Peter Werner

Actually, "Balance Ragged Lines" is not supposed to be used on body text. Balancing and hyphenation are taken care of by the paragraph composer – by default that's Adobe's excellent "Multi-Line Composer", which already takes the effect of hyphenation and composition decisions over the entire paragraph into account, not just the current line. So you don't need to activate any other options to get nice and balanced body text.
 
"Balance Ragged Lines" is intended to be used with small centered blocks of text like pull quotes, multi-line headlines and so on. For instance, you can apply it to your subhead paragraph style so that those two lines of text are always evenly divided between the two lines and you don't have to manually add forced returns for everything to look balanced.
 
If you apply "Balance Ragged Lines" to regular body text however, it will actually usually make the result significantly worse, and it is sure to drive anybody mad who has to do copy fitting with your body copy style.
 
If you look at your example, the only thing that has really improved on the right is that InDesign has balanced all lines so that the last line of the paragraph is filled completely, making tradeoffs in all other lines in order to meet that goal. Also keep in mind that placeholder copy won't always give you the best impression of these things since the hyphenation is not representative when using pseudo-latin.
 
EDIT: There is an article on InDesign Secrets that goes into detail.

Actually, "Balance Ragged Lines" is not supposed to be used on body text. Balancing and hyphenation are taken care of by the paragraph composer – by default that's Adobe's excellent "Multi-Line Composer", which already takes the effect of hyphenation and composition decisions over the entire paragraph into account, not just the current line. So you don't need to activate any other options to get nice and balanced body text.
 
"Balance Ragged Lines" is intended to be used with small centered blocks of text like pull quotes, multi-line headlines and so on. For instance, you can apply it to your subhead paragraph style so that those two lines of text are always evenly divided between the two lines and you don't have to manually add forced returns for everything to look balanced.
 
If you apply "Balance Ragged Lines" to regular body text however, it will actually usually make the result significantly worse, and it is sure to drive anybody mad who has to do copy fitting with your body copy style.
 
If you look at your example, the only thing that has really improved on the right is that InDesign has balanced all lines so that the last line of the paragraph is filled completely, making tradeoffs in all other lines in order to meet that goal. Also keep in mind that placeholder copy won't always give you the best impression of these things since the hyphenation is not representative when using pseudo-latin.
 
EDIT: There is an article on InDesign Secrets that goes into detail.

I've once typeset a booklet with mathematical formulas for students in Adobe InDesign for a client. While there are plugins like InMath, they are expensive and clumsy since they rely on hacks like baseline shifts and so on. There was another plugin that can be used an external formula editor like in Word, but it turned out the formulas didn't print properly and there were incorrect characters. Not to mention that these solutions are way too expensive if you only have a one-time project.
 
Back then, I, too, found LaTeXIt! for Mac to be the best solution since it allows you to type out small snippets of LaTeX and save it out to a PDF using XeTeX (XeTeX being a key part since this allows access to OpenType fonts to customize the look to match the text in the publication) or copy and paste it into other applications. But it's not ideal since customizing the fonts, look and kerning of the formulas takes loads of boilerplate code since LaTeX was never meant for lots of customization. Not to mention every formula was basically a linked image and had to be re-built for even the smallest change.
 
I don't think actual LaTeX integration would make a lot of sense. But I do think that built-in formula editing support for Affinity Publisher ("Maths Persona"?) would be a fantastic feature. Additionally, a way to quickly type LaTeX code simply as an input method (without having LaTeX installed, the formula subset would be enough) and a way to import MathML would make it really quick and flexible to create math-heavy documents.
 
It's not just a feature that benefits the few people who are professionally printing math-heavy publications. I'm certain that such a feature would position Affinity Publisher as a really attractive solution for teachers and educators for creating work sheets and the like. This demographic is currently mostly on Word because something like InDesign is just way out of the price range and learning curve that these people would consider. But at $49, I think it would be a no-brainer for every teacher. All it would probably take is a decent math typesetting feature for Publisher and a non-destructive graph plotting tool for Designer. The expressions parser is already there as part of the text input fields…

I'll disagree.  This is not difficult, it's math. Yes, the feature would require allocation of development resources, but tangent snapping comes down to mathematics and/or algorithms that are pretty well-defined, with precedents in both graphic design software and in other areas of computer graphics.
Whether it's about Adobe or Affinity supporting or not supporting this feature, it all comes down to resource prioritization. This particular piece of work isn't rocket science, but does take up limited bandwidth for UX design, implementation, testing, etc.
For my part, I've also had need for snapping to tangents in my work, enough that I bought Astute Graphics' plugins to support that workflow.
So I'll add my +1 to support for snapping to tangency, which ultimately ends up covering snapping to path tangency and becomes a form of object collision snapping.

