GarryP

Marc, my mock-up was done in GIMP - in-built Linear Motion Blur filter - with the G'MIC plug-in - for the Textured Glass filter - but, like I said, I don't know what effects are available in Photo. (A similar effect can be achieved quickly in Topaz Studio with a fairly strong Film Grain effect and a small Speed Motion Blur, but I'm sure there are many different ways of doing this.) Also, my mock-up was done very quickly - less than a minute all-in, including parameter tweaks - for a very 'cheap' effect. You will probably want something much better for more important work.

I suppose it's possible that the next version of Designer - after the version currently in beta - could come with dimensioning tools, you never know. At the same time, there's also a chance that Serif don't want Designer to get too much like a CAD application, or whatever. All we can do is request new features and see what happens. I'm sure the team knows what they're doing and, just as importantly, why they do some things and not others. They are, after all, the experts in what they do.

In the first version - first post - I found it difficult to see where the water started so it didn't look realistic. The second version - first image in last post - looks better but the water is too 'flat'. In the third version, I like the distortion but the water itself looks false. I'm no expert in these things but it seems like the ripples are too large - both in wavelength and amplitude - and too 'defined', whatever I mean by that. (I also think I prefer the orange sky with the faded colours. It looks more 'mysterious'.) I have no idea how I would 'fix' the water. I don't think a simple blur would cut it. These examples show something like what I myself might want to achieve... https://pixabay.com/en/panorama-regensburg-historic-center-2646143/ https://pixabay.com/en/singapore-river-skyline-building-255116/ https://pixabay.com/en/arno-river-florence-firenze-italy-1066307/ ...but I don't know how I would do it. There's a G'MIC filter called "Textured Glass" which gives a reasonable effect when combined with a Linear Motion Blur, see my very-quickly-knocked-up attached image, but I don't know what effects are available in Photo.

Hi JFisher. That's okay, I realise you must all be very busy. I've just tried it with build 238 and re-arranging the master page layers still gives one of the issues above. I've attached an example document (created with 238) where: * the column guides are on master spread "Master A"; * the normal guides are on master spread "Normal"; * both the "Normal" and "Master A" spreads are applied to pages 2 and 3; * if you move the "Master A" layer to the bottom of the layer stack the column guides are shown; * but, if you move the "Normal" layer to the bottom of the layer stack the column guides disappear. Repeat the re-arrangement and you see the issue coming and going. I haven't done enough repeat testing to say if the other issues - with the guides getting deleted or being changed - still apply though. guides-go-missing.afpub

Windows 10 Home 1809, Publisher 1.7.0.206. Unfortunately I can't give you a simple sample document that shows the problem as it doesn't always happen but sometimes when I: * have a master page with column guides; * then apply that master to a spread; * then create another master with 'normal' guides; * then apply that new master to the spread - as well as the other one, not replacing - the column guides sometimes: A. go invisible (often) while 'normal' guides are still visible; B. become visible again when I randomly drag the masters in the layout studio (infrequently works as a fix); C. get deleted all together; D. get renumbered to a much higher number, e.g. from 4 columns to 48 columns (only seen that once so far). Again, sorry I can't supply an example document. Hopefully I've given enough info' to start a small investigation.

Someone else started a thread on pretty much the same thing yesterday: https://forum.affinity.serif.com/index.php?/topic/79136-order-of-preferences/ The discussion there seems to have gone 'off the boil' though.

If you don't want to discuss this further then that's absolutely fine and dandy with me, no hard feelings. Sometimes it's useful and/or interesting to discuss things like this but I realise it's not to everyone's taste. Just in case anyone else wants to continue a discussion about buttons, here's a nice picture. I like the big yellow one, but the red one next to it isn't without its charm.

