hifred

RMB=Right Mouse button
I see that one of the underlying principles in Affinity apps is what is called Context Toolbars (under the Menu bar). This probably works well for many users – but I have to admit that I prefer moving my mouse or pen even less, whenever it makes sense. Obviously I'm a heavy user of keyboard shortcuts – but there's a lot of options which don't really lend themselves for shortcuts.

From Photoshop I'm super used to /spoiled from a wealth of context sensitive RMB menus: For every tool there's a matching RMB menu, which offers a drilldown of exactly the options required in this very second by that very tool.

Affinity apps have context sensitive RMB menus in their dockable editors, but on the canvas there's only one generic RMB context menu – but (looking at Photo right now) most of your tools don't even offer an RMB option at all. When trying out Affinity I can not tell how many times I already right-clicked without any effect... Am I the only one who finds this painful?

Please let me know – are there plans to add context sensitive RMB menus everywhere?


Some samples of Photoshop's RMB menus: 

Context Menu of Photoshop CS 6 Crop tool

That's what you get inside the text tool...

Extremely useful in Photoshop's Brush tool. No equivalent in APhoto.
 

Also sorely missed: Further options in Free Transform via RMB
 
 

Yup. Many tools don't even have a RMB menu at all! I made a feature request already.

I meant: Please refrain from private judgment on fellow users attitude and from assumptions, how statements might come across.

That's really kind of funny... 
This thread brought to my attention that Serif already uses a system to toggle between two tools – generally a super helpful feature – I even opened a feature request for this.
Serif just happened to implement that tool-toggle a way that it either gets terribly in the way or doesn't get discovered at all. I dare calling the current implementation plain wrong – it doesn't do anything good and can not even get turned off – it really should get fixed asap.

What I am used to from  quite a variety of programs (including Photoshop) is that one may temporarily call another tool by pressing and holding down a letter key. That way one may lay down a couple of brush-strokes while actually drawing a path: Press (and release) P to call the path tool and click to lay down anchor points. In order to access to the brush tool one would press (and hold!) the letter B. As soon as you let go the B-key one reverts to the Pen tool exactly in the position where one had left off – one may continue laying down points in that path.
The greatest advantage of this implementation is that it can not get called by accident. There's simply no other reason to press and keep holding a (Non Modifier-Key) right now = it can not get in the way. The second great advantage is that this sort of toogle is broadly known and expected behaviour. Hooking this up should not conflict with anything, as you don't use this event yet (normal keys held down).

 

There's countless threads in this forum where people ask for a DAM. Serif confirms that there's some plans, but so far they didn't reveal what they are working on. Reading the requests brought up by users I see that they ask for very different things: Some want a straightforward viewer app, others even request complex database driven software with nifty filtering options to handle huge asset collections. The term DAM unfortunately isn't very clearly defined. Hence my question:

 Do you need a DAM-program by Serif? And what should it be like?
[Edit: Unfortunately I can not do anything about the terrible Poll formatting. Maybe staff can add an empty line between the questions?]

I would greatly appreciate if you stuck to the topic. Public assumptions on motivation and mental state of fellow users are not helpful.

I can confirm this bug.

This thread has been noted and I think has run it's course I am locking it. Please can all forum users avoid personal comments and speculation over motivation. Everyone here wants to improve the program and answer as best they can and for no other reason in my opinion.

I agree. Immediate feedback on pressing the ALT Modifier is badly missing. 

As the cursor doesn't change to a colour picker there's no way to understand that the mode-change has registered. One needs to start sampling to have that magnifying glass appear: But also here the feedback is poor, as it easily takes half a second or more, until the Loupe finally shows up. One nearly can feel the program think: "Hang on – the user has pressed ALT and now even keeps LMB held down – what was it again what I'm supposed to show?

While speeding up that widget one might consider removing that distracting bevel-effect from the  picker. Giving the user a picker-experience which lets users judge the just sampled colour sure was more helpful than skeuomorphism. That's how things look in Photoshop CS6. 

I agree. Immediate feedback on pressing the ALT Modifier is badly missing. 

As the cursor doesn't change to a colour picker there's no way to understand that the mode-change has registered. One needs to start sampling to have that magnifying glass appear: But also here the feedback is poor, as it easily takes half a second or more, until the Loupe finally shows up. One nearly can feel the program think: "Hang on – the user has pressed ALT and now even keeps LMB held down – what was it again what I'm supposed to show?

While speeding up that widget one might consider removing that distracting bevel-effect from the  picker. Giving the user a picker-experience which lets users judge the just sampled colour sure was more helpful than skeuomorphism. That's how things look in Photoshop CS6. 

Thank you Janno!
Oh, thank you! It looks like "Alt" does color-pick quickly already...
But.. there is one big problem - the cursor doesn't change to the color picker icon. So if you're painting with a large size brush - for example: 100 pixels wide, and you want to color pick a tiny spot of color (quickly) - and you don't want to wait 2 seconds for the magnifying glass to appear... then you're forced to try to pick a tiny spot - with a giant 100-pixel wide cursor. Which will make it very hard to pick the right spot. 
So maybe the suggestion would change to - have holding "Alt" immediately change the cursor to the color picker icon. So you get to have precision quickly, without having to wait several seconds for the magnifying glass to appear? Maybe that would make more sense.
 

Thanks for your vote and opinion @Polygonius
Your comparison with Lighroom as a catalog based program where you first have to import your files into a database is maybe not ideal: That importing process may get perceived as a needless complication indeed.
There's other DAM however, which work pretty much like Bridge or XNView and let you quickly browse whatever files you have on disk. From here you could send the file directly to Affinity Photo / Designer / Publisher. But those who need RAW files could use that same tool also for editing large amounts of RAWs in ways which are utterly impossible with Affinity Photo, due to its software architecture.