I completely agree that we should have features that are common in film software inside of still image editing packages. Just compare the ridiculously ineffective brush-based masking in Lightroom with the variable feathering of vector shapes in pretty much any respectable color grading or rotoscoping software. These programs are essentially solving the same basic problem, but mostly due to Adobe's monopoly in the stills image editing market and every other contender copying only them, we are left with this bizarre divergence between tools for stills and motion.
 
Features like better scopes, spline-based warper, proper keyers (or at least a linear non-destructive HSL keyer), vector masking with variable feathering, three-way color correctors, OpenFX plugin support, particle systems, 2.5D compositing, Python scripting and so on should definitely make their way into Affinity at some point in my opinion.
 
I think the reason why these are not inside of Photoshop yet is likely because Adobe thinks in "markets", as opposed to, say, "common sense". Most of the semi-recent development in Photoshop has been focussed either on making the software attractive for new markets (built-in 3D rendering, scientific tools like measurements etc.) or on reacting to other software threatening their market domination in a specific sector (when Sketch started being a serious contender for UI design, Photoshop got features like Artboards). Plus there is usually one flashy thing based on recent research that can be bolted on without too much change to any of the existing code that keeps the existing customer base happy.
 
I'm pretty sure their thinking goes something like "Waveform monitors are a video feature, but video people don't edit videos in Photoshop, only stills for bringing into Premiere or After Effects. Also, none of our photographers in the focus group test have requested this feature, they don't even know such a thing exists because it's not in Photoshop. It would be a pain to market it to them and they don't seem to need it. Let's rather add a panel that makes it really easy for us to sell them stock photos for composites and actually increase our revenue this way.". And I'm not being facetious, I have a fear that's what their actual conversations are like.
 
In fact, if you think about it, there is even no logical reason why After Effects and Photoshop should be two completely separate programs, with completely different code bases, implementing the same effects. The only reason is the fact that Adobe bought After Effects and never bothered to refactor everything to the point where they could actually at least share parts of the code. That's why we're still stuck with the 1990ies "Clouds" filter in Photoshop and there is the infinitely more powerful "Fractal Noise" in After Effects for instance.
 
But I'm afraid this is getting a bit off-topic.

I was having issues with the character and paragraph buttons on the top of the menu.
 
Hmm, I don’t have any issues. The only thing I see is a tiny UI-related bug. The Paragraph (resp. Character) panel will get to the foreground, when the Paragraph (resp. Character) button is clicked, but the tab of the panel will not expand and show the full title of the panel. See my video. 
 
Char-Par-Tab--Expand.mov
 

If you want to mimic what the old Ultimatte boxes used in television used to do, you can use Apply Image and use 
SG-MAX(SR,SB) as an expression for each red, green and blue (set alpha to 1 or simply leave it at sa). That's going to give you a grayscale mask. Clean that up with Levels, Invert, and then go Layer > Rasterize to Mask.
 
You can save that as a macro and it's as close as it gets to a one click solution.
 
An alternative approach that is also quite quick is to use is Select > Select Sampled Color. Can't test how well it works with green screen material right now, though, since I can't use selections due to this annoying bug, but it should work pretty well until Affinity gets a real HSL keyer.

There are several different brush types in Affinity, and unlike I am missing something obvious, it appears to me that the raster brushes used in Affinity Photo can only be used with brush tools. 
 
It would be fantastic to be able to apply these non-destructively to vector paths. Essentially like a non-destructive version of Photoshops "Stroke Path" feature. This is something that for instance Macromedia Fireworks and Discreet Combustion were always able to do, but for some reason it was never added to Photoshop.
 
Possibly, the applications could also support adding multiple brushes (or strokes in vector terms) to the same path, opening up even more possibilities.
 
In addition to the obvious benefits, having raster brushes on vector paths would also allow the brush engine to be used more like a particle system, another long-standing omission in Photoshop's feature set that would be great to see in Affinity.
 
NOTE: There is a "Texture Line Style" setting in Affinity Photo's path stroke options, but this doesn't seem to work with the raster brushes, counter-intuitively not even with those in the "Textured" category in Photo's brushes panel. I assume that this requires Designer brushes (as these work when applied in Designer in the same place), but those are not available inside Photo as far as I can tell. As such, I find this a bit confusing, and it seems that I'm not alone. Some kind of note in the Stroke popup under the "Texture Line Style" that lets the user know that they need to use Designer to apply Texture stroke brushes would be useful.

Just in case that this is talking about output levels, not input levels, which seems like the more likely case for precise settings like this to me:
 
You can use the "Apply Image" effect with "Use Current Layer As Source" and "Equations" turned on. If you use 
3/255 + ((253-3)/255)*SI as your equation (for Grayscale), that should do the trick. If you want to use RGB mode, use the same formula in each channel and just replace SI with SR, SG, SB respectively and let the alpha untouched. The first part takes care of the offset (the 3), and the second part rescales your values so your top value is 253. We need to divide by 255 since Apply Image always assumes floating point ranges from 0.0 to 1.0 (and beyond for 32-bit HDR mode) and not 8-bit values from 0 to 255, no matter what format your document is in. 
 