I don't know why you thought my example was silly. Maybe not the best example in this context, but one that does show that giving users more than one way of doing things can be better. You said - as far as I understand you - that having more than one way to do the same thing wasn't good for the user experience. By that reasoning, we should only be able to choose a tool in one way, either by clicking on the tool icon with the mouse or using a shortcut key but not both. I don't think that would give a better user experience myself. Some people prefer to click on an icon, some people prefer to choose from a menu, some people prefer to use a shortcut key. Let them do what they want and most people will be happy. Perhaps a better example in this context would be the "Bold" and "Italic" buttons on the Text context bar in Publisher. They both replicate the action of the user selecting a typeface variant from the drop-down list beside them so - by your reasoning (as I understand it) - they shouldn't be there as they replicate something can be done another way. I, on the other hand, think that they're a very useful way of quickly making a formatting change rather than selecting from a - potentially - long list of variants, especially for new users and/or those coming from word processors. Horses for courses I suppose. Personally I understood that the items in the preferences drop-down list were in alphabetical order straight away but maybe that's just me. Not all drop-down lists should be in alphabetical order - for various reasons - but this one is just fine as it is, for me at least. Unless you work for Serif - or an affiliated organisation working on the Affinity range (if there are any) - you cannot know how many categories will be in the preferences panel in the future. Remember that this panel is shared between the three Affinity products and so should work the same way in all of them. Publisher already has eleven categories and it hasn't even had its first proper release so nobody - even, I'm guessing, the Affinity developers - knows how many there will be in five or ten years time. InDesign has nearly twenty categories in its preferences dialog and if Publisher is eventually aiming for similar functionality then the eleven it already has will most probably grow (unless the developers come up with a nice way to make it redundant). If you introduce the functionality while the product is young, people will get used to using it and when it matures it will already be second-nature so they don't need to learn anything new. The settings on Windows 10 are shared between various applications - Settings, Control Panel, etc. - and they all have different ways to let you navigate between them - menus, drop-downs, quick links, breadcrumbs, etc. - so I don't know where your analogy is going there. What needs to be addressed is that the settings need to be accessible on desktops and tablets so that might be why Serif have gone down the route they have with the icons but I agree that it could probably be done better. Some kind of switch, as you say, might be more intuitive than the current situation. The preferences panel, as it is at the moment, doesn't seem to have been given the same kind of 'love' that the rest of the application has. Maybe this will change in the future.

See this on-going discussion:

Cristian, I have to disagree on this point. Having more than one way to get to a function can be very useful. Not everyone uses the application the same way as you. I, for example, don't use keyboard shortcuts much so they aren't very useful to me but they are extremely important to some users. Dropping keyboard shortcuts wouldn't make my life much worse but plenty of people would be lost without them. The more ways you can use the software the more accessible it is to more users and that can only be a good thing. At the moment, the category icons in the dialog are - as Chris said - listed by "importance" or 'relevance', whereas the categories in the drop-down list are in alphabetical order. This difference can be very useful to some people. I accept that, presently, there aren't very many categories so it's not a big problem to find what you're looking for (if you can figure out which category the setting you need is in) but as the application grows in scope there will probably be many more categories. And, as the number of categories grows, the icons listed by 'relevance' will necessarily change in their ordering as one becomes more or less 'relevant' than the others, whereas the alphabetical order will not change. If you get into the habit of selecting the category via an alphabetically ordered list then new categories coming in will have little affect on how you use this dialog; e.g. "Colour" will always come nearer the top of the list than "User Interface". A user who uses this dialog a lot will probably benefit from this alphabetical list being more 'stable' in order than a list that is ordered by 'relevance'. To compliment the alphabetical list it might be nice if the category could be selected by pressing a relevant key rather than having to select it with the mouse. That way, you could select a category by simply pressing, for example, tab, space, K for Keyboard Shortcuts. At the moment you can use the keyboard up to a point but then have to switch to a mouse to complete the transaction, which doesn't make much sense to me. P.S. The current search facility isn't particularly useful as far as I can see. For example, typing "mo" in the search box highlights both the "User Interface" and "Tools" categories - possibly for "Monochromatic Iconography" and "Use Mouse Wheel to Zoom" - but there's no way to see which category you need without clicking on one of the icons and then maybe clicking on the other if the first one wasn't the one you wanted. The search would be much more useful if it displayed a list of the actual found preference setting names which could then be selected to take the user to the appropriate page. Otherwise it's a bit of a lottery.

