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It's looking great Capeman, nice shading :) Regarding the lines, i'm not sure if you are already aware but Affinity Designer has some great pressure options for solid lines. It can give some expressiveness to them while keeping the lines editable just by creating a pressure profile (see attached screenshot). Looking forward for more!

You're welcome Tony. I will do my best to help in whatever i can. It looks very promising already and I'm quite excited with it :)

I agree that the "expanded version" should be the default. Its what most people would expect.

Hi Tony, I wasn't saying specifically that Affinity antialiasing is worst than Sketch or iDraw. I said it's probably not ready to compete with them specifically for UI due to the rest of the options they offer. Regarding the antialiasing issues in Affinity i already reported them here (this one involves clipping effects) and here (some antialiasing problems with filters). [EDITED] Didn't know about that Andy. So you are really targeting UI design too. Glad to ear that.

Yes it usually is. But having dithering applied automatically to all gradients and transparency is a great time saver and improves the quality of the output even for those who don't know how to smooth the gradients.

Yes, it's a good request. Don't forget to add a way to flat/expand the resulting shapes if needed, i mean to discard the hidden parts of the resulting boolean operation and keep only the shape that's visible as a single object (basically what Affinity does currently). Sometimes that's very useful. Illustrator provides a way to do it too.

Although gradients in Affinity Designer are quite nice, they are still showing some banding. I would like to suggest an option (checkbox?) to dither them (all types of gradients) as well as to transparency/opacity.

Without changing the document properties? As far as i know there's no way to trim the canvas to the size of the image as in Photoshop. You can however change the document properties to 500px wide manually. Go to File->Document Setup or make sure you don't have anything selected then below the main toolbar on the top you should see a button: document setup. Both will lead to the same dialog. You can change the size there.

Hi Andy, I think it refers to compound paths / compound shapes in Adobe Illustrator (Sketch supports this too). Illustrator allows you to adjust the original shapes you used in a boolean operation by keeping them intact and editable - it doesn't "flat/expand" the result as Affinity or Xara would do. They are maintained within the compound shape as editable shapes but only the result of the associated boolean operation is visible. When you edit one of the original shapes the result of the boolean operation is updated accordingly. You can think of it as a kind of a "special mask/group" that filters the result of the boolean operation, but the original shapes are still there and can be edited anytime. Below i've attached a screenshot that shows how Illustrator display a compound shape resulting from an intersection between a square and an elipse. Note the layer panel with the shapes intact.

Nichod, I'm not sure they are targeting UI designers. Affinity Designer already has some great features for UI (half-pixel snapping, split view etc), but has some problems as well, particularly the antialiasing in some situations isn't still there. And without that solved i don't see how adding more specific UI related features would help. I'm all for it but from what i've found there's some stuff that needs to be fixed or fine-tuned first. To compete it really has to improve its antialiasing. And for some that may not be enough. iDraw and Sketch are specialised tools and as such they offer some specific functions for UI (multiples fills, strokes, shadows; symbols, layer naming conventions etc etc) and output (retina ready assets/multipliers, targeted file formats; code export options - CSS, CoreGraphics and Swift) that i'm not sure will (or should) be covered by Affinity Designer.

Thanks for the info Tony. It's great to see you're broadening the scope of all tools compared to DrawPlus and other software. Seems there's a lot of cool stuff coming. Couldn't be happier :)

Ah Matt you're killing me :D Wasn't a big fan of the Mesh Fill in DrawPlus really... Having a (rectangle) mesh without relation to the original shape outline end up being more work than necessary. Can't wait to see what you guys come up with.

Here's how it looks now:

Thanks Ben, You guys are amazing. I think i´m running out of ideas for snapping! Affinity Designer is covering a lot of ground already. I'm quite excited with it :)

Please see the attached picture for a clear explanation. Basically i would like that when i'm adjusting the control handle of a curve with the node tool it automatically snap to the axis of the opposite control handle direction to get a smooth curve. I know this can be achieved changing a cusp node to a smooth one, but usually when we do this the software adjusts both control handle positions, meaning we loose the original position of the control handle we weren´t touching. Then we have to readjust the curve again. With this improvement i can quickly get a smooth curve messing with just one control handle knowing that it will snap to the exact axis to get a smooth curve without screwing up the other control handle position. This could be achieved trough the use of a modifier key. I would prefer the software do this automatically by default (pressing the modifier key would make it to override the snap). But it could be the other way around (only snapping when we press the modifier key). Hope i'm being clear :huh:

You can apply the solid transparency at the object level too if you want. Doesn't need to be at a layer level. I mean you can create several objects some with solid transparency and some without in the same layer. Just select a shape and move the opacity slider as you do for layers.

Yeah! Looks so tasty :P Curious to see how you develop this type of work. Love the expressiveness of the lines.

They are still working on it Scott. It's not possible yet. You can only break (not join) lines in two segments for now.

Hi Nemysys, Welcome to the forums, I don't know the answer to your first question but here is some info about your second.

You're not alone. I use it the same way. I've created a post a few hours before asking exactly why the content placed on the pasteboard area wasn't showing up.

Hi Andy, I call pasteboard the area around the document/page. I use that space to temporarily place objects/variations that i may need later. @Capeman has posted a feature request asking for the exact same thing here.

In my case i use it with some frequency but i agree it takes some space in the layers panel. What bothers me is the process of going to the menus to lock/unlock a layer. It´s a hassle for something so simple. A shortcut/modifier will do it for me.

Yes, i understood. I was just reinforcing the same idea :D Sorry if i wasn't clear.

Is there any particular reason on it's just a bug?

Sunset, You can't put objects in the pasteboard in Affinity Designer. I mean you can but Affinity doesn't display them. I´m not sure if this is a bug or if it's by design (probably a bug).