I've been getting at for years now; you're thinking about AD and my – and other's – proposals too much from the lens of a developer catering to freehand, Wacom pen- and Apple Pencil-wielding illustrators, and it shows. For precise, geometry stuff, AD really does have some severe shortcomings, this one being one of them. I just so happen to be the leading expert in my country, and probably one of the top-10 in the entire world (at least judging by currently and prospectively published work; you did get to the part where I was invited to publish my dissertation in book form, am I right? I take it that it will be published in Portuguese first, but I will push heavily and ask for enough financing for it to also be translated into English ASAP; that's how much I trust my own work, as I never took it as just another chore to get a diploma, but as a labour of love with a very specific, almost political goal in the world of type design and teaching in particular), on modular geometric typography. I live and breathe geometric shapes. And I love grids, as you've probably noticed already. But until you implement advanced tesselation grids on your app(s) (which I seriously doubt you ever will, and it doesn't bother me either way, as those are as niche and hard to implement as they get and the end user can pseudo-implement them anyway by using pattern tools already), they can only take you so far, and even then, when I'm dealing with a simple isometric or even orthogonal illustration or typeface, if I'm doing an academic poster, publication or even geometric illustration with stuff based on several different grids, I won't be setting up any particular one – because of the obvious mismatches that would ensue – and would at least expect my vector drawing app to make life a bit easier for me.

I thought of that. But there are cases when this wouldn't make any sense and would add just further operations, when the objective is precisely the opposite. I'm also aware that some of my use cases for this are better covered by specialised grids (an idea which I love), but sometimes I still stumble upon cases where either the grid wouldn't work, or it wouldn't be worth it to set it up just for that as it would actually take too much time. Yes, I've thought this through from all possible angles, and I did mess around with grids in Designer. They're great, but sometimes you just want to move some objects around here and there and be done with it.

Fair enough, Ben, but this is something the competition (I'm not naming them, because I did it already before) achieves already in not too busy a fashion (at least IMHO; I do feel you sometimes worry too much, and if this makes a tool, say, 5-10% busier but the net gains are like 50% faster operations, if not more – and I pretty much guarantee you that I can do some of them as quickly as I'm saying, as I can skip the nonsensical “duplicate–deselect duplicate–delete original” cycle, which can be excruciatingly slow depending on object geometry, position, underlying layer contents, etc. –, your math doesn't really add up), just because they opted on a non-WYSIWYG model by default. I'm guessing that choice was made back in the day mostly out of technological considerations, because of the hardware's weakness and inherent inability to quickly redraw objects' fills, not unlike window contents in Windows 3.1/95 and Mac OS Classic, when dragging stuff around, but it stuck as a default model in design apps and does offer some crucial UX advantages, as I and others demonstrated… Nowadays, you can indeed force a WYSIWYG drag operation on most apps, even old-school ones, by clicking and holding before dragging; perhaps AD could offer the reverse behaviour, i.e. offering its current WYSIWYG behaviour and ghosting as an alternative when clicking and holding? That would actually allow you to skip adding yet another checkbox, and if the delay was timed right, it would be easily discoverable, yet forgiving for those who don't want to use it, and quick enough for those who do. Just some food for thought. Though a toggle that might reverse those two behaviours would still be a welcome bonus and fit into the “giving users choice” theme, not unlike you already allow users to opt for a Corel-like (and maybe Plus-like?) selection behaviour, which forces you to fully enclose objects, and an Adobe-like one, which allows you to select objects just by intersecting them. Sometimes, “busy” is acceptable, or even necessary; if you're working on a busy file, with busy duplication or move operations and their respective snaps, watchagonnado? What I've been telling you for a long time now is that your attempt to make the app less busy is actually having, at least for some users/use cases, the entirely opposite effect (by entire orders of magnitude!) than the one you desired… I know I've been promising demos, and once you see it, you can't really unsee it. I'm so dead sure about this that I'm not even kidding. But yes, I do fully agree with you on the “requiring considerable thought” part, and I'm here to help you with that in any way I can. I have some ideas up my sleeve, and I do believe they can actually look and work better than those of the competition. WYSIWYG models are not inherently bad per se… as long as you don't lose functionality in the process. Which you, indeed, did. There are many ways to “square the circle”, so to speak, some of them a beautiful compromise, like, say, using translucency as I alluded to before, instead of the, err, competition's insistence on using those positively 80s-ish outlines. And yet, having that “ugly” option, and perhaps even being able to see all nodes on the ghost and the final object's position alike – yes, busy as hell! – might be a complete boon for certain users (say, if you want to snap to particular tangency nodes in the middle of a curve, which you otherwise cannot discern? Absolutely!). You should always try to one-up the competition, I'm all for that; but sometimes, it may look better, but actually work worse. If the user presents a strong case for that, if you can code it, and you're not getting us all into checkbox/toggle-creep hell, by all means go for it. Your Snapping Manager shows great promise and it might be the place where those would reside. Or maybe you could add a “Selection Manager” (because selecting stuff and dragging it around are two inextricably linked tasks) and consolidate all of that stuff there, including the two opposite selection behaviours I've mentioned before and which are currently tucked away in the app's preferences. I dunno, but surely there must be a way to accommodate these kinds of features without disrupting the UI too much. And if it must be a v.2.x feature, so be it, but still; better late than never, and “never” should not even be an option here, as you'll soon see when I show you my demos.

Bingo! And thanks for the demo, you saved me the trouble of making it for the time being and got your point across perfectly clear. By the way, this functionality allows you to make all kinds of snapping operations; it's not just to the mid point(s), but also to the edge points, mid-points on curves, edge paths, everything. “It just works™.”

Amen to that! I'd react to both your posts, but I've already spent all my reacts for the day. By the way, @Jeremy Bohn, do you have a link for the post from the mod which you've mentioned? I obviously trust you, but would love to see it in context. If you can't find it, I can obviously do a search in the forums for it myself later on if I have the time, so if it's too much work don't bother.

Man, ouchie. As a long-time-ish Mac guy as well (I started out on a “sunflower” iMac G4 running Jaguar, back in Dec. 2003, so not as long as you did, and the earliest Mac I remember ever seeing was a colleague's Mac Color Classic running System 7 back in 1994, but still; that experience, as well as using Digital Research's GEM – which was still very advanced even in its crippled, post-Apple lawsuit state – at my elementary school back in 1991, a full year before using the relatively basic Windows 3.0/3.1 at home from 1992 onwards, did ensure that I knew Windows 95 was, in fact, the proverbial Emperor's New Clothes and firmly established the Mac as a mythical tech creature on the back of my head), I feel your pain. As for the transition… it'll happen some day. I hope you can do yours successfully and sooner rather than later, really. As for mine… Maybe after my PhD? That would actually feel right, because I'll be entertained with yet another shiny, unrelated thing for quite a while very soon. Maybe second time's the charm? It'd make for a great “race”, to see if I can finish my thesis faster than Serif can “finish” Affinity… And Quark, man… Archaic as it may be, what a waste! Well, it's not really an option because they are still in the business of price-gouging their users. They're not Adobe, but those prices are still insane, and they only get away with them because all those big companies which produce boring manuals are completely dependent upon them, ha. Some things never change, I guess… But if Serif ever developed a working qxp-to-afpub file converter, after adding all those boring features I and others keep harking on, they'd be dead in a month, that's for sure.

Indeed, you're absolutely right. I don't know how we should go about it, but maybe thread merging should become a thing here in the forums. Don't you think? And if the mods won't do it, maybe we should organise ourselves via cross-linking and proposing to the OP of the sacrificial/deprecated thread to add those links in the first post and lock it (if that is even possible… maybe it's exclusively the mods' prerogative, and I would totally understand if it was).