You can make that into a Macro with sliders instead of absolute values to create your own "Output Levels" tool until Affinity's Levels feature finally gets updated with Output Levels and numerical controls.
 
Alternatively, you can always use the Channel Mixer to achieve the same thing.

I think the current Affinity philosophy is by far the most sensible approach, and the shared code base finally gives us the UI consistency that Adobe has never been able to achieve. It's great to be able to create, say, a movie poster in an image editing application and refine some of the typography in a layout application, then go back and work on some of the raster imagery. Being able to work on a single document all the time and being able to show, hide, and move layers instead of splitting the graphics into three files in Photoshop if they have to overlap text in the layout is a huge advantage
 
However, I have to completely agree with the original poster that having both equation editing and sheet music engraving integrated into the Affinity suite would be extremely useful. It's already been discussed in these forums at various points, but publications that integrate lots of equations or music examples, such as text books, are extremely cumbersome to produce with current professional graphic design tools since every single item has to be integrated as a picture and edited in an external application, then exported to PDF or similar, then relinked in the layout, repeat for any changes. Not to mention you don't have the context of your page when editing the embedded graphics.
 
A dedicated persona with scientific tools for mathematical and chemical equations would also open Publisher up to the eduction market – not just the professional scientific publishing world, it would make it the perfect tool for teachers to create worksheets with. Software like InDesign with the InMath plugins is completely unattractive for individual teachers due to its price point and perceived complexity, but the 50€ or so for Publisher would likely be no-brainer. Thus I'd expect that the development resources required for what most designers would consider a relatively niche feature set could probably be more than recovered through the additional sales in that market.

For those looking at thumbnail extraction, metadata, or the basic structure of the file format: This open source project and the corresponding documentation might be of interest 
 
While the speed at which new features are developed would probably make the native Affinity file format impractical as an interchange or final output/archival format, some fundamental details that don't change, such as accessing thumbnails, metadata, page sizes etc. would of course be extremely helpful.
 
However, I do agree with the sentiment that a completely closed file format makes it problematic to blindly trust it with one's data. This is always an issue when a software is discontinued or a company goes away. We have seen this with Adobe/Macromedia FreeHand (most of the file format has been painstakingly reverse engineered, but to my knowledge certain parts still remain undecoded), Aldus/Adobe PageMaker, the proprietary chunks in Macromedia/Adobe Fireworks PNGs that hold the editable data, or recently, Serif's own complete Plus range. When your last computer (or VM) that can still run the original software breaks, as a user, you are basically locked out of your own files and can no longer make any edits.
 
I think it would be a good middle ground if Serif simply made a public, legally binding commitment that in any scenario in which the software is discontinued, the company goes away, or read compatibility with old file format versions is broken, the complete file format will be documented and a full official specification published for anyone to freely access.

It would be handy to be able to just double click a guide and be taken to the Guides Manager with the position field for that guide already having the focus.
 
Alternatively, the ability to select guides and edit their position in the Transform panel could also address that workflow and would at the same time open up the possibility to use the Translation part of Power Duplicate to create guides.

For graphic design use, it would be useful to have options to quickly scale a layer proportionally or non-proportionally to fit or to fill the canvas/artboard/parent object.
 
Moreover, since raster layers can be freely transformed inside of Photo, a quick command to scale it so that one pixel in the layer exactly matches a pixel in the document would be very useful (could alternatively also be called "Clear Layer Transform")
 
In terms of UI, these could either be part of the Select tool options bar, the Transform panel (be it as buttons or as flyout menu items), or the Align tools.

I just saw this – having done scripting in both languages in different applications, I really, really, really hope this will be reconsidered when the time comes for that feature to be implemented.
 
I'm actually a bit surprised to read that statement since I literally can't think of any use case that JavaScript covers chat Python doesn't, usually even cleaner and easier.
 
Even basic things like splitting code into multiple source files and deriving from classes provided by the host application (say, MenuCommand, UiPanel, or FillerTextGenerator) are maddening and frustrating experiences in JavaScript, if they are possible at all.
 
Imagine use cases like a basic InDesign IDML importer for Affinity Publisher. With an existing Python XML parser package, this is a fairly straightforward task. Or a "Place Article from RSS feed" command. Network access and RSS feed parser come standard with Python without installing anything and would make that type of thing a matter of only a few lines of code. With Adobe-type JavaScript scripting, I'd probably give up the idea of writing that script before even starting.
 
Not to mention you guys would have a much easier time developing and maintaining the C++ host side if you can use boost::python versus some raw JavaScript engine API.
 
