smallreflection

Good update. I'm still receiving a fairly significant issue when dragging shape bounds with children and "lock children" turned on—often resizing the parent object is still making child layers pop wildly around at random, hiding/squishing/resizing them at times as well.

Fix for guides (making sure guides move with their artboards mainly) is my big request. UI design is quite difficult without it, as I tend to have to move artboards around, and when I do all of my guide placements are lost. Duplicating guides across boards is also a big one.

One small request on my part (and this may be too difficult to be worth the effort), but it would be great if the logic was tweaked a bit for grouping on copy + paste operations. One example: currently I'm Cmd + dragging over a set of icons, and each icon is nested in a folder and named appropriately. To work quickly, I may Cmd + drag to select, then copy and paste them onto another artboard. But now the pasted icons have lost their groups, and they're pasted in as a messy pile of layers. Of course, I could select the folders from the layers panel to copy and paste, I just have to fish for them, which takes a tad bit longer. It would be great if the logic realized when I had selected all children in a group, and copied the group instead of just the child layers.

Sorry, one more strange one from me. For some reason, at least in my current working file, using the Artistic Text tool works fine, but using the Frame Text tool does absolutely nothing—I'm able to draw the frame and type, but the cursor simply stays at the beginning of the box, and won't input any characters. Update: At first I thought this might be an issue with just my current working file. I attempted the same thing in a new file, same issue, but my keyboard has been acting strangely. Rebooted, and the issue only occurred in my current working file. I copied all layers over to a new file of the same dimensions and everything seems ok at the moment. Strange!

One more strange thing I've noticed on and off (in 1.4 and 1.4.1) is sometimes when dragging or resizing a containing shape with "Locked Children" selected, the interior objects will occasionally (randomly) jitter and then move, disappearing, even if I move the containing shape back to its original location. If I open up the parent shape folder, I can still see the child layers nested inside, but they've randomly moved around the canvas, hidden because they're not within the visible shape area. Stranger still, pressing undo does nothing to return the child objects to their proper place within the parent masking shape. Sorry I don't have an example of this I can share but just thought I would note it. This isn't an issue on every attempt, but it is happening.

You guys are great! One feature request from something I just attempted to do for the first time—could support for gradients be added to global swatches?

Love it!

Excellent job, guys. A very solid update. Time for a big Christmas party on your end. :)

One more request. :) From a UI perspective we still have a little ways to go with guides. Now that guides are artboard-specific it's quite frustrating that guides don't actually move with the artboard—if I need to rearrange a set of artboards, all of my guides are lost. :/ Also it would save lots of time to be able to drag/select/copy/paste/delete guides. If they are artboard specific though that makes it a bit trickier as they can't be selected in the pasteboard area, away from art elements.

You guys are great! Amazing how much you turn around.

One more (apparent) bug I've noticed—when selecting text layers and trying to move them to the top of the stacking order with Shift+Cmd+], it instead shifts the paragraph orientation to flush right instead of affecting the sort order. I'd think that paragraph orientation should be something limited to a button command.

I've run into an issue when selecting fonts from the Character Studio panel—at least in some instances—for instance at the moment I've been using the Capitolium News font, synced via Typekit—and when selecting from the Studio panel I can only select the regular weight, or else attempting an alternative switches it to a random font. However when selecting the font family from the top contextual toolbar, I'm able to view and select all available weights. I'm assuming this may have something to do with the new fallback features.

One other request is can we make Guides being artboard-specific an option, or dependent on dragging inside/outside of the artboard? In some cases having them artboard specific is helpful, but there are certainly some cases where I'd love for a guide to work across multiple artboards.

Agreed here. Moreso an issue for me in Photo too, where I've worked on digital painting and constantly am hitting shortcut keys to switch tools, like the brush and eraser, and find that I'm being switched to the pixel brush, mixer brush, etc., so I have to type a key several times to get back to what I was going to before. Edit: Yes, just a toggle to turn this on/off would be great. :)

One thing I noticed in working on a logo and prepping different formats—if I create a global colour as a spot color and then want to save out a CMYK or RGB set, it would be nice to keep the color swatch linked but switch it from PMS to CMYK, etc. Currently I can edit the CMYK values of a global swatch and treat it like a CMYK swatch, but it remains marked as a spot colour. Is that a problem?

Sorry to be a downer after giving kudos. But I'm getting a repeated crash after pasting three layer groups into another layer group and trying to move them. As soon as I click and drag, it crashes. Going to have to go back one beta to test. Edit: after removing the problem layers and starting them from scratch, I've had no further problems. 112015-AffinityDesigner-move-error.rtf

Yay, artboard selections are fixed, and multi-select for slices is here! You guys are rockstars.

Li'll request: could you please include multi-select for Slices like it currently works for layers? I've been having to turn around 50 slices on and off one at a time the last few days.

As a followup to my earlier mention, I have reopened some mockups from a couple weeks ago and apparently the new beta (or previous one) got rid of all my guides. :/ But if it were going to be an artboard they would have been preserved. Something to check on please. :)

One thing I just noticed, I saved out a bunch of guides on a large file, saved, closed, reopened, and all of the guides were gone. So far I've tested this a few more times and it seems to be removing all guides on every save/close/reopen. :/ Edit: I went back to beta 1.3.5.7 and strangely it was doing the same thing on that file. I had a large document size (4000px x 4000px), but when I converted the document to an artboard, the guides were retained properly on save.

Very nice! :) One thing though—I know visible bleed will come later, but currently if I set margin and bleed on a document and then change it to an artboard, the margin is no longer visible, and bleed lines don't show as well. Is that something that will be added in per-artboard later on?

Using the beta for UI design so far I love the way that artboards are designed and working currently. This seems to be how the latest versions of Photoshop are solving for it as well—to me it's less confusing to have artboards incorporated with the layers panel. This is just me, but I typically design by modules/sections of content, not by content types. So text, images, etc. are organized and moved around structurally. So for me it's a pretty rare case that I'm using layers that apply to multiple artboards, since the artboards are used for separations of concerns (content areas). Of course this would be a bit different if we were planning for page layout, but that's what nifty Publisher pages will be for. :)

Crash report: I'm pretty consistently getting a crash when taking some artboards with a fill color (just a white background) and trying to set them back to transparent. Not happening every single time, and can't send files over, sorry, but one of the only crash-causers I've had so far.

One other thing that seems to be showing up for me is Cmd + Opt. dragging to quickly select shapes seems to not be working much at all now, even if I have a parent Layer folder selected.

EDIT: I didn't have the UI preset turned on, but I did have force pixel alignment and snapping on. Using the preset seems to have fixed it up. Maybe it was the tolerance setting? Sorry if this was mentioned, but I'm noticing a pretty significant decrease in snapping precision in the latest beta, perhaps the artboard implementation messed with things a bit? It can get fairly precise if I zoom in really far, but with a 10px square grid set, moving objects around seems to always want to snap or move about 1-5px off of the grid instead of snapping to it. Just something to check into. But still worth it—artboards are already making a huge difference for me! So happy. :)