smallreflection

Hi sergio,
Thanks for your feedback.
Some of those things are already possible:
With an artboard selected you can use the Transform panel to change its dimensions; You can also set you own custom View Points (both what you want to view and at what zoom level): go to the Navigator panel click on the menu on the top right and enable Advanced mode. In Advanced mode set the canvas view as you want then click on the cog icon on the bottom of the Navigator panel and select Add to save that View Point. You can also rename and remove them there.

A separate Artboard management adds vagueness: which layer belong to artboard?
This is the question I always ask myself when I open the layer palette of an Illustrator file with artboards...
To have a stack of layers enclosed in an artboard is really useful to me.
 
Probably Layers is no more the perfect name for it because it does much more... But this Layers palette is a huge strength in AD, and offers a clever approach. 
Moreover now you can create a sort of "shared-layer" above (or below) all artboards, so the illustrator-way can be reproduced.
 
Cross-artboard layer selection works fine... What do you mean?
 
 
 
In AD the modifier for duplicating is CMD and not ALT, using CMD the Artboard cloning works as for other elements.

Can’t select inside an artboard at all. Selections are broken if I use shape tools to make new objects.

that is freaking amazing and surprising!
THX!!!

Purpose: Features / Improvements / Fixes 
Status: Beta
Requirements: Purchased Affinity Photo
Mac App Store: Not Submitted
Download: Here
 
To use this beta, simply download the file from the link given above and double-click on the file to open the installer. Follow the instructions to install the beta version. The beta sits alongside the Mac App Store version and will not interfere with it.
 
 
Notable changes:
- New Panorama Persona - available from File -> New Panorama.
- 5 new Photos extensions - Miniaturise, Monochrome, Liquify, Develop and Dehaze - 400% rendering performance improvement in most common situations. - Global colours. - Full support for P3 panels found in the new 5k iMac and 4k iMac. If you have one of these you can try making a new RGB8 document with ProPhoto profile and choosing RGB(255,0,0) or RGB(0,255,0) as the colour of your objects - they should look richer and more vivid than you are used to seeing.
- View points added to the Navigator. The Navigator has an advanced mode that lets you choose to create and swap between specific view zoom/position saved points.
- Font fixes. Specifically, a number of font-related crashes have been addressed
- Export/Import improvements - particularly PDF.
- Fix for Text tool failing to accept certain characters (those that were mapped to other shortcuts!)
- Snapping improved for Rotation Centre. Rotation Centre is available from the Move Tool's context toolbar.
- Pantone/named colour/tint improvements. Selecting an object which has a Pantone colour will automatically choose the tint options in the colour panel.
- Canvas rotation. The canvas can be rotated by using the touchpad's rotate gesture or by using the View menu items 'Rotate Left', 'Rotate Right' or 'Reset Rotation'.
- Fix for colour conversion issues exhibited with HSL colours in RGB document formats.
- Character & Paragraph panel improvements.
- Typography panel show visually the effects of different OpenType features. Select some text and go to the Typography panel - this will show you the available options for your current font and text selection. Try changing fonts for more options.
- Printer’s marks and bleed available for output. The export options for PDF now include these additional options, as does the Print dialog.
- Smart Tap feature. Toggle between the current zoom and 100% by double-tapping with two fingers on the trackpad. This is useful for designing up close and being able to easily refer to a 100% view and then back again.
- Updated splash screens. These are necessary as we need to include Pantone licensing information.
- Added Split-toning adjustment. This is available from the Layers panel's adjustments menu and the main Layers->Adjustments menu.
- Improvements to deform filter - you can now select and manipulate multiple pins at once.

There is already a bleed parameter, in the Document Setup. It doesn't preview yet, but will do fairly soon.

With so many people talking about artboards (that I think that are great but still need a little bit of refining), I would like to ask: will we have a Bleed parameter and, if yes, will it show as a frame around the artboards?

This is is one of the most epic beta releases so far!

I totally agree with jackamus: guidelines should be lockable. Moving guides instead of intended objects - been there so many times...