Also, JavaScript will likely run scripts in separate engine instances for each script to avoid clashing function names and the like, making it really hard to communicate between different scripts, share code between commands and so on. Even running specific functions defined in a script file from the interactive script console etc. may be impossible.
 
I realize that some folks favor JavaScript because they are already familiar with it, but I don't see how someone who is used to JavaScript wouldn't be able to easily pick up the necessary Python basics within a matter of minutes and be at a point where they could write pretty much everything they could in JavaScript in Python as well.
 
The only real issue I see with Python is that all that power may clash with Apple's AppStore sandboxing rules.

The current Gradient Map feature is quite basic like the one in Photoshop, but in many ways, it could be a much more useful tool with the following additions:
 
HSL Mode: Instead of going based only on Luminance, this would use the input hue or saturation as the lookup index. In combination with HSL blend modes, this would allow for some fantastic workflows like basically warping the color wheel to taste, similar to the "HSL Wheels" feature in Magic Bullet Colorista (Note: don't be fooled by the name of the feature, this is NOT referring to the three-way color corrector). Just use a gradient of the HSL spectrum and drag or re-define stops, set the result to "Hue" blend mode, and you have an extremely powerful color correction tool that gives you results that would be difficult to achieve in any other way.  
Circular Editor Option: Like the Colorama filter built-into in After Effects, this makes it easy to work on maps that are supposed to start and end with the same color. In combination with an input for a number of revolutions (cycles) to use, this would also make it easy to create gradient effects where a few stops are repeated multiple times across the spectrum (like, say, alternating black-white-black-white). This would also massively improve usability in conjunction with the HSL mode option suggested above.  
Access to swatches: This would make it easy to re-use gradients by defining them or recalling them from swatches as an alternative to using Adjustment Presets.  
Interpolation control: Sometimes the transition from one color to the next needs fine-tuning – this is something that Affinity's gradient editor already supports, but not in the Gradient Map dialog. A Constant Interpolation setting where the color would just be constant up until the next stop would also be useful since it would eliminate the need for duplicate stops in the same position, which are really hard to select. Possibly, the curve editor could also be re-used to define falloff using a Bézier or Catmull-Rom-Spline.  
Duplicate Stop option: Often, it is necessary to use the same color multiple times in a gradient. Adding a button for this and/or enabling Option+Drag to duplicate would be useful. Photoshop aggravatingly always inserts new stops with the same color instead of the color that is already there at that position in the gradient, but the (better) implementation of this in Affinity had the side effect that duplicating stops became harder.  
On-image sampling: While the dialog box is open, it would be useful to highlight the value under the mouse pointer in the gradient display to be able to place a stop exactly at the desired position. Clicking in the image would insert a stop.  
On-image highlighting: Conversely, when editing/dragging a stop in the gradient editor, an option to highlight the affected pixels in the image would be helpful. The options could be: off (nothing) all pixels that have exactly the value represented by the position of the stop (similar to focus peaking) the zone that will be affected in the image. The overlay would start at 100% intensity at the value represented by the stop and fall off to 0% on each side until the position of the next stop respectively, taking the falloff into account (see "Interpolation Control" above). Optionally, two different colors could be used to represent each side of the stop.  
Resizable dialog box for more precision: When editing 16-bit images or editing falloff from one stop to the next or when placing stops very close to each other, it would be useful to have more room to work with. Making gradient editor dialog boxes in the application resizable would alleviate this problem.  
Snap to Luminosity button: Sometimes, it is useful to place stops exactly at the point in the gradient that corresponds to their luminosity, especially when they are defined by selecting swatches from a color palette. Adding a button that moves all selected stops to that position would make this really quick. For instance, tinting an image with two tones while keeping black and white intact could be achieved very quickly by selecting a black-to-white preset, then adding two stop, selecting a color from the document color palette for each, and clicking that "Snap Selected Stops to Luminosity" button.  
Ability to move start and end stops. The values before the first stop and after the last one would simply use constant extrapolation. This would eliminate the need for duplicate stops, which take longer to create and are harder to edit since all operations need to be performed twice.

It would be handy to be able to just double click a guide and be taken to the Guides Manager with the position field for that guide already having the focus.
 
Alternatively, the ability to select guides and edit their position in the Transform panel could also address that workflow and would at the same time open up the possibility to use the Translation part of Power Duplicate to create guides.

Images have been retouched and manipulated before the digital age (see here for a few famous politically motivated examples). Stars used to have their own retouchers they worked with for their portraits. It's just gotten a whole lot easier to do. In fact, the accessibility of Photoshop and similar tools has lead people to finally distrust the images they see, whereas in former days, only a select few people were privy to knowledge about the extent that images could be manipulated.
 