Ah, yes. You put it exactly the same way as I did. And that's what I would do, too, and what I did when performing these little tests. Except I immediately stumbled into the sheer incompatibility between that workaround and artboards' default behaviour of “sucking” objects into them, as I've demonstrated. In fact, to get around that, I even considered fooling AD into behaving like Ai by using “pseudo-artboards/pages”, i.e. by just creating a bottommost “Artboards” layer and manually adding rectangles to size on it. Only when exporting the finished artwork would I then add artboards in their place, but of course, that would be a pain if I had lots of them, as I'd have to undo and redo the entire operation when doing any further edits. While for some projects that might work, there's a point where it would get too complicated and slow for no good reason, when a checkbox would achieve the same thing with zero fuss.

Ha! Of course I'm not encouraging them in that direction. I'm all for choice and, if they play their cards right, they can absolutely offer something akin to Illustrator's “Like [insert program name]” workspaces/keyboard shortcut sets, except even better. You'll see what I'm talking about when I start pumping out more demo videos. I mean, it wouldn't necessarily have to be as automated and pre-made as those, and users certainly would find an even better middle ground especially if forced to get to those toggles one by one, by hand, but the choice, if and when possible to add without cluttering the interface too much, should be there. Or, to put it more succinctly, I want us to have our cake and eat it too (pardon the recently politically-loaded expression, but it's really the best I could come up with at almost 5:30 AM ). As for the other stuff you've mentioned, I'm a bit intrigued. Well, AD's layer panel does seem to offer more information, that's for sure. But the model is so borked that I'd take Ai's version over it any day of the week, sorry. Maybe I'm so biased against AD's panel that I can't really appreciate its advantages (because, indeed, I can't use it for any extended period of time in a complex project that makes use of it), but I'll be sure to check it out closely one of these days. Still, I do think I recall what you've mentioned (in fact, Universal/Global layers should also, per my demos, be labeled as such in italic, so there's that), and yet I don't feel it'll swing the needle much.

So upon reading all the replies, and writing my two huge, off-topic posts on each thread with new replies, on to the matter at hand once and for all. Yes, this is a dismal omission, there's no other way to slice it, and I'll always feel that delaying this so much was misguided. So: your first order of business should be, herculean a task as it may be in the background, adding a bare-bones version of this feature, ASAP. This should absolutely not be a v.2.x feature, no matter what you may think (as I've said before, save a bad-ass FreeHand-like dialogue for… v.4.x or v.5.x if you must; users would be positively delighted, and you'd have plenty of time to get it right, because no one would really bother you with this anymore). No other threads are as big and as old as this one, and this is not an advanced, “nice-to-have” feature by any measure, and many users will feel nickel-and-dimed if this transitions to the v.2 roadmap. This fellow commenter put the urgency of it better than I ever could: The way I see it, to keep the user base relatively tame and confident it would actually be better to ensure a bare minimum of functionality – even if each of the tools was indeed limited when compared with the competition – than having a set of excellent, fully fleshed-out features many users can't even get to use because the really basic ones they absolutely need aren't in place at all yet. This one being one of those. Version 1.8 (or v.1.7.5, if you can manage that) of Designer should be your “Snow Leopard”/“High Sierra” moment, i.e. not a strictly flashy feature-packed version, but the one that “fixes” stuff and really sediments this thing as a workhorse for [nearly] everyone. Just my €0,02. As for you being away from the forums: with all their limitations, which I've stressed before elsewhere, congratulations on your 1.7 releases, which are indeed full of new features and I'm sure kept you away for a long time. Seriously, we understand. And welcome back! Now, let's get back to work but, if you can spare the time, preferably with a bit more [healthy] interaction once again.

Absolutely. I get where you're coming from. And as far as your post concerns me, because it also does, If I riled – or otherwise bored to death – someone personally, I deeply apologise and can assure you that I'm working on not being such a pain to deal with. But, in parting, I must respectfully stress that you should seriously look at our angle, too, Mark. The entire topic of this thread is discussing the erasure of… an entire thread with no explanation or warning on your part. That was probably “just business”, and wasn't strictly personal, because it wasn't personally directed at anyone in particular, but… surely you can appreciate how that may rub [many] people the wrong way, right? I fully stand by what I've said before: in 20 years of forum-going I've never seen anything quite like that, and it does change my perception of these forums for the [much] worse. Secondly, regarding my dealings with Patrick, something which in hindsight maybe I shouldn't have brought up here in the first place, but now that the damage is done, I should clarify and leave it at that: that episode in particular was personal, and a customer interaction mishap. And yes, I fully admit that I'm trying to call your attention to it, one Serif employee at a time if need be, because that kind of thing really is damaging to your image and outcome (you see, if I didn't care for Serif, I wouldn't have asked for an apology at all or even call anyone on it; I'd have just left the forums for good right then and there and skipped buying Publisher altogether, so the fact that I'm still here “pestering” you is actually a positive, in its own twisted way ). I'm sorry, but that's the simple truth. I did not enjoy being singled-out on a quote and having my intelligence publicly insulted, and I reserve my right as a paying and dedicated customer (… if only! NDA signee, too) to a) vent about it publicly as well and b) demand an apology (I did apologise by my long posts in advance, FWIW and by the way, because I know I'm partly to blame, but… as I usually say, “it takes two to tango”). Other people in my situation would have reacted differently, that much is obvious, but they surely wouldn't have been indifferent to it, and nothing good would ever come out of such an episode regardless of their reaction. However, I also admit that I've been hammering you and all bystanders with it too much, and it's time to wind it down a bit. Still, I'd kindly ask you, once again very much on topic in a very meta fashion, to not just take the easy route and threaten disgruntled users with locking down yet another thread (I mean, it did veer off-topic because of me, and I and other users got defensive, but nobody went as far as outright insulting anyone else, so one could argue we were still being civil), as that would further prove my initial point and drive me and potentially other users away. Why not try and mediate conflicts instead? In our collective case, regarding this thread deletion, maybe you could reverse it and/or at least explain your decision; and in my personal case, maybe you could create the internal conditions for some kind of acknowledgment/apology, as I feel I am really acting in good faith here. It's just that simple and easy; we all meet halfway, no fuss, and I keep on cooperating to the best of my ability (I can't speak for other users, but my gut feeling tells me that if you partially reversed your decision – by, say, reinstating said thread, albeit in locked form –, the forum would remain a more welcoming venue, even if in a more restricted form if you did, indeed, decide on tightening up the entire roadmap thread situation). So, as for that off-topic rant, that's also a wrap; if you wish to discuss my personal issue any further, you have my e-mail address (just do a search for “João Gomes”, my real name, and I'll pop right up) – and, indeed, an e-mail message on this subject on your inboxes already, waiting for a reply, unless it somehow went to spam or something, which I'd find very strange as it was a very formal message and we had already exchanged messages before –, so I kindly suggest we take it from here and move that discussion over there instead. Anyway, guys, I'd really prefer to go back to giving constructive feedback on threads dedicated to features and do some demo videos, so… once again, to everyone else that was dragged into/drowned out by this, peace, and happy designing!