Having a browsing Persona inside Photo/Designer/Publisher as suggested here is frankly what I considered a very poor solution. It meant having to have the respective editing app open to browse suitable assets! Even having clones of that browsing module sitting in all three Affintity apps would be very unelegant, programmatically.
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Thanks to all who already voted! It was great if all the  +140 other people who already watched that Poll cast their vote as well. 
You all have an opinion on this, right? :o)
 

Thanks for letting me know (had no idea that holding down both did that). However, it's not really much of an option for me who uses a tablet to draw, as you said (also doesn't help that just holding down R click to add to selection doesn't work).
I can do some specific Wacom settings to make it function, but it seems a little bit backwards having to hold down both the L and R mouse buttons to do what one modifier key could do. Same could really be said about holding down alt+L click+R click to change brush size and hardness/softness with the Brush tool. These controls are not really made for pen and tablet use.
 

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The debate is silly and futile. I completely agree with rui_mac ... Masking in AP is horrible and illogical and it is the main reason many people can not switch to AP despite its many advantages and their wish to do so.
The developers are going the wrong route here anyway. They try to make some magic masks for hobby user to remove birds from sky and cars from selfies. Completely useless for serious work ... And those insulting automatic hair masking examples that can be sold only to someone who never did work on hair with low contrast relation to the background ...
The odd thing is the blur and sharpen tool work so I gather there is little technical reason for other tools not to edit it in edit mode. Should simply become a grayscale layer in this mode - that would fix it ...

That's should not be a reason to make modern machines unresponsive. Here's a folder view with a few of my Photoshop files, none of them is slow or makes PS unresponsive. There's really no need to defend bad performance, it doesn't help anybody and surely not Serif.

Nice!
Yes thanks, I have seen dmstraker's later post, where he mentioned this. I personally think overdragging to Undo would fell even more direct. One usually already knows while dragging that one has messed up – that way one could undo without even releasing the knob. Also a lot of retouchers work with tablets / pen displays – and the doubleclick event generally sucks with a pen.  A similarly pen-friendly implementation is btw. overdragging to remove nodes in graphs (like in curves). So, if you still have a line left on your notepad... :o)
 

Node removal by overdragging in Photoshop. The gif drops a few frames, but I guess you get the sense.

I've just had a chat with one of the developers about this and we like the idea. I'll log this as an improvement request.
As an FYI, if you double click the node to reset to its default value, you can double click it again to set it back to the custom value you previously had. This is only on Windows so another improvement request will be going in for macOS.

And here's  my consistent take on it:  This Photoshop comparison totally doesn't fly.
Photoshop in terms of RAW handling is just as powerful as Lightroom (uses the same engine) and lets you work with whole folders of RAWs in parallel. Photoshop together with ACR and Bridge offers an awesome DAM + RAW Editor experience for those who prefer managing their assets without a database.
 

I agree, they do change. What I don't understand is why..
Why do I have to change tools to have access to Convert to Curves? There's room on the Text Tool toolbar - in fact the toolbars are identical between using the Text Tool and the Move Tool except for the controls that are hidden when the Text Tool is selected. 
Perhaps it's this way for historical reasons, but to avoid confusion (and provide convenience) it should be changed (IMHO, of course ).

@Mark IngramIt's a step in a good direction to show bigger thumbnails. But it was still required to have them in document aspect ratio. The current implementation isn't as readable as it could be –  it is even  is misleading – as it suggests the user that the document is actually square but cropped in some way. This really needs to get fixed. Also the Mask should never display a checker pattern,, but always appear in greyscale.

 
Interestingly Alpha Channels show the correct aspect ratio:

I do understand this notion - however we are still looking at the 1.x version, right :o) Even Photoshop in version xx changed how Ctrl+Z works, quite recently...
Of all those users who don't post in the forums - what scenario would you consider more likely: Relatively inexperienced users running into what happened to Patricia (neither being aware of the cause, nor of the recently introduced fix in Preferences).
Or experienced users who use a lot of keyboard shortcuts and even like the concept of stacked hotkeys - who at the same time get just mad about little behaviour change, which they may get rid of with one little checkmark in Preferences?
My personal preference is that software makers remain open for change - even on long established conventions :o)
 

@Mark IngramThe actual reason also here (in Designer) is very likely an accidental tool-change by pressing the B-key twice. I suggest implementing the Shift-protection for accidental tool change suite wide. Further, I think you should consider inverting the default behaviour – one should have to check a box if one dislikes having to press Shift. I doubt that you will find a lot of users who will freak out. The OP didn't even want to use the tool cycle mechanism – obviously she wasn't even aware of that option: Patricia only wanted to pick a tool – the fact that it was already active before her tea break made the operation fail.

Please have someone  analyze such error patterns. One only needs to read this forum regularly and runs into them, pretty much on a daily basis.

Hi @Mark Ingram Here I have piled up and explained a few other UX issues.
They all, without a question fall into the "changing the default behaviour of the application is a thing which we rarely want to do" realm :o) It took some time to collect and maybe you find some of this not too foolish after all... 
I'd be happy if you / the UX guys had a look, before the the thread gets burried in this ever growing feature-requests-thread.
 
 

Well, this is a matter of definition. I only wrote about malfunctions in existing features.
I consider standard-tools which  bring users to a point that they can no more track down the issue themselfes defective – as the present tool-behaviour does not offer the slightest advantage, in any context.