MattP

Hi Miguel, good to have you here :) Don't forget you can simply choose 'Separated Mode' from the 'Window' menu to make the program more traditional Mac-like, if that's your preference :) I'll be interested to hear your thoughts on the program as you get used to it! Cheers, Matt

Awesome! :D

Hi Gregg, The pencil and brush tools will automatically attempt to smooth your input to give you flowing curves. You should find that the brush tool smooths a bit more than the pencil tool as you tend to draw with larger nibs in the brush tool. DrawPlus used to have a slider that controlled how much smoothing would be applied, but I always found that no matter what I set it to, it was just never the result I was wanting. Instead, I've tried to make the smoothing better in Designer so that you just don't need a slider or anything - and I think it's really pretty good most of the time? If you want to make your curves look more like straight lines afterwards, then you could go to the Node Tool, select the nodes (drag a marquee rectangle over them in the Node Tool - I'll make 'select all' work in the future for the Node Tool to select all nodes) and from the context toolbar you can choose to convert to sharp points... is that maybe more like what you were after? If not, is there any chance you could show me an example of what you'd like to achieve? Cheers, Matt

Space Race.afdesign

Mixed Media.afdesign

Line Art.afdesign

lol! Nice first picture! :)

It's probably the same as my old one then! :) If you take a look at the back on the batter cover there is some small writing that says the model number. Mine was an A1281 :)

Hi Lon - good to see you've joined the club! :) Do you know which model of MacBook it is? I had an old MacBook Pro (15", Late 2008 model - it said on the back that it was model A1281, I think) until a couple of months ago and it worked well despite not being the latest and greatest. I upgraded it to 8GB RAM and an SSD, but only because I was doing builds of Designer on it - it previously had 4GB and I had no problems with it until I needed to build the product which uses a lot of memory! My model needed a firmware flash in order to support 8GB so keep in mind that you might need to do this too - unless yours is newer than mine! :)

Nice work, Sean! :)

That's a mighty-fine arrow head... :)

The Pencil Tool doesn't do any kind of constraining at present... Maybe it should? To draw straight line segments just flip to the Pen Tool and use it in 'Line Mode' (on the context toolbar) or just click with Alt held down.

Hi Sean, OS X uses Ctrl-click to pop up a context menu (it's the same as right-click). You have to start the drag without Ctrl held down, then press it to activate the mode Tony is mentioning :) Cheers, Matt

You can use the transform page to set the anchor point and then rotate by using the edit field in there and that should rotate about one of the major points. There's no way to set an arbitrary rotation centre at the moment - but there will be... :)

Hi Sean, In my car drawing, I don't have any layers - all the objects are at the top level... This is just a different way of working. It's just the same as if I'd made a layer and put all the objects inside it instead - they're all just at the same level as each other. It's an accident to be honest, but easily rectified and a valid way of working :) Cheers, Matt

You can now enter "w*0.5" and it should work correctly in beta 4 :)

I'm still working on it, but here's a drawing of a Miura for you to play with in Designer. If anybody fancies improving it and sending it back that would be fantastic! :) Miura.afdesign Cheers, Matt

Try typing "*=50%", or "*=0.5" in place of the number that used to be in the field. Alternatively, you can add "*50%" or "*0.5" to the end of the existing number. You can also do things like "w*0.5" to make the value be half the value shown in the width field (I've just tried that, and it seems to be broken - give us a tick and we'll fix it!). You can also put things like "1in+3px" and it will convert each unit into document coordinate space and do the maths for you. Hopefully we've got this one in the bag! :D

You should be able to type in any value you like in the text field next to the slider. For all the work I do, 100px is far larger than I would ever need! I guess it's all dependent on how big you're designing things... and how much gratuitous 3d-ness you want to see! ;)

That sounds like a good idea to me - I know you can achieve the same effect by just creating a slice object instead, but then it's not linked to the object you're interested in anymore, so this setting would serve a purpose for me. I can definitely imagine using this :)

Hi there, Sean! :D I was just looking at Flickr a few minutes ago (for the first time in years!) and was just about to contact you! Great to see your name appear on the list and I'm sure Designer should work well on your MacBook Pro - I wrote a lot of it on my old 2008 MacBook Pro so there's been a lot of effort put in to make sure that it runs smoothly without needing the latest and greatest hardware.

Hi, I'm Matt Priestley and I'm one of the Affinity developers. I'll try to help out on any topic, but particularly anything relating to tools, views and document drawing as they're the bits I'm mostly responsible for writing. Feel free to join me and introduce yourself, too! :)