Actually, no, Mark, my NDA is much more recent than that (I knew of Plus way before Affinity was even a thing; you know, back when I sent you an e-mail right after Adobe went to a CC-only business model, basically predicting Affinity and betting, yet again, on the right “horse”, without even knowing it… but, deep down, I knew). In fact, I believe it's probably still ongoing, and that's why I never go into any details here (duh). Check for “João Gomes” on your NDA contract archive as well, then. So, to recap, since I seem to have got your attention: yes, apparently I was such a dedicated and… I dunno, insightful user (i'm just assuming that should be part of the criteria for picking out people) that I was invited to sign one of those things. Time and time again I apologised profusely for not having contributed as much as I should have, because of that infamous MA thesis which sucked the better part of three years of my life. I am, however, willing and trying to make up for lost time, even if belatedly. The only reason I wasn't a more dedicated user was, well, for personal reasons, and I will always do whatever mea culpa I must. But no more than that. You see, things took a turn for the worst recently and, as I've said, through no fault of my own (or maybe because of my early expectations from Affinity; then again, maybe it's your marketing message that's a bit too good to be true; as for my long posts, well, I'd rather reserve my summarisation abilities – which I do have – for all the character/word-limited academic stuff I'll have to write for the next four years of my life). Succinctly put, I became increasingly disillusioned with Affinity apps, especially Designer (first it was the little nagging buts/zits, like tabbing between fields lacking polish, the Separated Mode being grossly un-Mac-like, etc., and then it escalated to me realising the document model was so borked I couldn't actually work with the app even for moderately complex documents). But the real pièce de résistance was having your head of QA publicly insulting my intelligence here in your forums, as if I didn't understand the faintest bit about business models. Yeah, that really took the cake. I responded directly, right then and there, and afterwards informed your PR team, as well as your customer support via e-mail, and to this day… zilch. Absolutely zero response. Put two and two together, and what do you get? You see, if one of your users is kind of a pain – like me (heh), except full-out rude and disrespectful –, you can always kick them out. It's only one customer, after all. If one of those users happens to be “a bit of an influencer” but is still in the wrong, well… It's not good, because you still lose them and whoever he may have influence upon, but at least it's contained-ish (depends; in my case, it could really be rather bad, even if I was a total idiot). If, on the other hand, one of your employees publicly butts heads with a user, any user, that's really bad. If that user is one of the aforementioned type, and is a bit in the right (for all the well-deserved joking about the size of my posts, I still get support from other users in the forums, so clearly I'm not talking complete idiocy here), that's doubly so. And if it's a user who has a contractual obligation towards you (and I surely hoped to both maintain it and actually reinforce my end of the deal once I got more free time, which I finally did), that's triply so (unless, of course, there's so many of us lining up for the taking that you can just afford to consider the ones you already have as expendable and send out more invites; I mean, it's your company, you hold all the data and the cards, so do whatever you please and feel to be right). Now, besides having that “special relationship” with you (to quote a very British diplomatic term), I warned you several times that I am a bit of a tech influencer around my area, and am also working my derrière off to become a design teacher (I already am, though it's a bit of a work-in-progress to become a full-time one – like, you know, doing a 3-year-long PhD programme… – , but I am indeed friends with several teachers and acquainted with many more already). Is that arrogant of me to say? I dunno man. But whether you like it or not, it's a fact, if I'm successful it won't change any day soon, and it does colour the entire experience for both parties. For all my self-centredness, I'm more altruistic than you might think, and I will always, until the day I expire, put the interests of my students first, and if I'm telling you that I won't recommend your app to them, in their best interests, you'd better trust my judgment and at least listen, regardless of your crazy sales figures and accolades from Apple and other users. If you want to shut yourselves in an echo chamber of praise, be my guests, but rest assured that such choice will not help you grow in any way. It may motivate you, and that's great, but motivation alone won't move you forward (or in the right path, at least). I didn't escalate my criticism of your choices out of some sheer sadistic pleasure or some other sordid motivation; no, I became genuinely shocked with how unintuitive and poorly thought-out some of Designer's core features are (and that includes, yes, the lack of a “Select by same…” tool, but I'm actually much more worried with the entire document/artboard/layer model, as that seems much harder and involved to fix than adding this simpler feature). I was genuinely sad that I couldn't use it, and even sadder at the implications thereof. Sorry, I'm only being honest here. And I still give you praise when I must, but I always try to be 100% objective. And constructive. If you check my feedback, I don't just dish out criticism, I actually propose alternative solutions. Every. Single. Time. My consciousness is squeaky-clean when it comes to the quality of my feedback. And I'm not alone in my assessment; João Brandão, another teacher who I trust deeply, and who'll likely become my PhD co-supervisor, has precisely the same view on Designer (he started out by “Steve-Jobsing” me, because I showed him Designer, then he forgot about it, and finally he came round a few months later showing it to me all excited and as if I'd never heard of it; but, as of late, yes, he's also become very disillusioned with it and wrote it off as well). As for the others, It's not even on their radar yet but, considering Professor Brandão's assessment (he's not some ignoramus, but a guy who actually has an excellent multi-touch calligraphy app of his own on the i[Pad]OS App Store, by the way, so do check it out if you're into that sort of thing; in fact, the guys at Serif might even be able to licence those patents and technology from him, for the iPad versions of Designer and Photo and macOS Catalina's brand new SideCar feature, if the deal was sweet enough *wink-wink* *nudge-nudge* *say-no-more* *knowhatahmean*), it's probably for the best that they haven't seriously noticed it. I know I won't even be speaking about Designer to them ever again until I feel I and my students (and they and their own students) can use it for at least 80% of their tasks (the other 20% being hopefully fulfilled by some ancillary, free app like Inkscape until Serif fills in those blanks; but that can only work if the core of Designer is actually fit for purpose). So yes, to say that I'm disappointed is a bit of an understatement. And erasing/hiding entire, dozen-page-long threads without nary an explanation drove me from disappointed and sad to actually mad. With good reason. That stuff is [was? I haven't checked the other thread, but will do so right after the break] just wrong, man [Edit: Yeah, I just did; we were asked to tone it down by none other than yourself, and I did out of respect for the users and the moderators, but if it ends up going unaddressed… it's yet another strike against Serif in my book]. It will be frowned upon on any kind of forum. Get your act together [Edit: on the forums, at least]!

Aha! Finally, some sort of answer. No need for novels. Do you want me to upload the NDA you had me sign, or is that against the rules it contains itself? Maybe there's thousands of us, yes, but in a sea of millions, we are indeed “special” by any measure, because we are indeed a 1%-ish minority of users. By the way, ask your PR department to do a search on your e-mail servers for “João Gomes”, my real name. You'll see some of it is interesting, and some of it is rather… sad. And not through any fault of my own (other than writing big texts, I guess, but I stand by what I've always said, that your own employees should be held up to a higher standard here in the forums than your end-users).

I completely get where you're coming from. But I take it you're on a Windows PC, right? If that's the case, I actually somewhat envy you. On a Mac, with all of Apple's transitions, Retina screens, etc., sticking to CS6 isn't really an option. Heck, I also own a CS5 Design Standard licence, and it's not that limited in features when compared with the latest versions of CC, but it just won't run on my current Mac by default. And from everything I've read recently, CS6 is also about to “die” on the Mac. Sure, you could run it in a VM… But the same can be said of FreeHand (hey, I tried it here on my computer the other day, it works!) and, yet… you wouldn't really want to do that for serious work after a while. Not on a laptop, that's for sure. As for being stuck with CC, that's also an issue for me, but I did migrate a lot of work successfully from Corel to FreeHand, and then from FreeHand and Quark to InDesign and Illustrator, so doing it once more to Affinity isn't that big of a deal (if I didn't manage to migrate everything before switching for good, and later had to open some really old file, I could in theory pay for one month of subscription and convert a few more old projects/templates left behind, absorb the cost into the project budget and be done with it). Except I can't even begin that migration process, because Designer doesn't work at all for me, and Publisher, as you said, isn't “finished” yet. But I did buy them in their incomplete/flawed incarnations, and participated in any Betas I was let in, because I wanted (and still do) to give them a hand – both financially and in the form of direct feedback – and stay ahead of the curve (despite all its failings and recent delays, I really do believe Affinity will become an alternative standard of sorts, kind of like the Mac is in general and Corel actually is in some market niches, so using those betas was never an exclusively altruistic exercise). And I can pretty much guarantee you that the day Designer is “fixed” (for me, at least), I'll be installing that update/beta faster than you can say “universal layers” and using it for… something, at least (I'm not using betas for production work, as I'm a bit wiser than that, but at least I'll be performing my test routines, as usual).