Most of the time, recognizing edits it's as simple as applying an extreme curves adjustment. Most manipulated images fall right apart. Sometimes just looking at an image on an uncalibrated monitor is enough, which is why extreme curves are a good way to check if your own edits hold up. Other techniques include analyzing the grain structure or looking for repeated patterns (usually more subtle than this famous example however) or looking for strange glows or edge artifacts that are the result of sloppy masking. More often than one would think, it's as easy as looking at the EXIF metadata and seeing which software was used to write the file.
 
There have also been various automated ways, programs and scientific papers with various approaches to detecting manipulated images, some using machine learning, others looking for small repeated patterns that might be the results of using the clone stamp and so on.

The current Gradient Map feature is quite basic like the one in Photoshop, but in many ways, it could be a much more useful tool with the following additions:
 
HSL Mode: Instead of going based only on Luminance, this would use the input hue or saturation as the lookup index. In combination with HSL blend modes, this would allow for some fantastic workflows like basically warping the color wheel to taste, similar to the "HSL Wheels" feature in Magic Bullet Colorista (Note: don't be fooled by the name of the feature, this is NOT referring to the three-way color corrector). Just use a gradient of the HSL spectrum and drag or re-define stops, set the result to "Hue" blend mode, and you have an extremely powerful color correction tool that gives you results that would be difficult to achieve in any other way.  
Circular Editor Option: Like the Colorama filter built-into in After Effects, this makes it easy to work on maps that are supposed to start and end with the same color. In combination with an input for a number of revolutions (cycles) to use, this would also make it easy to create gradient effects where a few stops are repeated multiple times across the spectrum (like, say, alternating black-white-black-white). This would also massively improve usability in conjunction with the HSL mode option suggested above.  
Access to swatches: This would make it easy to re-use gradients by defining them or recalling them from swatches as an alternative to using Adjustment Presets.  
Interpolation control: Sometimes the transition from one color to the next needs fine-tuning – this is something that Affinity's gradient editor already supports, but not in the Gradient Map dialog. A Constant Interpolation setting where the color would just be constant up until the next stop would also be useful since it would eliminate the need for duplicate stops in the same position, which are really hard to select. Possibly, the curve editor could also be re-used to define falloff using a Bézier or Catmull-Rom-Spline.  
Duplicate Stop option: Often, it is necessary to use the same color multiple times in a gradient. Adding a button for this and/or enabling Option+Drag to duplicate would be useful. Photoshop aggravatingly always inserts new stops with the same color instead of the color that is already there at that position in the gradient, but the (better) implementation of this in Affinity had the side effect that duplicating stops became harder.  
On-image sampling: While the dialog box is open, it would be useful to highlight the value under the mouse pointer in the gradient display to be able to place a stop exactly at the desired position. Clicking in the image would insert a stop.  
On-image highlighting: Conversely, when editing/dragging a stop in the gradient editor, an option to highlight the affected pixels in the image would be helpful. The options could be: off (nothing) all pixels that have exactly the value represented by the position of the stop (similar to focus peaking) the zone that will be affected in the image. The overlay would start at 100% intensity at the value represented by the stop and fall off to 0% on each side until the position of the next stop respectively, taking the falloff into account (see "Interpolation Control" above). Optionally, two different colors could be used to represent each side of the stop.  
Resizable dialog box for more precision: When editing 16-bit images or editing falloff from one stop to the next or when placing stops very close to each other, it would be useful to have more room to work with. Making gradient editor dialog boxes in the application resizable would alleviate this problem.  
Snap to Luminosity button: Sometimes, it is useful to place stops exactly at the point in the gradient that corresponds to their luminosity, especially when they are defined by selecting swatches from a color palette. Adding a button that moves all selected stops to that position would make this really quick. For instance, tinting an image with two tones while keeping black and white intact could be achieved very quickly by selecting a black-to-white preset, then adding two stop, selecting a color from the document color palette for each, and clicking that "Snap Selected Stops to Luminosity" button.  
Ability to move start and end stops. The values before the first stop and after the last one would simply use constant extrapolation. This would eliminate the need for duplicate stops, which take longer to create and are harder to edit since all operations need to be performed twice.

I completely agree that we should have features that are common in film software inside of still image editing packages. Just compare the ridiculously ineffective brush-based masking in Lightroom with the variable feathering of vector shapes in pretty much any respectable color grading or rotoscoping software. These programs are essentially solving the same basic problem, but mostly due to Adobe's monopoly in the stills image editing market and every other contender copying only them, we are left with this bizarre divergence between tools for stills and motion.
 
Features like better scopes, spline-based warper, proper keyers (or at least a linear non-destructive HSL keyer), vector masking with variable feathering, three-way color correctors, OpenFX plugin support, particle systems, 2.5D compositing, Python scripting and so on should definitely make their way into Affinity at some point in my opinion.
 
