tariq

This is a requires to move the "user account" management functions that appeared in recent Affinity suite products to a separate app. There are 3 reasons for this: Reduce the bloat on the core apps and keep them focussed on content creation. Currently the extra "weight" of this functionality is borne by all the apps, which is inefficient, especially if you have 2 or 3 running at the same time, and very especially if you don't want that functionality. Logically a user account and product purchase management facility should be separate. We then have the choice whether to use it or not. It reduces the technical risk. We've been suffering from a disastrous 30 second startup time due to an embedded "web rendering component" in the apps. User account management should never be allowed to bring down the entire app, nor should it even be linked to content creation. That is separate from the very poor choice to "embed a browser" which is both lazy and a security risk. ( On that last point, how did the apps get past testing with a 30 second startup? If it was identified, those changes should have been reversed. )

It happens when I change brush pen colour using the colour palette tool. Sometime it happens when I undo a paint brush stroke, but the common factor seems to be the colour palette. Attached is a debug crash report. (please don't let this be due to the embedded web JIT component in the main content creation tools....) photo_crash.txt

the user account functions should be moved to a separate app - they are added weight and bloat on the actual core tools and the "web" component should be removed, and native UI components should be used to display content sorry but this is basic software design

Ive said it before, Affinity should be much much more open about how it develops its tools - it would benefit, and avoid massive bloopers.

those function can be shoved into a separate app which is optional to use - and not burden added to every creative app

Thanks again. From a technology perspective, having an embedded "web browser" seems like a bad idea, from both an efficiency perspective but also a security perspective. In my experience it was always lazy developers who opted for a 'embed web control' in a supposedly native app. If I was in charge of development I would demand it be ripped out and done properly. Affinity has developed a good reputation for modern, efficient native apps - in contrast to others who have 30 years of legacy code to deal with, or terrible apps which run on 'cross platform' technologies like Delphi. Please don't go down this route.

Hey Patrick We can do without the welcome screen and the "my account" thing. It is bloat that no-one asked for Keep that content on your online website, not in the app. If you cut then out you would have no complaints, and a leaner app. It is rather depressing to hear in-app-adverts are the cause of this.

thanks. Why is a supposed native MacOS app using JIT compilation? Seems a little odd. Would love to know if there are valid reasons...

If Affinity were more publicly open about their bugs and prioritisation list that would be super helpful. It is 2021, the era of open source collaboration and transparency, ... and we can be better than Adobe!

In case it helps understand the problem better, here is a screen recording of Affinity Designer 1.9.3 on macOS 11.3.1 on a MacBook Pro 2015 15" i7 CPU with 16GB RAM. The duration is about 25 seconds. And it happens with Photo too. (Safari is open but with only one tab, a Google search results page). aff_time.mp4

Can Affinity tell us what the cause of these slow apps is? ive had the slow startup issue across all Affinity Apps for a while including this week's 1.9.2 update

same here - ive had the slow startup issue across all Affinity Apps for a while including this week's 1.9.2 update @MEB could you tell us what the cause is? some openness and transparency would be helpful in building trust. smiley saying "we've identified the issue but we're not going to tell you about it" is a little old school software dev.

just adding my voice too - ive had the slow startup issue across all Affinity Apps for a while including this week's 1.9.2 update

just adding my voice too - ive had the slow startup issue across all Affinity Apps for a while including this week's 1.9.2 update

I too am having this issue which started with 1.8.6 I believe. Latest macOS just updated to 11.2 (1st feb 2021) and latest Photos, Designer and Publisher from Mac app store. It would be great if Affinity could be a little more open about their development process and tell what the issues is - or what they think it is. Many of us have already said we don't want new features until the core apps are solid and fast again.

hi Chris, yes I think the crashes happened as a picked colours from custom swatches (which I've been doing for a long time, so I suspect a recent bug) latest macOS, latest Wacom drivers, latest Affinity via App Store

I regularly use Affinity Photo whilst screen recording using Quicktime and also a Wacom tablet - I've previously reported performance problems with very high fan and very poor latency and speed. However, now I am seeing crashes. I don't know the cause, but I've attached the MacOS crash stack log in case it helps the developers. My inexpert look at it suggests a buggy attempt to address memory it shouldn't ... Crashed Thread: 0 Dispatch queue: com.apple.main-thread Exception Type: EXC_BAD_ACCESS (SIGSEGV) Exception Codes: KERN_INVALID_ADDRESS at 0x00003ff4a616c8b8 Exception Note: EXC_CORPSE_NOTIFY Anything I can do to avoid it? Restarting the app causes the crash to happen later... which is problematic when trying to record videos... crash_log

thanks - I guess reading between the lines support for embedded fonts is something that will happen in future?

ps - I'm using the latest MacOS and latest Affinity Photo from the Apple Store.

Attached is a sample PDF. Importing into Photo to rasterise it results in a rendition, with incorrect text font selection. The same PDF when opened in MacOS Preview to export as PNG works beautifully. This is on the same computer and so the same fonts are available. Attached also is the warning on import that fonts are missing (they're obviously not missing). However with other PDFs I've noticed poor rendition even when fonts don't appear to be missing. You may be asking why I want to import PDFs into Photo - the reason is to convert them to bitmaps and prepare them for a bitmap target eg a web page or images in a presentation. lyx_test.pdf

it would be better to put howtos online free for all to see rather than behind a pay-for-book

Thanks @Rick G - does that course address the points I raised? (the promo video shows a book with only a very simple one with titles and main body text )

I think it would be incredibly helpful if Affinity published a detailed guide on how to use Affinity Publisher to create a book. The reasons for this request are: there are many ways to achieve some tasks, but some are "hacks" and some are not the "AP way" the tutorial videos are nice but they're short and sweet, not big enough for a large topic like this some guidance is hard to find, or maybe doesn't exist - put it all in one guide Some of the themes to be covered should include: footnotes, index and contents parts, sections, chapters - maybe even multi-filebook projects images and embedded content (despite what some say, it is not intuitive and suggestions don't support workflows which need say 200 images in a 500 page book) - I've previously posted video screen recordings showing how this is confusing. gotchas in things like style definitions - eg changes which accrue even if you undo the style options, how to avoid this (experiment on a copy - yuk?) good practice - eg should you avoid in-app editing of images to avoid confusion on where the true source is? should you always inherit styles from Body? or create new ones from scratch? why? I'd suggest a long-form tutorial with embodied short video clips. I really wanted to use AP for my next book but sadly some of these issues have prevented me. I hope the AP develops consider AP from the perspective of DTP tasks like publishing technical books with 600 pages and 200 images and use this to think about how the workflow and usage could be made efficient. The answer will be different to the task of designing a 2-page pamphlet or 4 page magazine spread. Can I politely and gently request that people don't reply with "it works for me" and "its version 1 what did you expect" or "we have 30 years of DTP experience what do you know".

looks like it is an Apple issue - other are seeing the problem too (I only have one Apple ID)

upgraded to macOS Catalina (fresh install from usb over a formatted disk) App Store now shows "no purchases" -so have lost my 3 Affinity Apps!!! anyone else seeing this? Apple insisting it is Affinity's fault...