You are absolutely correct in your assertion. But Publisher at least allows you to have an object straddling two adjacent pages (i.e., in DTP parlance, a “spread”), over the spine. Good luck doing something similar in Designer! And I stand by my use case, like that imposition one. Being able to do so in Designer won't steal Publisher's thunder, and if it did for 1% of its potential buyers, well… it would be negligible compared to the damage this general unintuitiveness causes to the perception some people may have of Designer itself. In my case that perception is currently so very bad, I'm even boycotting it for the time being, as I've said before. And if that's Serif's reasoning for sticking to this horrid model (again, that seemed to be the case with the infamous “Baselinegate”, but I surely hope in this case it just comes down to how hard it may be to rethink the entire thing without breaking stuff for the users), it shows a deep lack of confidence in Publisher itself and on its dedicated DTP features. I've said it before, and I will say it again: no one in their right mind, and who knows how to operate a DTP app, would or should ever attempt doing anything but the simplest 4-page leaflet or accordion flyer on something like Adobe Illustrator or Affinity Designer. Even with styles, baseline grids, etc. All the fiddling necessary to make up for the lack of even more basic stuff like master pages adds too much overhead for that entire exercise in futility to be worth skipping the additional $40 for the Publisher license, period. I sometimes make as much in an hour, and even if you're doing some pro-bono work, I mean… have some self-respect and plunk the money for it. But for certain really bizarre, artsy, or otherwise specialty projects, coaxing Designer or Illustrator to kinda work like a DTP app is the only sensible option, as DTP apps have, by default, other insurmountable limitations of their own. On a more deeply philosophical level, I've always seen Illustrator as this kind of “sandbox” where you can play and go crazy, do stupid and exotic stuff that otherwise wouldn't make much sense in a production environment, and InDesign as its more “serious” brother, which reins you in and forces you to stick to all the dictums and rules of the classic printing press. Makes sense to you? My main issue with Affinity Designer is that it is also trying to rein me in and make a digital illustrator out of me, or something, instead of letting me roam free, like Ai. I also fully subscribe to this, but I should add that “26 years” is a bit more precise (Illustrator 5, launched in 1993 for the Classic Mac OS, was the first version to feature Layers, and I'm willing to bet they didn't change much in behaviour since then). That's precisely my issue with some of Serif's decisions, i.e. reinventing the wheel and indefinitely postponing fixes for them or addressing criticism, thus letting users hanging and waiting for 4/5 years, while pumping the app full of steroid-like features. Yes, it's super exciting and attracts new users, and also enables new workflows, absolutely, but it doesn't bode well to certain kinds of even modest “power” users. And many people here have said they wouldn't mind paying a bit more (some even say as much as twice the current price) if that meant these essential features were added. Nobody here is expecting Serif to hire more staff and make miracles, like suddenly introducing shape blends, auto-trace, multi-line composer and whatever thingamabob some are also yearning for, because many of us know about (hey, at least I do) the Mythical Man-Month (i.e. the diminishing returns when adding more people to software development teams), but at least we'd like to see a slightly different set of priorities. As the impressive underdog that they are, Serif, at its most boring, would still likely be more exciting and enticing than Adobe, that much I'm sure of. Oh, this. You're also right on the money. I remember when working at my only full-time job as a graphic designer that my work colleague didn't even snap objects to guidelines ( ), and many of my fellow colleagues at the Uni didn't even know how to add them in the first place in the first and second years of their BFA. Then again, it also took me years to find out about Smart Guides, the Knife tool and Live Paint (I only learnt of them in 2006, when on my Erasmus, while watching some Italian girl doing an intricate vector illustration in Ai and being completely mesmerised at her work speed), and only when working at that company did I learn certain advanced features in InDesign. I was basically trying to save time, and frantically googling for solutions to new problems every week (usually, the “R&D” did pay off, and today I can say that I likely take advantage of most dedicated ID features for any particular use case, instead of doing crazy stuff by hand like I did before, because I incorporate that research into my process even if the object I'm working on is anything like something that I already did some years prior; much like when doing academic work, like writing papers or preparing classes, I revisit, question and, if necessary, revise my own workflows in order to constantly optimise them). Yes, YMMV, but, just like the Dark Side, once you taste the power… you can never go back. It's just sheer insanity, not just from a psychological standpoint (because working “against” an app can really drive you mad), but also from an economic one. You do the math, and boom, there goes another month's worth of a CC subscription, still totally worth it regardless of its cruftiness…

Yeah, I'm bumping this with a wee suggestion: Perhaps the “ghost” in the original position could be always rendered in a slightly translucent fashion (whether in preview or in outlines mode), instead of as an outline. What do you think? It would likely still work, UX-wise, and look a bit more WYSIWYG and modern, just like the guys at Serif like. As for the video demos, oh, they are a-coming once I get a proper vacation (I mean, since I can't code and I'm proposing stuff that's a little bit different than what Illustrator offers right now, I'll have to set up entire special documents on either of them, with real “fake” ghosts – actual objects underneath those I'll be moving – just to visually simulate what I'm getting at, and it'll take a while). I may be boycotting any further word-of-mouth marketing of Designer, but I still want it to succeed.

It is a bit of a deal breaker on a philosophical level, which I already explained at great length and depth. Affinity Designer makes a lot of decisions for you, without allowing you to opt-out of them. And those aren't just mildly irksome decisions; they preclude entire workflows and make other tasks take 10 times longer than they needed to. If there is one thing many creatives hate, that would be being “boxed-in”, so to speak, and even if Ai is a cumbersome, crufty old dog of an app, if you use it for long enough you'll find it's almost as good in that “out-of-your-way” way as FreeHand was. Yes, the “FreeHand forever” crowd will cry bloody murder and accuse me of straight up heresy, but please bear with me here; I did start on FreeHand, after all, and I know the comparison I'm making isn't spurious or exaggerated. FH and Ai (and even CorelDRAW!) are much closer in UX philosophy to one another than Designer is to them. And Designer veered off of that path not in a good way, but in a “let's reinvent the wheel to make this more palatable to digital illustrators working on iPads” kind of way. Interestingly, Photo is much closer to Photoshop and GIMP, and Publisher also much closer to InDesign and QuarkXPress, than Designer is to… well, anything else. So I fail to see the big advantage of Serif's choices for Designer's document model, but especially making them the only ones available. Not that I have anything against those choices or that crowd (far from it! I have the utmost respect for illustrators, just because and also for personal reasons, as I've said elsewhere here in the forums), but I've just demonstrated that with a few checkboxes or a light rethinking of a panel or two, as you've also said, Serif could easily accommodate both camps, like, yesterday. That's what makes these limitations and their stubbornness in not addressing them as a top priority so depressing and frustrating.