I think the reason why these are not inside of Photoshop yet is likely because Adobe thinks in "markets", as opposed to, say, "common sense". Most of the semi-recent development in Photoshop has been focussed either on making the software attractive for new markets (built-in 3D rendering, scientific tools like measurements etc.) or on reacting to other software threatening their market domination in a specific sector (when Sketch started being a serious contender for UI design, Photoshop got features like Artboards). Plus there is usually one flashy thing based on recent research that can be bolted on without too much change to any of the existing code that keeps the existing customer base happy.
 
I'm pretty sure their thinking goes something like "Waveform monitors are a video feature, but video people don't edit videos in Photoshop, only stills for bringing into Premiere or After Effects. Also, none of our photographers in the focus group test have requested this feature, they don't even know such a thing exists because it's not in Photoshop. It would be a pain to market it to them and they don't seem to need it. Let's rather add a panel that makes it really easy for us to sell them stock photos for composites and actually increase our revenue this way.". And I'm not being facetious, I have a fear that's what their actual conversations are like.
 
In fact, if you think about it, there is even no logical reason why After Effects and Photoshop should be two completely separate programs, with completely different code bases, implementing the same effects. The only reason is the fact that Adobe bought After Effects and never bothered to refactor everything to the point where they could actually at least share parts of the code. That's why we're still stuck with the 1990ies "Clouds" filter in Photoshop and there is the infinitely more powerful "Fractal Noise" in After Effects for instance.
 
But I'm afraid this is getting a bit off-topic.

I see, that makes sense – at least Apple's compatibility limit problem allowed me to buy it with the discount without having a supported device  ;)
 
Based on the tutorial videos, it really seems quite capable. I'll post my first impressions in a separate thread.

Congratulations – Photo for iPad seems like an incredibly capable tool that finally opens up iOS for more professional work. My iPad Air is not supported, so here are my initial impressions based only on the tutorial videos (which do work fine on iPad Air). These are what I think are the most pressing issues that, if fixed, would get this thing even closer to perfection  ;)
Putting something like "Deselect" into a contextual menu isn't that great – I think if each Persona had a few buttons next to the Persona selector for quick access to very frequently used operations, that would be much more fluid. This would also solve having the "Develop" command being only visible when you have the Hand tool active and having to dive into a menu for toggling clipping preview, which is something that is often used in a "switch it on, change something, switch it off to check how it looks, switch it on again" type workflow. Maybe it's just the videos, but I didn't see any way to use a brush to paint selections. It would be good to have a setting that switches the Adjustment and Filter studio panels to a simple list or icon view, or, alternatively, add buttons to the Layers panel that show popovers with filters a iPhone-style sliding categorized navigation list. The current design seems to require way too much scrolling and also has very colorful icons that distract from the document. If I just want to add something fast, the current design is not great. Also, a "previous filter" item at the top like on the desktop version might be a good idea. Levels does not have any histogram whatsoever – if the intended use is to just use the scopes panel, some kind of indicator where the selected black and white points fall inside the histogram/waveform is needed for precise control, as well as a way to make the histogram/scopes bigger than they currently are. Quick access to clipping highlights also (which would actually make more sense as a global option that's available in the other Personae as well, excluding Liquify). Output levels are missing as well. Double tap to fit to screen is nice, but quick pinch to fit like in Procreate seems more fluid to me (it might just be that my middle finger is somehow abnormally long, but two-finger taps are often recognized only after the second or third try for me) Straightening seems a bit fiddly – it would be nicer to be able to drag out a line and then have the end points movable even after you release the touch. Basically with an "Apply" button instead of committing right away. Right now, if you get it wrong or wonky, there seems to be no way to cancel and no way to get it really precise. Similar problem with the Inpainting and Mask Refinement brushes – an "apply on release" check box would make this more convenient. If disabled, it would allow you to paint multiple strokes and then press an "Apply" button. Same on the Desktop – I can't count the number of times I've used one of these brushes, hit the screen edge and had no way to scroll the document without the incomplete operation being applied, leaving no way but to undo and repaint a potentially complex selection. The curves UI in Develop (and possibly the regular Adjustment, it's not shown in the videos) seems to be too small for precise adjustments. A button that pops it out over the full screen like Procreate does by default would be very nice. Also, like with Levels, there needs to be a way to see where a point falls on the histogram/waveform, numeric coordinate inputs and a clipping warning for it to be really useful. It would be much more useful if dragging on the layers would adjust Opacity instead of doing multi-select. Selecting could be implemented either by having an additional column with checkmarks permanently shown to the left of the layer name, or by having a "Select" mode that makes that column appear after press of a button like in many other iOS list views to prevent accidental selection. That would also be more intuitive for new users. A "Hide Selection" option would be very useful to see what selection edges look like after an adjustment. Goes for Desktop as well. This is nitpicking, but the square buttons in the Layers panel don't match the round look on the other buttons, like "Return", "Document Menu" etc. The Inpainting Brush "Inpainting in progress" overlay seems like it would get really annoying if you have to do a lot of inpainting because it would make your screen flash after every brushstroke. It also makes it harder to compare before and after since you get to stare at that blurry wall instead of before/after images in direct sequence. A smaller progress indicator like the non-intrusive "Marked as Pick/Reject" feedback popups in Adobe Lightroom or a global progress bar next to the Persona selector would be a lot less distracting. A lot of the Develop UI is really colorful and could distract from the image. I already mentioned the Adjustments previews as another case of this. In Develop, for instance, the RGBCMY sliders could just have their knob colored instead of half the slider (background of the slider indicating the percentage could be gray instead of R/G/B/C/M/Y), or maybe the colored part could just be a thin line like on standard iOS sliders. It's not clear from the tutorial videos if this is there, but a "double-tap any numeric input, slider or option to reset to default" feature would be great. On the desktop as well. Or alternatively or additionally, a "default" button in the popup calculator would seem like a good idea to me. Develop seems to lack an option for numeric inputs. This is essential for precise corrections. It would be nice if the popup calculators could do basic maths, like those in Flame. So something like "current setting * 1.5" would be really easy to do. History seems to have no "Purge History" button that would save storage space on complex documents, especially ones with a lot of paint strokes. The only way to do this currently seems to be to do a "Save as". Also, having the initial document state in the history list would be useful. And an option to use the great split-screen compare mode with history steps would be nice (though admittedly not essential). The size of the application bundle is extremely large, more than a GB. Anything you could do to reduce this would be greatly appreciated since storage is usually extremely limited on Apple devices, there is no way to use memory cards, and the images being worked on potentially get rather large, especially considering that they are saved with history by default and that 41 megapixel raw files are within the norm these days. Hope this feedback is helpful, congratulations on the spectacular launch!  :)

