Spohr_Photography

Well that's a new one..😊  answer is No.    This is why the marching ants are interspersed between white and black.  I may be completely wrong here but they do not look like Affinity Ants to me?

Make a backup of 1.6.7 like this is a good idea before installing 1.7.0, as 1.7.0 has lost settings for some users

Yes,
For Affinity Store do the following:
Go to "\Users\username\Library\Application Support\Affinity Photo Beta\" and copy all the files and folders inside there. Go to "\Users\username\Library\Application Support\Affinity Photo\" and paste the contents into there overwriting whatever was in there For Mac App Store do the following:
Go to "\Users\username\Library\Application Support\Affinity Photo Beta\" and copy all the files and folders inside there. Go to "\Users\username\Library\Containers\com.seriflabs.affinityphoto\Library\Application Support\" and paste the contents into there overwriting whatever was in there When you next run up the application it should have all the same settings your beta had. However please note that if you had already made any changes to 1.7 (or had any content from 1.6) already there these WILL BE LOST! If you wish to keep that then export those out and reimport before doing the steps above.
Instructions here for Designer equivalent
 
 

Oops, @Spohr_Photography was a bit faster … 

Absolutely. Purchases from the Affinity store come with a 14 day money back offer. email AffinityReturns@serif.com

If you have bought the app through the Apple App Store previously, you should get your updates through the App Store as well. The updates are free. If you had an existing app with Serif, ie Affinity Photo and you bought it again, I would suggest to get in contact with Serif to see if you can get a refund or change your license.

Hi zBernie,
A DAM application is still something our developers would like to do, but completing Affinity Publisher and the next updates to our existing apps is the priority.

I understand that NeoFinder works well and supports AP format. But, I'd rather wait than transfer all photos from Apple Photos to, say NeoFinder, and then transfer again to Serif's DAM.

It was not a thought to be as criticism on your post. I'm just looking positive forward to see what they come up with. At present, there is nothing out there which satisfies my needs, especially with AP file format.

2020. Which month? That wasn't mentioned
Best regards!

I do use Adobe Bridge which is good enough for many of my (limited) needs but I was a little unhappy with the preview of certain images. It seemed to be unsharp compared to the acutal files. This made me look around for an alternative (many of them are mentioned in threads in this forum, just search for DAM and look into the thread with the most pages  ) and to my surprise XNviewMP does a good job. Especially since it is able to preview *.afphoto and *.afdesign files (on Windows, I don't know about Mac and Linux). It currently does not preview APub files but I could imagine this will come at a later time.
d.

I know I'm arriving at this party very late (because I didn't see it until now...) but nobody is trying to 'not answer' anything and there are no 'difficult questions' - there are only questions that some moderators may not know the answer to as they're not privy to all information. I'll say this: I'm sitting next to the guys that are writing the DAM... It's a thing.