MattP

I actually used to work for Xara back at the time when they released Xara X, and the left/right click thing was something that I absolutely loved - once you knew it, it saved so much time! I think there's definitely some mileage here, but I think there may also be some inconsistencies introduced by it - I'll have a chat with everyone else when they get in the office :) Oh, and super-bonus points to Miguel for his knowledge of Corel acquiring Xara in order to integrate/steal some of their better features!

That's what I like to see... another cute kitten avatar! :D Great to have you guys with us on the beta - your input will be very valuable :)

I was only joking, Miguel :) We very much appreciate all your input and we all desperately want to make Designer as good as we possibly can! Have you got any further with your Lamborghini drawing?

Hi Nichod, I was just talking to TonyB and he mentioned something interesting... iDraw doesn't support winding modes, and hence it doesn't import SVG files correctly that use winding modes. This is why your Affinity and Sketch SVG files don't appear to have worked. If you try opening them in Safari or Inkscape you'll see that the winding modes are honoured and the documents both look as expected. So it's actually iDraw's bug that's showing you the 'problem'. I'll look at changing our boolean operations to automatically reverse curve orientation for holes and this will actually make iDraw import the file correctly (because drawing correctly won't be relying on winding modes). Thanks, Matt

Hi Damson, Thanks for your post. Hopefully I can answer your questions :) Affinity Designer is going to be sold from the App Store for £34.99. There's no ongoing subscriptions, as you'd expect - you just pay to buy it and then it's yours. We will continue to add features over the lifetime of the product (we have a lot of plans!) and also to fix any bugs that are found and you will receive these as free updates via the App Store, just like any other App Store program - meaning that you can either tell your Mac to always install updates automatically, or you can manually decide when to apply the update. We already have an incredible PSD import engine and our AI/PDF importer is being finished right now, so it will open these files and maintain as much editability and information as possible. You should expect to be able to work on a PSD/AI/PDF file without issue. We also have solid EPS and SVG import/export so these intermediate formats should enable you to receive files from anywhere else. Clearly there may be things which we don't support (our mesh gradient fills will be different to Adobe Illustrator's when we add them, so it's unrealistic of me to promise they will import as editable meshes - they most likely will not, initially at least) but we will strive to make everything work as well as possible. We are very aware that compatibility is a barrier to professionals, so we are paying this a lot of attention. It sounds like you should definitely download the beta and see how it works for you :) We've still got a fair amount to do (in particular, you currently can't export back to PSD, or open AI/PDF files - but that's in development right now and will come soon) but you should find that the core tools are there and that they are solid, reliable and very productive. There's actually an article about Affinity Designer here that mentions a few of those details. I'm sorry that our website did not offer better descriptions - it's just a placeholder while our real site is being finished and it will hopefully appear soon :) Thanks, Matt

Hey, I get the hint - I'm still working on it! Busy, busy, busy... ;)

Hi Nichod, Thanks for getting back to me :) I've just tried exactly what you described and this is my result... it's all vector, with a radial gradient in it, so I don't know what the difference between our two setups is? :S Is there any chance you could just attach the .afdesign file here so that I can try it on my computer and see where the problem is? Thanks in advance, Matt

Hi Nichod, Definitely agree this is useful (along with being able to specify arbitrary sizes - eg. 256px width) and it will come at some future point :) Cheers, Matt

Hi Nichod, Could you please provide a file showing the problem? As I said in your other post, I'm getting correct results for SVG export without it rasterising gradients, so there might be something about your particular example that is causing the rasterisation. Is there any way you could also show an example output of this from another app showing the same thing working that you're seeing as a problem? I think our SVG export works pretty well, I think? :) Cheers, Matt

What a pickle! :lol: Dreadful pun, sorry... *sigh* Looking good so far - I'm really glad you're enjoying using Designer and I'm definitely appreciating all the input you've given! Looking forward to seeing future updates! :) Matt

Hi Nichod. Had you adjusted the gradient midpoints at all? SVG/PDF only support fairly basic gradients, so to make sure they look the same they will be rasterised. If they are simple, then they should be supported by the standards, and hence should remain as vectors in the output... I have just tried exporting a 3-colour gradient on an ellipse to SVG and it is definitely still all vector with a gradient :) Cheers, Matt

Haha - RTFM! :P We already have a modifier to stop selection of the object you're currently over - try holding Alt then starting your drag :)

We already have this as a modifier... :) During your drag, try holding down Ctrl and you should suddenly find that anything that touched your marquee will be included in the selection... just like Illustrator. I can't say I particularly like this mode though because I far too often get too many things in my selection?

It's worth noting that we've got a few new ideas for the Mesh Fill in Designer, that should make it much better than the one in DrawPlus! Hopefully I'll be able to add it fairly shortly after our release :)

Affinity Photo already has snapshots - points in time of the document history... So this means Designer also has this functionality within it. There's nothing to stop us adding this split-view history browser style-thingy, it's more of a UI consideration than anything else... We can have a think on it, thanks :)

Wow! Certainly taking shape! :)

Affinity Photo uses the split-view to show before/after of your effects... I'm not 100% sure that this has a place in Designer? How do I say which adjustment I want to view with/without? :unsure:

lol! We actually had this working a while ago - and also tried hooking it up to rotate the canvas instead... but the weird thing is that the gesture is generally so inaccurate that you end up using the mouse/trackpad in the normal way afterwards to get the actual rotation that you wanted to achieve! If we enabled it again, it would be just as a flashy 'look what you can do' feature that actually wasn't very useful (because it always required further adjustment afterwards!) and we're deliberately only adding things to Designer that both serve a purpose and work properly. If there's a huge demand for this novelty, we'll happily think again - we're always open to considering things, but the whole idea of the program is to only do a limited number of things, but to do each of them really, really well - so this doesn't quite fit in my opinion... Cheers, Matt

This sounds like a great improvement - looking forward to using it! :)

Hi guys! This was a decision we made a long time ago... but it doesn't mean it was a fantastic idea, lol! It means changing more than you'd imagine, but there's no reason why it couldn't be made to work... I'll talk to the team about it on Monday :) Cheers, Matt

Come on, Neil! It'd be great to see some of your work in Designer! :)

Err... yes... I'm still trying to get to this - will do it extremely soon, sorry! :)

Now that's the spirit! :D Great to have you along for the ride, Tony. Really nice work on shutterstock too! B)

It would mean always having to sacrifice the space - for something which you turn on relatively infrequently... We always used to do this in all our old applications, and it looked ugly and was extremely rarely used (in the scheme of things). The Lock/Unlock functionality certainly does need a keyboard modifier adding though... perhaps this will be enough after we've added it? :)

Well, beta build 17344 (released a few minutes ago) has EPS export, so hopefully that will get you going :)