Great news, congratulations, also for getting featured in Apple's presentation!!!  :)
 
One thing though – I already bought and downloaded it successfully, but when it starts, it says "Affinity Photo for iPad is not compatible with your iPad." (using  an iPad Air). The requirements in the App Store clearly list iPad Air as being compatible in the "Compatibility" section (contradicting the text in the description). You're likely to get quite a few angry users (or very sad ones like me) who buy the app and then find out it won't run on their device.
 
To be honest, I'd very much prefer a resolution/layer count limit like Procreate has it on older devices over a complete "your device is not compatible".

There is no replacement for manual work in these situations. That being said, you might be able to take a few shortcuts, at least locally in certain areas. Here is what I can think of:
If the lines are very regular, solving it in the frequency domain might work. In Affinity Photo, you can try the FFT Denoise filter, as well as Frequency Separation and see if any of these gets you anywhere. In this example the lines are not a regular pattern, so your results may vary. The lines are darker than the surrounding area. You may be able to take advantage of that. One approach would be to duplicate the image and put the top layer into Lighten blend mode and offset it horizontally by a few pixels. Then mask the layer to the areas where it looks good. You can also use the layer's blend curves to limit the effect to dark areas. This should get you 90% there in the areas of uniform color that are not covered in patterns, like the white portions of the domes. In some areas, duplicating the layer, applying a Maximum filter and switching that to Lighten may help. The Maximum filter will grow bright areas into darker ones, thus filling in the dark lines. Again, mask and apply blend curves as appropriate. You can start with a black mask and brush this in selectively over lines like you would use the clone stamp if need be. If you resort to the clone stamp, again remember to take advantage of Lighten blend mode. If you have a second image of the same scene taken from a minimally different viewpoint (eg. taken handheld and moved ever so slightly to either side in-between shots), you can align those images and apply a stacking mode (or blend mode). In your case, since the lines (cables?) are mostly closer than the background, they would cover different areas of the background in the two images due to parallax, whereas the background would remain largely identical, hence allowing you to eliminate the lines in post. Good technique to remember when you have to photograph something where a lamp post is really close to you and in the way and you can't move in a way that would get it out of your shot entirely. Of course neither of these will give you instant perfect results and it's likely that nothing will work for the entire image, but if you can use these techniques in individual portions of the image, the amount of manual cloning you'll have to do will at least be reduced significantly.