The old version of the logo was incredibly 80's but that might have been a good thing, depending on what sort of music they make. I like the new version but I have some concerns: * I don't know what the 'smoke' is for - it's a nice effect but I'm not sure why it's there; * The full logo is very tall which might make it difficult to scale for inclusion in landscape-oriented images, such as page banners; * The "SKITXO" text is difficult to read - at first glance it looks something like "SKITY" with a little blob after it (the old logo was similarly difficult to read as it looked like "Sloitixio"). All-in-all it's a nice image, I'm just concerned that it might not be easy to use in lots of different circumstances.

If someone reading this doesn't want to try using Inkscape - it's a very capable vector application but the learning curve is quite steep - they could try an online vectorizer, such as: https://www.vectorizer.io/ I've not used this particular site myself so I don't know how well it works, and you should always be careful about what you send to free online processing sites (carefully read all of the terms and conditions, especially about what they do with your uploaded file, there could be copyright issues you might want to avoid), but it might be useful.

Lovely stuff.

Ah, okay, sorry, I'd only ever seen it written as the 'Windows' - or sometimes 'Win' - key. I've just had a look at some of my other keyboards and an old Logitech Wave(?) has "option" written on that key. (I didn't use that keyboard much so I totally forgot, or didn't notice in the first place.)

Please ignore this post; my memory isn't what it used to be. Isn't the Option key a Mac-only thing? If so, this issue might be noticed more quickly if it was posted in the Mac forum.

You're welcome. Glad to help where I can.

You're welcome. I think the forum is updated more promptly/frequently than the website.

You can always find the latest beta pinned to the top of the relevant bugs forum:

Have you tried build 238? Whatever might have been wrong may not re-occur, and - if it's still a problem - the developers may be more likely to look at it on the latest build rather than an older one.

Great stuff. Both the board and the stones look really nice. (Adding a 0.4px blur to the BoardBase layer gives a slightly better effect - at least for me - but lovely stuff all the same.) Thanks for sharing something that must have taken a lot of time to produce.

Nice work, but I have a few comments... I like the colours you've used, they go well together. I think the shadows on the 'labels' might be a bit sharp. I don't really like the typeface used in the features list but couldn't give a better alternative without a lot of experimentation. The metallic effect works well for this purpose. I don't think the man is in the right position; at first glance he seems to be kissing the headphones. The headphones really pop out of the image so that's good. Is the man too close to the viewer? He seems to be fighting with the headphones for who is most important in the image. Maybe zoom him out so he's more of a background figure.

Great work as usual.

I've had a look on the Invision website and can only find this: https://invisioncommunity.com/4guides/how-to-use-ips-community-suite/content-discovery/searching-your-community-r70/ which isn't much use. It would be nice to have some instructions on how to search for, for example: * All posts where the body contains both the words "first" and "second" but not "third"; * All posts where the body contains "first" but not either "second" or "third"; * All posts that have "first second" - in that order, next to each other - and also "third" anywhere else in the post; * All posts that have "first second" - in that order, next to each other - but not where "third" is anywhere else in the post * All posts that have "first" in the title but not "second" in the body; * All posts that have "first" in the title and "second" or "third" in the body; etc. etc. etc. (The example words are just 'place-holders' and not actual search terms.) Obviously there are many different ways people want to search but if we had some instructions on what sort of thing we can do then it might make it easier for us to find things (and perhaps not report duplicate problems/issues).

I just tried searching for: * <zoom> and got 4578 results; * and then <zoom +100%> and got 5973 results; * and then <zoom -100%> and got 3776 results. Could "-" mean "NOT", perhaps? When searching with <zoom -100%> I didn't notice any "100%" mentions in the first two pages of results. Not a thorough check but it seems to have some meaning. Do I get a free copy of Publisher beta? The one I already have is lonely and maybe I can make a breeding pair.

Semi-related note: On Windows 10, if you're having strange problems with uninstall/upgrade (not just for Publisher) and you have "Fast Startup" switched on - Control Panel / Hardware and Sound / Power Options / System Settings - then you could try doing a Restart instead of a Shut-down/Boot-up (search for "windows 10 fast startup" for information.) Doing so will get you a 'nice clean and fresh' boot-up. This might help, or it might not, but it's worth a try if all else fails.