@Matt,
Regarding the arrow highlighting, I would take advantage of the system highlight colour (in my case blue) to highlight the hierarchy you're in and invert it (the circle + arrow) to highlight the selected group/layer:
 

 
If you find the white circle visually disruptive in the selected layer/group, you don't need to invert it, keep it blue with an white arrow - the circle will blend with the blue of the selected layer/group, leaving just the white arrow visible -.

To echo another post or two, I hate to be a broken record, but I do have to request a simplification of the color picker as well—that's probably the number one request that I've gotten from our development team on probably a dozen occasions, wondering when it will be changed. Currently it does just require too many steps.

Just a quick thank you for the update.
 
The Art board feature will make my life significantly easier - Proper cropping of artwork for slice creation, perfect for my workflow!
 
... if I could multi-select slices in the export persona slice panel to toggle them on/off (like you can with objects in the Draw persona) life would possibly be too easy :)
 
All the best.

To echo another post or two, I hate to be a broken record, but I do have to request a simplification of the color picker as well—that's probably the number one request that I've gotten from our development team on probably a dozen occasions, wondering when it will be changed. Currently it does just require too many steps.

To echo another post or two, I hate to be a broken record, but I do have to request a simplification of the color picker as well—that's probably the number one request that I've gotten from our development team on probably a dozen occasions, wondering when it will be changed. Currently it does just require too many steps.

To echo another post or two, I hate to be a broken record, but I do have to request a simplification of the color picker as well—that's probably the number one request that I've gotten from our development team on probably a dozen occasions, wondering when it will be changed. Currently it does just require too many steps.

Artboards are awesome! That and global colors! :) Already going to make a huge difference for me.
 
Two ideas for the future:
- It would be nice to switch an existing color to a global color.
- For UX work, when duplicating an artboard, guides either need to be duplicated automatically and linked to the board, or (best, for flexibility), I need to be able to select guides, copy and paste them in place relative to each artboard.
 
Thanks for all your hard work!

So cool to finally see artboards in AD!
 
A few observations:
"Insert artboard" with the "document" size selected seems like it should make a blank copy of the current artboard. Instead, it makes a new artboard the size of all artboards, which results in exponentially larger artboards. This is probably a bug. :) The "v" shortcut to cycle the selection tool only works some of the time (in the other case, it cycles the selection tool "on" and "off" rather than choosing the artboard tool). It would be preferable to always be able to cycle it to the artboard tool with the keyboard. This is probably something that will come with future Affinity Publisher development, but it would be nice to have the option to automatically rearrange artboards.  The pasteboard behavior is perfect. Having a shape crop as it leaves the artboard, but reappear once it's completely off, is the behavior Adobe should have thought of 10 years ago. You guys totally nailed it. It took me awhile to figure out that I could change the color of an artboard to get rid of the transparency grid. Not sure what you could do to make it more discoverable, but it's a great feature!

Artboards need to be made from the new doc panel as well. Set number, distance etc.
 
Not only the flicker. Sometimes the artboards seem to randomly resize and then go back to normal size.
 
After just making a new doc, the V shortcut doesn’t switch to the artboard tool.
 
Love that you added the expand/contract item on the left side in the layers panel. Any chance to add some shortcut to switch between expand/contract state instead of having to click that icon?
 
Snapping to Artboards edges seems unreliable. 
 
How do I disable the canvas rotation? Most of the time I activate it by accident and it’s useless for UI design?
 
Also Aligning to Center seems to be absolutely ignorant on which artboard I am working on, my objects gets moved to center of the pasteboard 0_0 ...
 
P.S. And I don’t like that you can move the artboard like a layer. Locking it doesn’t help because you also can’t move the layers inside it.

Purpose: Features / Improvements / Fixes 
Status: Beta
Requirements: Purchased Affinity Designer
Mac App Store: Not Submitted
Download: Here
 
To use this beta, simply download the file from the link given above and double-click on the file to open the installer. Follow the instructions to install the beta version. The beta sits alongside the Mac App Store version and will not interfere with it.
 
