Hi,
My name is Mikael and I am working on illustrator around 50-60hours per weeks.
I really want to find a good illustrator alternative at home and none have came close to replace my adobe's software.
Until I found about Affinity.
Affinity photo is going to replace photoshop for me. 100% sure. It feels like its a complete software that can do pretty much everything I expected from a photoshop competitor.
Affinity Designer feels a little younger. Missing features are really changing the game and leaving a gap between Designer and Illustrator. The gap isn't big though!
Features that I haven't found (maybe they're hidden somewhere) are the following :
-Auto-trace (not a big deal... its never perfect and tracing it manually is a better solution)
-Deformations (arc, shear, perspective, ...)
-A proper mirror (would like to use shortcut and be able to place a center manually for the reflection so I can "work in mirror")
-A way to turn shape into guides. I create master files so people can edit things in later and I place a lot of guides. Right now it looks like a mess using lines and they tend to forget to delete the shapes if I leave them on a locked layer
-Variables importer (I do buisness cards and things that require importing data such as text and images... I think I've read somewhere that it would be a feature in your next software...)
-A way to use plugins like fontself, variable importers, ... scripts...
-That one is more a question than a feature... Is it possible to save each layers in there own eps files named with the name of the layer? I mean a one click solution not manually hidding, saving, ...
I think its the points that really stood out for me. I may not be the average Joe so I'm not sure all the points I brought are necessary... but they are the ones I found.
I really love the interface and I will buy both softwares. I like where its going and the toolbar on top is really helpful! I'm more a "keyboard shortcut" guy but I like having the tools I don't use a lot up there so if I forget the shortcut its still easy to get to it.
Thanks!