Except I didn't spend just 40-50 bucks for this program several years ago. As I've said here before, I did that, and spent countless hours here and by myself testing the product, and put my own professional credibility on the line when ranting and raving about Serif in the early days. This is all about correcting course and saving face. As a matter of fact, I might even be more proactive and exhort my students and colleagues to download the AD trial, see for themselves what its limitations are, and then come to these forums to further reinforce the point that it is cumbersome and incontrovertibly prove my warnings to Serif in a way that they would see for themselves; except it's not up to me to make that choice, and I will warn them of the potential waste of time that process may entail in the long run. I'd be speaking from personal experience… Now, @ErrkaPetti, if you want to accept anything Serif, a company whose bosses and employees, IMHO, until recently lived up to the great customer interaction they pride themselves on, drops on you with nary a suggestion or criticism from your part, that's on you. You're as free to do so as I am to do what I'm doing. We're both paying customers, after all. But, then again, after reading what @Jowday just said, it makes me want to turn the tables around and ask just what are you, in fact, doing here (not on the forums, of course, but on this particular thread)? Maybe Facebook or Twitter, two shorter-form, faster-firing platforms would be more a more appropriate venue for heaping praise on Serif, no? And if you don't care about an entire thread disappearing, well… you could try articulating just why isn't that a big deal for you, and if you can't for any reason, there's a forum out there made up of other still accessible posts, to which you may contribute in a constructive fashion. And by the way, and speaking of constructiveness, I should say that this thread right here can never really produce very constructive comments (other than… either ignoring the issue altogether or telling Serif that they should reinstate that content ASAP, as a matter of principle, and them responding in kind – or, sadly, also ignoring it like they seem keen on doing) even if we tried, because its very main topic is… destruction itself. On an EPIC scale. Do you have any idea how many forum pages 11 months' worth of posts equate to? How many hours we've spent here were just erased from history? So it devolved – rightfully so, if I may add – into a meta-discussion about Serif as a company and its Customer Relations, I'll give you that much. Seeing how you're not a moderator, it really isn't your place to decide about how appropriate that is, and if you feel offended in any way, shape or form by any of what I or other people have said here, by all means take it directly to the moderators. No, really, it's not a big deal, as that's how forums should work. It's not “ratting out” or something; in forum-land it's pretty much healthy and normal practice. Look, almost nothing of what I say here is personal in the least, anyway. Other than that tiny window I opened into my intimacy (don't expect any more of that, by the way; it's not that I'm not comfortable with talking about that kind of stuff, but it's just way too off-topic and improper in this particular context… If you guys want and Serif allows you to open a “mental health/emotions/whatever in artistic professions” [can you say “How to be a Graphic Designer without losing your soul”? ] thread on a general discussion sub-forum – do we even have one of those here? –, be my guest and I'll be more than happy to contribute with my input there), the only personal thing I mentioned were my hurt feelings over something which I considered – and always will – an insult, even if it was accidental. I've said as much before; I write long posts, and perhaps @Patrick Connor missed that crucial part where users might only have access to that tool via what would later become known as StudioLink. Still, wouldn't you agree that moderators and other Serif employees should, by default, be held up to a higher standard than any of us here, and be extra cautious with customers? Do you know what this nonchalant attitude makes me think, as an end-user? It makes me think that now that Serif has millions of users, they [think they] can afford to treat any individual one as disposable, regardless of their relative worth, but even then I don't think it's any less wrong to dismiss a user who isn't a frequent poster, or doesn't integrate a big teacher network, or whatever. Just the other day, this fellow poster mentioned on the “Baselinegate” thread that he had used, on some .afdesign document, that infamous baseline grid feature that was added by accident, and Serif's Customer Service response was to offer to remove baseline grids from his document (i.e. further crippling it), instead of owning up to their mistake and, I dunno, perhaps compensating the user with a free Publisher license, or at least giving him a heavy discount, or something? That's what I would do if I was running a business. You sometimes have to take a loss, and when in a lose-lose situation, you should always take the path that “injures” the customer's feelings and loyalty the least. And I don't have a degree in psychology, marketing or business management but, to me, this seems clear as water. Injustices towards other users make me as sad and disappointed as those against myself. This is most definitely not just “all about me” or my inherent value as a user, I can assure you of that. It's an image of Serif I've been reconstructing in my head over months, from all the pieces of data that I've been gathering, and that definitely includes stuff that happens to others. But since I'm not petty, that's not the kind of stuff I'd be posting about on the Mac App Store, as you may guess; I just alluded to it when speaking about a general “loss of confidence” and focused on the more galling examples, like those 5-year+ waiting times for basic features. As for the nitty-gritty of UX knowledge, I've said before that I'm not a normal user, and I'll stand by it, regardless of what people may think of me because of that statement; I never studied computer science, or formally learnt UX in any advanced capacity, but I'm probably one of the biggest computer geeks/nerds you may ever come across on a graphic designer's world/forum. It's not me who says it, but my colleagues and friends, and… well, it is an undeniable fact. I'm not inherently “better”, nor “worse” than other users; just out of the ordinary. I was an IT manager for two years, and I spent most of my free time reading ArsTechnica posts, one after another, about OSes, checking old GUI galleries from the 1970s onwards, watching countless YouTube videos with old app demos, etc. Ask me how the Sun Star worked; I will be able to describe it. Ask me the difference between Douglas Engelbart's famous mouse demo and the pointing devices that came afterwards; I do recall. Ask me the differences between AmigaOS, Digital Research's GEM and [classic] Mac OS; I also know them. Skip into the world of graphic design, and I have mostly the same degree of trivia knowledge from phototypesetting systems all the way to the latest beta of Publisher, even though I was born in 1985, when many of that older stuff was already about to become obsolete. I have an MA in typographic & editorial practices, for crying out loud; that's why I'm interested in stuff which predates, well… me, all the way back to around 1440 AD and even earlier still (does 3000 BC sound far enough?), because… alphabets. And general geekiness, of course. But here's what I'm getting at: it is indeed not normal that I, even with all that admittedly amateurish, ancillary knowledge of computer science, should have a better intuition than a multidisciplinary team that includes professional programmers and designers alike. And, yet, my gut feeling consistently tells me I absolutely do, in fact, have it, at least as far as the kind of work I and a lot of people I know do, because I get confirmation whenever I try to test this thing for any real work and stumble onto dumbfounding limitations, while immediately coming up with my own constructive proposals not always equal to what Adobe, Macromedia or Corel came up with before. It's a very troubling and frustrating feeling to have, let me tell you. I'm not at all happy about probably “knowing” more than some people at Serif, and while I may sound like that, I'm not gloating about it just for the sake of it. In fact, I feel that Serif should have at least one advisor/tester a bit like me working for them (not necessarily me, because I'm sure I'd be a pain to work with in such an already stressful environment, but you get my point; also, I know I'm out-of-the-ordinary but I'd never go as far as thinking I'm unique), and that would be great, because I then could go on my merry business and not even bother with any of this anymore; but I do feel they haven't one, because otherwise some of the weird stuff that came out of their labs would have been caught in QC and internal focus group testing, even before it first reached the public beta stage more than five years ago. That's how I am certain that Serif is lacking a certain je ne sais quoi on their staff, and I just won't forgive myself for not having been more attentive and assertive about the importance of the document model before them freezing this – IMHO – botched multiple artboard/container/layer implementation they foisted upon us. Hindsight 20/20, I guess… When I remind them of where I'm coming from, it's mostly as a warning; other than maybe one day getting my hands on a cheap tool that I'd love to use (that's my endgame, at least), I personally gain absolutely nothing from peddling my knowledge here, as I do have increasing credibility among my peers, and between fighting Impostor Syndrome – of which I was, for the longest time, a big victim of – and trying to avoid the Dunning-Kruger effect – of which I'm highly suspicious a few, if not several people in Serif's team suffer – and Peter principle – of which I also believe Serif may increasingly become a victim of, on account of the earlier effect and if it ever gets too big as an organisation –, I think I'm holding my own rather nicely and making myself a comfortable niche for a honest career thanks to that. I don't need any ego boosts here, and this wastes, as you've all said, a lot of my time. So if I keep warning Serif about that kind of stuff is because I do care and some of the attitudes I've been seeing lately from them reek of hubris, sorry. You see, these three “effects”/biases are all stuff that seriously plague academia, and which we are basically trained to spot, everywhere where they may arise (including politics, but I won't even go there as a matter of principle, as I don't think it's wise to mix professional work too much with those unless strictly on-topic, like discussing budgets and client–provider relations [again, discussing Adrian Shaughnessy's accumulated wisdom on the subject in a sub-forum could be highly beneficial for many young, aspiring creatives, and having Serif be a force for good on that regard as well would be super nice, but I digress]). For all my incessant “gloating”, I'm way more humble in reality and in practice than you may think. The entire point of academia is, basically, doubting oneself, your sources, the works, and check and double-check, compare and analyse everything you come across as objectively as possible to reach truthful conclusions. I've found my fair share of contradictions in other people's work, and if anyone does the same with my own, great! The sooner, the better, so I may correct it and others may not be misled, as that would be the worst. So, in a nutshell, I'm sad and absolutely wish I didn't know more than the guys at Serif about some of those subjects; I wish that my suggestions would, then, be quickly and seamlessly processed and translated by some experts in the company into some usable form, instead of me having to spend yet more of my time here doing demo videos (also, them being addressed at all would also be nice, even if it's to tell me that they are useless or completely off the mark, or something; as I said before, I actually like to know when I'm wrong about something, and why, so I may learn in the process). But doing demo videos I will, when I find the time and mental wherewithal for that, because that's the right thing to do, at least until Designer is finally true to its marketing and branding (then, I'll probably GTFO, use the app for regular work and pop here occasionally to point out the odd bug and check on development, as was my plan all along and as I do with other pieces of software I use – and sometimes even beta-test –, like Glpyhs.app or macOS itself). Because, at the end of the day, I really want to recommend this thing to everyone, as these apps have a solid base and are marketed under a very fair – maybe even too fair – business model. But I just can't bring myself to do it in its current state, as that just entails too much risk to my personal reputation as a tech/design adviser and potential damage to others involved; their time, at the fast-paced beginning of their careers, is even more precious than mine.

