[Expand the family products?]

I'm very much in sync with a lot of the CEO talk after the revelation of studio link a while ago, I started investing in the tools just for this hope , its branding name and got realised finally. I do not think affinity has really a need to compete on video or 3d as next product but capitalise on the existing 2d focused persona to create new ones that leverage existing vector and raster functionality. I can see something good with an eventual "Affinity Animator" to take on spine/spriter/live2d rigging and more traditional flash like products reusing a lot of existing product code for all the vector/raster processing, and potentially an "Affinity Architect" architecture/cad persona to build upon illustration feature into a more technical vector drawing set of tools.

As UI/UX person I would really like to see a prototype persona in the form of "Affinity Experience" to take fully on Sketch and Adobe XD, the base of Affinity designer and photo, with added responsive/animate tools for ui/ux/collaboration, and a single format would make something great and very powerful, granted you have enough manpower to catchup with the years of features built by competitors. You did with some of those adobe behemoths, so I have faith

I do think Serif has good a very capable team, good vision of a CEO, and a clean modern code base to work with, there are the basis for a true extensive and cohesive product suite for the next 10 years and beyond.

At this price point, absolutely a no brainer to conquer the world

[Possible to run a batch installer that would auto input product keys for all products?]

1 hour ago, Dan C said:

Hi Nico

Unfortunately this isn't something we officially support for single license users, unless you have purchased a multi-seat commercial license as previously mentioned above.

I understand your reasoning for wanting an easily installable .exe file that does not require a product key, however the creation of such a file could be easily distributed illegally which is why we do not support this, apologies!

Hi Dan, I respect your side. All I was looking for is to be able to allow parameters to the exe, or distribute directly the msi files that allow parameters from command line to be silent, and add user and product key. It would not affect anything regarding piracy compared to what's now as you can still /extract the exe into msi with user/key embedded anyway and distribute that copy ready to install if you want. This would allow to simple chain multiple affinity applications together with other installations (Firefox, chrome...) once a win10 clear installation is done, and new versions would just be a download and copy in the existing folder as the process is managed by a batch file independently.

I understand there are other solutions with automation software like autoit or autohotkey, but doesn't look as simple and elegant. Best would probably to use something similar to NPM like Chocolatey, but unlike the web, doesn't look it has ever taken off for standard software. At least commercial ones, blame the rise of the subscription models and all those proprietary "launchers".

Thanks anyway to everyone.

[Possible to run a batch installer that would auto input product keys for all products?]

12 minutes ago, v_kyr said:

• Windows Installer - Command line options
• Msiexec.exe Command Line
• The Silent Install options for the Windows installer (msiexec)
• ... and so on ...

Not sure what you mean concrete here, since passing over parameters as arguments from a batch file, or a win scripting host script, or Powershell script is easily possible.

The exe file seems not a valid file for msiexec, tried powershell

The converted msi through /extract which gives you a gui to add email and product key works through msiexec and install silently using msiexec /i affinity-photo-1.7.3.msi

The point is that I want to use a bat file to trigger all the exe files (together with other software), and download any new version into the usb stick folder with win10 installer and chain things, I do not want to convert each exe into msi as they get updated.

My idea was sort of this to work:

msiexec /i affinity-photo-1.7.3.exe email=###### productkey=######## or whatever are the actual parameters for this

 

[Possible to run a batch installer that would auto input product keys for all products?]

All good, a bit of googling and experimentation, found it, it's a msi installer, you need to go to command line, type => product-name.exe /extract

You will get all instructions to make it silent, add user/product key and disable the steps. Hope it useful to others.

 

For anyone who wants to create a chain of installers, always check the exe installer adding /? after the full filename

 

Edit: still need to convert every new exe version into msi, so not helpful, I needed to pass the parameters to exe directly from a bat file, seems not possible.

[Possible to run a batch installer that would auto input product keys for all products?]

Perhaps I wasn't clear enough, I mean create some sort of batch file for one, two or all three apps (or a standalone exe file) and run all of them if the installers are within the same folder for example with the batch file/apps already configured once with all the products keys. In other words create a silent batch installer. From time to time I like to format my machines and reinstall everything clean.

It's a bit of a system admin type of tools, you bundle all the latest exe files in a folder, you just run the preconfigured batch and go for your coffee, come back all installed and ready to use.

[Possible to run a batch installer that would auto input product keys for all products?]

As per subject! And install everything with one click in windows at least? Not sure you can do with mac, but would be useful too!

Edit: I basically want to know if there is a parameter to pass to the exe to auto add the product key when the installer is running and make silent (no clicks needed), so you can get a chain done to auto install all. And if something similar is available for mac too, as I have all 3 apps for both platforms to install from time to time

[Design Versioning for Affinity Products]

1 hour ago, v_kyr said:

Well there are different solutions available to work with git here, in terms of storing large binary files into shared repositories for that. - See for example this short article ...