 
Notable changes:
- Artboards. These are still work-in-progress and you can expect a few niggles, but at least you can see the direction we're heading. At present we still need to add auto-slice creation to Export Persona for artboards and we also show an occasional flicker when adding artboards: these will be fixed before the next update. We also need to move guide, grid and rulers to work per-artboard, so these are currently not as they will be in the final release and will be fixed asap.
- Global colours.
- Full support for P3 panels found in the new 5k iMac and 4k iMac. If you have one of these you can try making a new RGB8 document with ProPhoto profile and choosing RGB(255,0,0) or RGB(0,255,0) as the colour of your objects - they should look richer and more vivid than you are used to seeing.
- View points added to the Navigator. The Navigator has an advanced mode that lets you choose to create and swap between specific view zoom/position saved points.
- Font fixes. Specifically, a number of font-related crashes have been addressed
- Export/Import improvements - particularly PDF.
- Fix for Text tool failing to accept certain characters (those that were mapped to other shortcuts!)
- Snapping improved for Rotation Centre. Rotation Centre is available from the Move Tool's context toolbar.
- Pantone/named colour/tint improvements. Selecting an object which has a Pantone colour will automatically choose the tint options in the colour panel.
- Canvas rotation. The canvas can be rotated by using the touchpad's rotate gesture or by using the View menu items 'Rotate Left', 'Rotate Right' or 'Reset Rotation'.
- Fix for colour conversion issues exhibited with HSL colours in RGB document formats.
- Character & Paragraph panel improvements.
- Typography panel show visually the effects of different OpenType features. Select some text and go to the Typography panel - this will show you the available options for your current font and text selection. Try changing fonts for more options.
- Printer’s marks and bleed available for output. The export options for PDF now include these additional options, as does the Print dialog.
- Smart Tap feature. Toggle between the current zoom and 100% by double-tapping with two fingers on the trackpad. This is useful for designing up close and being able to easily refer to a 100% view and then back again.
- Updated splash screens. These are necessary as we need to include Pantone licensing information.
- Added Split-toning adjustment. This is available from the Layers panel's adjustments menu and the main Layers->Adjustments menu.
- Snapshots panel. This panel (disabled by default) allows you to take a snapshot of the document in the current state and refer back to it at later points.
- Added shortcuts for the different Personas. These can be customised by the user as desired.

Oh my goodness, thank you so much … you have been busy … artboards *and* canvas rotation *and* all those fixes … unbelievable …  :D
 
(By the way, will there be an option for rotating the canvas using a mouse or any other input device, besides the internal trackpad? Would be great …)

Really nice! The social templates and the smoke brushes especially will come in handy for me. Thanks much! :D

Finally!  :)
Well deserved...

Purpose: Features / Improvements / Fixes 
Status: Beta
Requirements: Purchased Affinity Designer
Mac App Store: Not Submitted
Download: Here
 
To use this beta, simply download the file from the link given above and double-click on the file to open the installer. Follow the instructions to install the beta version. The beta sits alongside the Mac App Store version and will not interfere with it.
 
 
Notable changes:
 
- Live preview of compound object boolean mode
- Overprint black
- Fully support El Capitan split-view
- Enabled monochromatic icons
- Fixed cycling of tool shortcuts
- Fixed international character input
- Improved PDF import/export
- Added user-adjustable controller ramps for brush variances
- Added recent fonts to dropdown
- Improved iCloud file syncing and merging
- Added cancel button to export progress panels
- Added Registration colour
- Improved file size of PSD export
- Updated help
- Fix for Ctrl-run up issues
- Numerous stability fixes

Nice surprise! Got it first! Haha :P BTW, congrats for being on the new iMac's display on Apple's website: http://www.apple.com/imac/performance/

We are going to make a professional Affinity DAM application - stay tuned in 2016 for more information ;)
 
Thanks,
 
Andy.