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MattP

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Posts posted by MattP

  1. Well, I think we might go with the following change...

     

    post-5-0-55641000-1406705267_thumb.png

     

    Cusp nodes will be displayed with a triangle because they are making sharp corners, smooth nodes are displayed with squares as they are the default type and look obviously different to the round off-curve handles.

     

    I've played with this before (I even added it to DrawPlus a long time ago) but was never very happy with how it looked, so always removed it. I think I like this though (for the moment!) so we'll see how you feel about it in the next beta :)

     

    Cheers,

    Matt

  2. Just to add to this, our application has been validated for sale on the Mac App Store with the current codebase so it passes all Apple security checks to ensure that there is nothing untoward happening, and that we only access allowed APIs and use them in a consistent fashion. This means it should be impossible for the application to do anything that would affect your system.

     

    Unfortunately, I'm not enough of a OS X techie to be able to offer any meaningful support regarding your system. Incidentally, what version of the OS are you using? (Is it OS X 10.7 or above?)

  3. Hi Matthias,

     

    I definitely agree that curve node type indicators may be helpful (we're investigating this at the moment - we used to have them, but they looked ugly and distracting so we removed them, but are currently trying to find something more subtle). Have you tried Affinity Designer's Pen tool yet - I'd argue that it's very full-featured and extremely productive already, and we're currently adding additional functionality as we speak - hopefully available in the next beta :)

     

    Cheers,

    Matt

  4. Hello and welcome to the forums! :)

     

    It's definitely inconsistent, but it is done deliberately and has worked very well for us in the past: That doesn't mean that we won't reconsider if there are compelling arguments against it though...

     

    If you consider the Shift key as an aspect-ratio constraining modifier, then things make more sense. Basically, if you imagine you didn't have knowledge of the Shift key, you would want to be able to resize a rectangle/ellipse/curve freely, but if you were to resize text freely you would just get some ugly looking text. So certain items (groups, images, text) force the tool to automatically constrain, and the remaining objects force unconstrained resize. The Shift key is used to modify that default behaviour. The idea is that most people will not notice that it has done the auto-constrain/unconstrained logic because it just did what they expected to happen - but clearly it's not always true ;)

     

    Cheers,

    Matt

  5. Hi Mike,

     

    I think this is a good feature - but one that will not appear for a while, to be honest. I don't like the way this is done in Inkscape (it effectively rasterises at a fixed resolution, does a pixel-based flood fill then traces the bitmap outline to form a vector and inserts this into the document - so it is never perfect) and to do it properly would require a large unit of work which we don't have time for before release. Instead, you can usually make the result you're after from a bit of object copying and geometry operations against a large rectangle in the background :)

     

    Cheers,

    Matt

  6. Paste inside is already available :) Just choose the 'Inside' button from the Insertion Target group on the top toolbar (i.e. click the right-most button at the top-right of the main window). Hopefully that does what you're looking for?

     

    At present, we have no options for the nudge distance - but these will come soon.

     

    I'm not sure what you mean about option-drag? At the moment, we are supporting the default behaviour of option-drag and popping up a context menu (i.e. acting like right-click). However, if you are over a handle in the Select Tool, for example, and you do the option-drag, you'll get different behaviour so that we can add extra functionality to this modifier :)

     

    Incidentally, if you are a user of FreeHand - do you have any old FreeHand files available that you could send to us? We're trying to write an importer at the moment and have very few .fh files to work from! They would obviously be treated confidentially, never shared anywhere and deleted as soon as we have written the importer. If you could send them to asomerfield@seriflabs.com that would be incredible, thanks!

     

    Thanks,

    Matt

  7. Hello!

     

    The only real problem with allowing a dark and light UI in the same program, is that your icons have to be able to work on both light and dark shades... So you either end up with icons that don't work very well on both shades, or two sets of icons. We are only supporting the darker shade at present (with adjustable UI gamma to brighten things up - available via Preferences->User Interface->UI Gamma) but certainly won't rule out looking at this in the future :)

  8. Hi Nichod,

     

    Thanks for getting back to me :) I agree with your statement that ideally any effects should be exported as SVG effects (I hasten to add this doesn't happen when exporting from Illustrator) but there's a very good reason why it's not happening at present - quite simply the SVG effects are implemented differently to our own and hence they just don't look the same, so we can either rasterise them or ignore them completely on export. We can also potentially offer a third option, which would be a 'best guess' at the parameters - so they're roughly right, but the problem is that if you have any other areas of your document that simply had to be rasterised on export and they intersected with the areas of effects that we were going to output as SVG effects with 'best guess' parameters, then you'd quite clearly see areas where the two didn't line up in your exported image... :(

     

    I definitely agree that the way your test had been sliced up was not ideal from an editing perspective... The problem is that you applied a gaussian - that makes an effect larger than the original object - i.e. it would not be possible to crop to the original object to produce some sort of useful vector outline for re-editing, nor should you be able to see any part of the original object because it would interfere with how the blended result would look. Off the top of my head (and it's early on a Saturday, so forgive me if I'm wrong) there's no way a vector could be included in this file that would be in any way helpful? The Gaussian effect definitely can't go out as anything other than rasterised completely, ignored completely (hence the vector shape would go out without its effect) or the 'best guess' version I described above that would have issues with anywhere it intersected other document elements that must be rasterised...

     

    Thanks,

    Matt

  9. Hi Damson,

     

    User-definable shortcut keys are on the way, but probably won't be ready for release. Other than that, you should find that Designer has a full range of shortcut keys - just hover over any tool to see a tooltip that tells you the tool's name and its shortcut key. The shortcuts should (happily) map onto what you're used to from Illustrator/PhotoShop. We haven't forgotten the importance of shortcuts - productivity is one of our key values...

     

    With regards to your issue of not being able to clearly see the selected tool, you can brighten the dark grey of the application by going to the Preferences dialog, choosing User Interface and then adjusting the UI Gamma slider. Hopefully that should help you :)

     

    I don't think Designer will see the addition of graphs any time soon, my initial reaction is that they are more likely to appear in Publisher first.

     

    Thanks,

    Matt

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