Ahahaha. Thanks for getting all philosophical and meta, man. No, really, I'm not being ironic here, because people don't talk about those issues nearly as much as they should, just because they are taboo or something (and then, guess what, people go without help and die). Indeed, I'm not all too happy with all the stuff that's been happening around me, like losing one teacher, from that group I keep harking back to, to suicide, my mom's best friend to cancer, my ex from my life (she's still around… somewhere) because of depression and career choices on opposite sides of pond, and whatnot. But hey, I'm getting help for all of that, and then some. Thank you for caring, so I should also tell you that, between professionals and friends, I'm pretty much already covered. As for being out and about in Lisbon, and drunk at that, interestingly enough, I'm far from it (aha, I know, I know, it's Saturday… fair enough; but while I'm no stranger to the occasional night of mild-to-heavy drinking, the last thing I'd do in one of those occasions would be to come here to bash on Serif, as I do tend to drink only in good company, and almost never alone; also, as you may guess, I wouldn't be this articulate – especially in English –, either ). As a matter of fact, I've been staying at home these last few days working on two posters/abstracts. Wanna see? They are peeking behind us right there, in Word, the entire ensemble awash in full, nighttime “f.luxed” glory. I am, indeed, procrastinating by venting here with you people, that much is true. That's kind of what I do when I get stressed out about deadlines. But you do worry too much. I really am sticking to a program here, there's a method to the “madness”, and I've been in this game since waaaaay before all that stuff – and even the triggers for most of the really screwed up stuff that's been happening in the world at large – went down. And speaking of worrying about stuff, I would rather worry about Serif for the time being, than with all the other stuff you've just mentioned (besides, how can you be so sure I don't do so already, during other times of the day and the week? Walking and chewing gum, man, and that's what my family and friends are there for… ). The thing with Serif is that it makes me rather sad and personally hurt (especially the thing with Patrick; no, really, it is that personal, even though I never spoke with the guy face to face, because I do care for these guys and was pretty much dismissed as a useless idiot who supposedly didn't understand business models… I may be a royal pain in the butt, but… seriously? I've been kicking myself ever since 2004 because I wasn't gutsy enough, nor had much money in the bank, to buy Apple stock, as I basically predicted the “iPod halo effect”, their meteoric rise, etc.). Serif was an exciting company, and trying their products (updates, betas, what you have it) was a bit like getting new toys for Christmas. Except they were supposed to be useful “toys”, put bread on the table and be worthy of an unreserved recommendation from myself towards others (because that's what I'm constantly asked for, about a plethora of stuff). For context, you have to understand that I was pissed mad at Adobe with their CC-only business model stunt, back in… I don't even recall, 2012? 2013?… to the point that kept creating anti-Adobe artwork on many Facebook pages for a while (you won't see me do such a thing right now with Serif, as I'm mostly just… disappointed, really), and promptly fired up a heartfelt e-mail at Serif, actively pledging for a Mac-compatible CC alternative way before anyone else had even read or probably even uttered the words “Affinity [whatever]” (even though it was already in early Alpha stage, if I'm not mistaken… But do you see a pattern there? It seems that I also predicted/guessed Serif's entire business model several years in advance, just by doing a cursory search of design software company websites), and did end up forging a closer relationship with them when it comes to the nitty-gritty of it than the majority of people here in the forums (AFAIK, since I haven't discussed this with my lawyer and won't risk it, I am not legally allowed to discuss the details, so let's just leave it at that; it's just a general factoid that does add further injury to insult). As you can see, I did have bit of an emotional investment put into this, to put it mildly. I saw these guys, these genius and gutsy underdogs, as a bit of a lifeline from yet another evil empire that wanted to extract yet another rent out of me. Kind of late 1970s Apple against IBM, or early 2000s Apple against… everyone else, all over again and in my niche of business. It is political, and it is related with the economical shenanigans you've mentioned in more ways than you may think. I'm actually a very politically outspoken person (if you go to The Guardian's page on Facebook, you'll see me there on occasion, also wasting bits of my “precious” time for anyone who will hear it), and these things really mess with me, whether they are “pure” politics or otherwise (if anything, everything is politics, as I often say). So, yeah. When it comes to my tools, on which I literally depend, I now feel a bit abandoned. Orphaned, even, if you will, because there are no better alternatives, as I'll explain further down. And I can't help but feel that Serif, for all its insane sales figures, is really suffering from a special brand of hubris, not quite unlike the one Adobe suffers from (albeit on a smaller scale, but definitely on the same spectrum), which may hurt us all deeply in the long run. Heck, it's hurting me so much right now I don't even feel like using one of their apps anymore, and will actually steer people who trust me away from it. I'm absolutely, positively not overreacting over this, man; I had months, if not years, to try the app and mull over it, and I also gave Serif quite a long time to concoct some kind of response to me grievances here in the forums. To be insulted in a heated moment is one thing; to be ignored for weeks on end, well… that's just further icing on the cake. And, on top of all that, to not even be able to make use of the very thing that prompted all that strife in the first place, maybe for many years to come, well… that's just the cherry on top, and the proverbial last straw. As a matter of fact, and in hindsight, seeing how these issues have been dragging on for so long, are yet to be resolved and may even only be addressed in v.2.x, I should've been doing just that since the very beginning, and treating Affinity Designer v.1.x as one of those “commercial betas” Apple and Google are so fond of doing (hey, I'm a first-gen, Apple Watch Sport [retroactively called “Series 0”] owner, so I really know what I'm talking about; I do put my money where my mouth is and love to “test” that kind of stuff, while being fully aware of the risks, so it's really nothing new to me, but I also warn other people of them and usually tell them to “wait until version 2 or 3”… Guess I was too optimistic about Serif way back when, whoopsie-daisy). As for my issues with Affinity Designer, just how serious the lack of alternatives is, and the way I feel about the entire thing, here's another, even better analogy: my brother is a musician; he treats and babies his instruments like… the most prized possessions that they really are. If he loses them at the airport, or if they break, he's completely and utterly screwed… And he must constantly carve and bind new reeds, because they wear out and their design makes a big difference on the quality of the sound. I – also a former music student, mind you – feel very much the same way about my professional tools, and even though software shouldn't require as much maintenance, if at all, it absolutely should allow you some creative freedom as to its very mode of operation, too (that's Petr van Blokand's entire schtick: “build your own tools”, he says… I wouldn't go so far as designing my own vector drawing app, but couldn't Serif, at the very least, relax things a little bit? Pretty please?). I depend on them, and they better be functional, elegant and flexible, otherwise my work will feel like – and become – a terrible chore, instead of the unencumbered form of personal expression it damned well should be. I don't want to – nay, I can't – design vector-related stuff while boxed into a first-and-foremost illustration-bound application, and Serif's marketing and branding is absolutely deceiving in that regard. Also, being someone with a keen eye for UX, not only do these issues and unnegotiable choices sadden me, as they prevent me from using the app for anything but the most basic stuff, they irk me in more ways than one. Because not only am I not able to make good use of these tools in their current state, they could be 10x better – and actually useful, if not perfect or complete – with so, so little investment. With the right kind of investment. Or with the right[ful] business model, in Adobe's case, but when it comes to those guys I'm really not holding my breath anymore (can you believe that I did think, for the first few years, that they might reverse course? How naïve and optimistic can one be… right?). As for Open Source, while it's the model that pleases me the most when it comes to politics and economics, it suffers from an entirely different set of issues kind of by default (mostly UX-related, especially in the insufferable Scribus, but the licensing issues when it comes to commercial standards – like, say, colour books – that we, unfortunately and for the time being, must adhere to, are also a sticking point), which steered me away from it many years ago. Then, there's Corel, but it's so alien (even though I did take my first steps there), and so expensive, that there's no point in even considering it. And the same goes, in a nice, parallel line (as I did start my DTP training on it, too), for QuarkXPress. And, yeah, FreeHand's dead, regardless of what the “FreeHand forever” crowd will keep telling themselves, in a state of collective delusion and insularity that makes my long rants or even using Scribus (*gasp*) seem sensible by comparison, ha. So Serif it is, then. Except it isn't. Yet. Finally, as a cute little addendum: I do sometimes muse about switching from my very cumbersome Word+Mendeley > Classic DTP (InDesign/Quark/Publisher) academic workflow over to a strictly LaTeX workflow for my thesis and for papers. I have no idea how I would even go about it, and what the advantages might be, as… you know, that crowd is weird, even by F/OSS standards, and even though I am a die-hard fan of Don Knuth, and probably read a lot more on the subject than most designers I know, I really don't know what to think of it yet. Maybe it is, indeed, a more elegant and flexible way to typeset academic books, if a bit too “left-brainy” for our poor, WYSIWIG-formatted minds, but it's still too early to tell. [Edit: I just checked, and yes, it is too cumbersome. TeX and LaTeX were created so non-designers would be able to create beautifully – if a bit too simple by our standards – typeset documents; the thing is, I'm a professional designer, and I'd rather work with a WYSIWIG editor even during the writing phase, as I know my way around Word styles, footnotes and cross-references, so if I can convert those straight away into a DTP app, I'm all set.]