• Storing Large Binary Files in Git Repositories

Thanks for that, but my point was about having the opportunity to explode the container file and git manage internal resources like text or json which could be used to store vector like well-structured svg like and therefore be able to diff changes at line level just like dev code. As Affinity designer seemed interested to put a mark into icon/ui/ux space (or perhaps giving up to more established sketch/invision solutions and focus on traditional illustrator/photoshop/indesign replacement user base), this is a feature increasingly important to have for better structured projects as designers get more and more used to git like workflows. This would allow to scan all changes across different versions of designs, icon sets and so forth. From my understanding Large files addons around git just speed up the versioning but doesn't really offer any further benefit of exploding and indexing internal resources.

We can imagine Affinity publisher could benefit from internal indexing to modify embedded images and their data associated in like large books, magazines, if an image changes or some of its data, you can store those specific changes that are also human readable, designer with icon sets, multi screen apps, photos could be non-destructive multi layering. In general whatever needs granular detail and a lots of things going on in larger projects, might be very useful.

These days I think it's way more useful to have an open format to interact with other apps, than an optimised binary to save space, storage in plentiful  Unless they have any business/protectionism reason, not considering that could cut some potential market through integrations. I hope to see good news in the future, as I would like to adopt affinity apps more.

[Design Versioning for Affinity Products]

Cool, no hope for third party work about this then. As I have seen there is request to support Sketch file format, here's another candle about it, if well supported export format it could be an alternative and therefore could save and git diff to that format. If your format is a typical proprietary format, it's going to be very hard time to turn it at this point, so probably my money are into sketch container support

[Design Versioning for Affinity Products]

7 minutes ago, GabrielM said:

Hi @Nico ,

We have no plans to implement this at the moment. Sorry

Moved to feature requests. 

Thanks,

Gabe. 

Thanks for letting me know Gabriel, do you have any idea or resource about internal file structure approach for designer/publisher/photo? Interested to know if the actual file is a proprietary binary or approached more of a open container with an internal structure like excel, open document or sketch files, perhaps compressed. Also to see if there is any potential to create a third party tool/service.

[Design Versioning for Affinity Products]

Is there anything on the market or planned by Serif to implement versioning? Sketch files are zipped to contain text format data and image which allowed products like Kactus/Abstract to collaborate with Git. I have affinity products across Mac, pc and iPad, and would be nice to have a centralised way like a git friendly system with meaningful diff/commenting that goes beyond simple binary replacement.

[File format]

Cool, thanks for letting me know.

[File format]

Is the file format used by affinity publisher finalised and stable? What I create today with the beta is going to be able to open with the final one and beyond?

[Stability/performance with large imagery projects with Designer]

Cool, thank you, makes sense to divide by section, in my case probably by month to make sure filesizes are in check.

[Stability/performance with large imagery projects with Designer]

Thanks Mike, I get that the CD/AI are not meant for this level of print usage as well as Affinity Designer, but I just wanted an opinion on how affinity designer performs loading 100s of jpegs. I have got an unfinished photobook somewhere of my daughter started in CD a while ago that I want to complete and print with an online photo album service (so simple pdf needed with bleed for "full page" pages), and I was thinking to port it to Affinity as I recently got it and as it's based on recent technology, hoping that It could scale well with multiple large files as they claim it can deal easily with very large single files.

[Stability/performance with large imagery projects with Designer]

Hello guys,

 

I wanted to know if anyone has experience with Designer projects containing huge amount of large images like photoalbums? Other applications have functionalities like embedding a low resolution version for preview and link the high resolution externally like I think InDesign and CorelDraw to be used during export. Is Designer performing well with a large amount of artboards with 1-2 GB or more of images or it has got limits/frequent crashes/unbearable sluggish?

 

Cheers

[Multi page approach in Designer to produce pdf]

I cannot find any info about any form of multipage feature, and seems in the roadmap. Is there any alternative approach currently available in Designer to perhaps use multiple same-size artboards that can be exported into a multipage pdf or anything else that fits the purpose?

[h265 format support like BPG?]

Any chance to support x265/h265 image side of the codec like BPG on the affinity products, at least photo?

[List of exports and automation]

Thanks for the feature list, there is a mention about exporting template here and there but not a clear list of assets export available, I'm talking about afbrushes, afassets, recently I have seen mentioned somewhere afstyles, is it supposed to be a list in there with all the assets type exports? Wondering how many more are out there hidden in the app perhaps? Perhaps making a video outlining all of them and how to use? I watched the afassets one on Vimeo, not sure the others.

 

I have got also a machine with multiple high end graphic cards (win10), have affinity products got OpenCL support for GPU processing?

 

Is there any interest in the company/community for assets to be generated outside from other applications and open the file structure to do so down the line? But also interest to allow assets to be loaded into other applications, like opening the file structure or give plugins for other leading design apps?

 

have you guys got any marketplace available where professionals can submit and sell their assets to be reused by others, like the Unity Assets Store? Any interest? 

 

By the way, congratulation with the products, they really look solid with a really nice product development approach, you have got really smart people leading that I think. Feel very lean but also polished.

[List of exports and automation]

Hello all,

 

recently purchased photo and designer and starting to have a look at the potential, I have got 2 questions.

 

1. Is there a place with a complete list of export types for both photos and designer, like afassets afbrushes... and what's their usage?

2. Are their format available and editable, for example, could it support any sort of automation from the outside to bundle a set of icons into a asset set? If I have a github project with a icon set folder, can some sort of npm based generator bundle things and make a build available as affinity asset?