There is no replacement for manual work in these situations. That being said, you might be able to take a few shortcuts, at least locally in certain areas. Here is what I can think of:
If the lines are very regular, solving it in the frequency domain might work. In Affinity Photo, you can try the FFT Denoise filter, as well as Frequency Separation and see if any of these gets you anywhere. In this example the lines are not a regular pattern, so your results may vary. The lines are darker than the surrounding area. You may be able to take advantage of that. One approach would be to duplicate the image and put the top layer into Lighten blend mode and offset it horizontally by a few pixels. Then mask the layer to the areas where it looks good. You can also use the layer's blend curves to limit the effect to dark areas. This should get you 90% there in the areas of uniform color that are not covered in patterns, like the white portions of the domes. In some areas, duplicating the layer, applying a Maximum filter and switching that to Lighten may help. The Maximum filter will grow bright areas into darker ones, thus filling in the dark lines. Again, mask and apply blend curves as appropriate. You can start with a black mask and brush this in selectively over lines like you would use the clone stamp if need be. If you resort to the clone stamp, again remember to take advantage of Lighten blend mode. If you have a second image of the same scene taken from a minimally different viewpoint (eg. taken handheld and moved ever so slightly to either side in-between shots), you can align those images and apply a stacking mode (or blend mode). In your case, since the lines (cables?) are mostly closer than the background, they would cover different areas of the background in the two images due to parallax, whereas the background would remain largely identical, hence allowing you to eliminate the lines in post. Good technique to remember when you have to photograph something where a lamp post is really close to you and in the way and you can't move in a way that would get it out of your shot entirely. Of course neither of these will give you instant perfect results and it's likely that nothing will work for the entire image, but if you can use these techniques in individual portions of the image, the amount of manual cloning you'll have to do will at least be reduced significantly.

The current Gradient Map feature is quite basic like the one in Photoshop, but in many ways, it could be a much more useful tool with the following additions:
 
HSL Mode: Instead of going based only on Luminance, this would use the input hue or saturation as the lookup index. In combination with HSL blend modes, this would allow for some fantastic workflows like basically warping the color wheel to taste, similar to the "HSL Wheels" feature in Magic Bullet Colorista (Note: don't be fooled by the name of the feature, this is NOT referring to the three-way color corrector). Just use a gradient of the HSL spectrum and drag or re-define stops, set the result to "Hue" blend mode, and you have an extremely powerful color correction tool that gives you results that would be difficult to achieve in any other way.  
Circular Editor Option: Like the Colorama filter built-into in After Effects, this makes it easy to work on maps that are supposed to start and end with the same color. In combination with an input for a number of revolutions (cycles) to use, this would also make it easy to create gradient effects where a few stops are repeated multiple times across the spectrum (like, say, alternating black-white-black-white). This would also massively improve usability in conjunction with the HSL mode option suggested above.  
Access to swatches: This would make it easy to re-use gradients by defining them or recalling them from swatches as an alternative to using Adjustment Presets.  
Interpolation control: Sometimes the transition from one color to the next needs fine-tuning – this is something that Affinity's gradient editor already supports, but not in the Gradient Map dialog. A Constant Interpolation setting where the color would just be constant up until the next stop would also be useful since it would eliminate the need for duplicate stops in the same position, which are really hard to select. Possibly, the curve editor could also be re-used to define falloff using a Bézier or Catmull-Rom-Spline.  
Duplicate Stop option: Often, it is necessary to use the same color multiple times in a gradient. Adding a button for this and/or enabling Option+Drag to duplicate would be useful. Photoshop aggravatingly always inserts new stops with the same color instead of the color that is already there at that position in the gradient, but the (better) implementation of this in Affinity had the side effect that duplicating stops became harder.  
On-image sampling: While the dialog box is open, it would be useful to highlight the value under the mouse pointer in the gradient display to be able to place a stop exactly at the desired position. Clicking in the image would insert a stop.  
On-image highlighting: Conversely, when editing/dragging a stop in the gradient editor, an option to highlight the affected pixels in the image would be helpful. The options could be: off (nothing) all pixels that have exactly the value represented by the position of the stop (similar to focus peaking) the zone that will be affected in the image. The overlay would start at 100% intensity at the value represented by the stop and fall off to 0% on each side until the position of the next stop respectively, taking the falloff into account (see "Interpolation Control" above). Optionally, two different colors could be used to represent each side of the stop.  
Resizable dialog box for more precision: When editing 16-bit images or editing falloff from one stop to the next or when placing stops very close to each other, it would be useful to have more room to work with. Making gradient editor dialog boxes in the application resizable would alleviate this problem.  
Snap to Luminosity button: Sometimes, it is useful to place stops exactly at the point in the gradient that corresponds to their luminosity, especially when they are defined by selecting swatches from a color palette. Adding a button that moves all selected stops to that position would make this really quick. For instance, tinting an image with two tones while keeping black and white intact could be achieved very quickly by selecting a black-to-white preset, then adding two stop, selecting a color from the document color palette for each, and clicking that "Snap Selected Stops to Luminosity" button.  
Ability to move start and end stops. The values before the first stop and after the last one would simply use constant extrapolation. This would eliminate the need for duplicate stops, which take longer to create and are harder to edit since all operations need to be performed twice.