For the time being, indeed I do, because I just came out of a four-year-long MA and am still more than seven months away from a PhD scholarship application; basically, I'm on yet another “extended vacation” of sorts, though I have that application to make and an entire book to publish, so there's that. But rest assured, I only “waste” time with stuff I really care about. I see it more as an investment, really; I always stood to gain a lot more, that's why I even bought this thing, knowing full well it wasn't finished, in the first place. Oh, I also bought Publisher, even while being extremely mad at Serif and knowing that, because of their really weird choices (and the fact they foisted them upon us, instead of giving us some much needed workflow and document model customisation), it wasn't likely I would be using Designer frequently for the foreseeable future. But much like I had already used Designer to make .EPS/.PDF files that I then imported into InDesign, considering how cumbersome Designer actually is I may end up, if Serif doesn't get their act together, throwing in the towel, and doing the exact opposite by using mostly Inkscape in combination with bits of Designer and the Designer Persona in Publisher, depending on exactly what kind of artwork I'm dealing with, because InDesign is really becoming that horridly buggy as of late. It now reeks of QuarkXPress 5 in a bad day. As for fully replacing Photoshop with Affinity Photo, the jury is also still out on that one, but out of the three components of the suite it's probably the one I'm most optimistic about. My purchase decisions are almost never political or emotional, but strictly technical and very self-serving. You see, €40 really is peanuts for me, even if I end up not making much use of an app, as I absolutely must keep tabs on things and stay ahead of the curve so that I can keep being the influencer I've been for many years (9 in an official capacity, to be precise, and around 16, if you count all the way back to when I entered my Uni and started becoming the unofficial go-to guy for all things Mac). Besides, I'm running all this stuff on a 5K iMac with 40 GB of RAM and a secondary 24'' screen. It really doesn't make much of a difference how many different apps I work with at the same time and how I deal with linked files, as I have way more computing capacity at hand than I should usually need anyway (all that RAM is there for the one-off VM, and the 32 GB I had for many years on my vintage and trusty 2009 27'' model did indeed save my proverbial behind on more than one such occasion). To say that I'm not a normal user is a bit of an understatement. As for Affinity's “StudioLink” thing, well, that's all nice and cool, but I don't really need it per se. I've been doing this kind of stuff for almost 19 years now, and I know I can devise my own workflows, complete with stuff like GREP styles, scripting, batch actions and whatnot, and make them work faster and be more optimised than anything Serif may come up with by themselves (and even if their default way is marginally faster, it's probably not worth the hassle of retraining my muscle memory for it). Still: I would like to see these three apps blossom into something barely functional, as a whole like Serif intended and heavily promoted, and finally chuck everything else into the bin. Is that too much to ask? I know I will keep fighting for that dream.

Anyway, I'll just leave this here; it's a direct quote from the 1-star review of Affinity Designer I've just dropped on the Mac App Store. It's entirely written in Portuguese, and I know upwards of 90% of the users here won't be able to understand it, but I still feel I should share it here publicly with you and with Serif, because I know at least fellow user @rui_mac speaks my language and especially none other than Serif forum moderator @MEB also does and can translate the contents into English for his colleagues' convenience: At some point, I would have to decide that enough was enough. It's big, but considering everything I've managed to cram in there, and how big my posts here usually are, it's rather succint. And yes, I know this sounds a bit like blackmail – hey, I guess it is; so sue me –, but if Serif does address the “Baselinegate” (that's the name I'll be giving to my spat with @Patrick Connor henceforth, to make it easier for me or others to reference it) and to the “Roadmapgate” (that is, in the same vein, the name I'll be giving to this very thread), the paragraphs in bold and italic will be completely gone (well, if you react before the next update hits, because otherwise I believe they will be set in stone in an archive somewhere), and the rating will also go back up by one or two stars depending on how many of them are. Address the remaining issues, bolded and underlined for your convenience, other related stuff will be gone as well, the overall tone will change and the rating will accordingly and progressively go back up to four stars with the infamous and long-in-the-tooth “advanced selection tools” and maybe, one day, back up to five stars if my pet peeves with artboards, clipping, universal layers, etc. are addressed either fully, or at least via sensible compromises and further customisation options. Oh, yeah, I know I'm but a single disgruntled user in a “sea” of favourable reviews (Ha! As if… In the Portuguese store there are only 18 5-star reviews, and a further 11 reviews with text, 9 of them 5-star, including one from yours truly written back in the glorious v.1.4 days and which will soon be superseded by this one, and 2 of them 4-star; by the way, most of them are, incidentally, 4-year-old reviews as well, hmmmm… I do wonder what exactly do Portuguese users really think of Affinity Designer these days…?), but it should go without saying that I will be relaying the same comments that are now on display, in Portuguese, for everyone to see on the Portuguese Mac App Store, to all my colleagues, students and to users on any English-speaking forums and social networks where I may partake in discussion about it (including unofficial Facebook pages over which Serif has absolutely zero control). Besides all the complete strangers involved, we're talking fellow design teachers, with a combined number of hundreds of students of their own, hopefully a few dozen students of mine, yet a few dozens of graphic designer colleagues from the Uni with who I still keep contact, and the entire Portuguese Typographers' Association (a local ATypI-supported offshoot of sorts, of which I'm a founding member; most of its members, whose work I know very well, have been in cahoots with Adobe since before its inception, complete with sponsorships by the 800lb gorilla in all the prior international-level events they put up and in which I also participated, so if I was already wary of even mentioning Serif to that crowd before, that wouldn't even cross my mind now), here. People who really trust me and absoultely listen and usually follow my technical advice, down to the computer, phone or even smartwatch they should purchase, plus all the people under their own influence, so… I'd estimate an immediate, combined 1000-2000-ish people, with room to grow every further year during which these issues persist because, hey, we're freelancers, design teachers, and even studio owners (as a matter of fact, I also know a few who are both). We basically dictate which apps have a real chance in the market. I'm sorry, but I always do what I must and what is, ultimately, in my and other fellow colleagues' best interests, not necessarily what's nicest or what I would have liked the best. I know this is very heavy-handed, but this is what you get when you are heavy-handed/aloof with your own paying, loyal, dedicated, well-intentioned users/evangelists. Also, I am doing this for your own good. It's not like I'm steering illustrators away from your app and cutting off your precious revenue supply… But I refuse to let students or colleagues of mine waste their time – and money! – with cumbersome tools, and let you destroy your own reputation further, and especially to put my own on the line for no good reason. I admire your gumption, but I'm taking no bullets for you. Also, I did give you several warnings, over the course of several months, and all have gone unanswered, so I'm not feeling guilty of being unfair in the least with my decision of no longer being quiet about the current state of affairs. If and when Designer is ready for primetime, I will surely and steadily peddle it to no end (as I did in the early days) but, until then, I'll mostly stay clear of it (as I've said before, as an already paying customer with a vested interest in its future, this obviously won't be the last you've seen of me here) and, above else, actively advise people in my situation – graphic designers and teachers + students thereof, not illustrators, photo editors or DTP typesetters on a budget who are willing to mix and match tools from different vendors – to do so and not even bother with throwing more money at you. If you want to corner this market and get valuable endorsements like my own, you really have to do much better than this, and fast. Yeah, it's official: [TL;DR] I'm boycotting/anti-marketing Affinity Designer until further action.

Nope. I won't. Do you know why? Because I paid for this thing. And, to top it off – or, better yet, this is the real crux of the matter, because ~€40 isn't that much to lose, really –, I also invested countless hours of my precious time in this by giving suggestion after suggestion, feedback post after feedback post, bug report after bug report. I'm not as active here as other users, but I'm certainly way more active than many of those millions of customers who are happy (but really; are they all? Are they really frequent and valuable users, like, say, design teachers like I already am? Or have some of them paid for the app – even after, sure, using up the free trial –, tried it further for a bit, figured out that it wasn't good enough for their needs and just chucked it into the proverbial digital drawer?). And what did I, and others, get in return? I, for one, even got personally insulted by a Serif employee here in the forums. And, you know what, considering how things turned out, isn't this thread's entire purpose right now whining about a decision by Serif, anyway? It started out with a very valid, very serious question, which has gone unaddressed for two weeks! Look, I know I sound entitled, and that I sometimes behave like a little brat. But a), as a paying customer (of the entire suite, no less), I kind of am entitled, by default, and b) this entire UX SNAFU is a hill I'm absolutely willing to die on, even if I have to do a damn postgraduate course in UX if I must to better back up my assertions with proper, structured knowledge and verbiage (and, in fact, my Faculty offers one such course, given by some former colleagues from my first MA in Communication Design and New Media, and I may very well do just that after I'm done with my PhD, as that's what the commercial market is really asking for now, big time; if I do so, expect to see me here in the forums even more, not less, even if it happens only five years from know when Affinity hits, oh, I don't know, v.2.5.x, and maybe then we'll have advanced selection tools and a knife tool, but still no universal layers or a sensible document model…? ). Anyway, don't worry about getting warning points from moderators. I've probably done and said much worse stuff here than, AFAIK, you ever did, and I haven't gotten any warnings yet, so… nah. If anyone here is getting them first, that would be me. And if I did get them, I would probably vacate the premises, STAT, instead of wasting any more of my time here.

Speaking of which: I am positively fed up with Serif's inaction and lack of attention to customers (are they all on vacation already? What's going on over there? This thread had been going on since July the 1st, and I would say this is an extremely serious issue as far as the forums themselves go), and I don't feel that, considering the current market outlook and the expectations raised but unmet, Designer is even a 4-star product, let alone a 5-star one, and I'm very much willing to drop it down a further peg or two on account of my soured and as of now unpatched personal relationship with them. Sure, it's cheaper and more elegant than the competition on the surface, but besides the obvious – and expensive! – 800lb gorilla that is Illustrator CC, Inkscape is free and probably more powerful and flexible than Designer as it is already (the only reason I won't jump ship to it is that it's too similar to CorelDRAW for me to want to go back down that rabbit hole). As for Publisher and Photo, they only survive that fate because both apps are arguably very good indeed considering the competition, respectively Scribus – dear lord! – and GIMP – meh. I won't target those two because it just wouldn't be fair to their teams; yes, some of the features that have been requested over and over again for Designer would be welcome on them, too, but the fact of the matter is that Designer is the oldest product, those weird decisions were made when finishing it up and they still affect it the most. Seeing how Serif only seems to respond to those App Store ratings, maybe a few hits here and there will make them reconsider their hyper-focus on the digital illustration market and dumbfounding structural decisions and priorities, at least as far as Designer is concerned. If anyone cares to join me in my protest, you know what you have to do.

At least that's a tool, which even requires a proper icon and shortcut key, and it was put there, so we know they intend on tackling it probably still during v.1.x. The “select by same stroke/fill/appearance” feature, by comparison, is downright basic even by ex-FreeHand users' standards (they don't care how hard it is to code; from an end-user standpoint, it feels basic and essential, especially in its current Adobe Illustrator's incarnation as but a couple of options on a submenu, which is the bare and expected minimum, so it's understandable that users just assumed it would come sooner rather than later and will be flabbergasted if it indeed only comes in a later, v.2.x paid upgrade), and has been an extremely popular request also for 5 years straight, spanning an entire 12-page thread. And yeah, as you can see, it's not there, not even a blip on the radar. Quoting you, once again: “not trying to be rude, but wow” x10. Somehow, this doesn't feel like the kind of feature that should require a gigantic amount of coding and testing, like a multi-line composer, or an auto-tracer, or something like that, and if Serif's excuse is that “their document model isn't ready for that kind of search forum” (I'm not entirely sure, but IIRC there were some comments to that effect, but please correct me if I'm wrong), then clearly some serious mistakes were made when developing said model at the early conception stages of the entire Affinity suite. Such a lack of foresight is severely disturbing, and doesn't match the expectations that a using a core document format, a portable engine written in C, etc., raised. Again, all of this seems to confirm my assertion that Serif developers are great, genius coders, but severely lacking in the creative relations department. They should take a page or two from Apple's playbook when doing the Mac Pro and Display Pro line reboot, and either actively ask users, in private, what exactly do they need, or at least look attentively at their own forums and, while I'm at it, treating them with a wee bit more respect (instead of, say, nuking the entire threads like they just did). These threads are by no means scientific surveys, but they are certainly better than nothing, and definitely better than anything other competitors like, say, Adobe could hope for. And I dare say, more useful than the insane sales figures and rave reviews on the App Store Serif keeps bandying about. Please stop behaving like a mini-Apple (of yore, that is; ever noticed how Tim Cook recently stopped bombarding us with sales figures? That's right, they now have so much new stuff to discuss every year, they do not even have to use figures as filler…), and forget about 5-star reviews and moolah; you should be always, always focusing on criticism, not praise. That's the only way you can grow as a person, as a professional or as a company.