hifred

@hifred I believe Sparkle saves single project files, and the now defunct Adobe Muse shares that same approach. As you mentioned, Xara saves the pages as one file too.
The question you would have to ask yourself is whether this is a good approach or not. Html, CSS, Javascript: these are all open human readable files, and the entire point of the web is open technologies. When relying on a closed file format like Xara, Muse, or Sparkle you become entirely (or mostly) dependent on that software to manage the site, and all three write rather abysmal code that cannot be handed over to a programmer in good conscience: they would have to start all over, because it is entirely human unreadable.
I suppose it is fine when dealing with simple sites with a simple structure, one-pagers, or flashy portfolio sites. But if the design must be integrated with a content management system (CMS) and/or database driven content with a server back-end, or even be converted to a mobile app... Well, let's just close with this: it is a Very Bad Idea to rely on pure visual web page building tools that 1) are unable to work directly with (existing) html files, 2) rely on a proprietary file format, and 2) output code that is only machine readable and a mess.
Tools such as Muse, WebPlus, and Xara all work with a separate design layer which must be converted to web code. This is hard to maintain (by the developers), hard to keep the design layer updated with the latest web technologies (which often change on a yearly basis or more often), and that custom design layer cannot hope to emulate an actual web browser output, so the so-called WYSIWYG view is only an approximation of the real thing (can't test javascript right in the view, for example).
No wonder Adobe and Serif had to throw in the towel with Muse and WebPlus: the web goes too fast to keep up with such a proprietary tool with an abstracted design layer. It's unmaintainable in the long run. Muse had become an obese dragon of an application.
Not to mention the hardships related to designing and testing responsive layouts in these kind of tools. And I am not even mentioning the trouble and frustration related to one-file file corruption issues, and thereby losing the entire site. That is to say, a versioning/file backup feature should be either integrated and/or it should be compatible with the tools you use for web site creation. A single-file approach for web development is (sorry) just a really bad idea, and adds one more unnecessary layer between the output and yourself. That is not how web pages work. and it is a severely limiting workflow anyway.
These tools cannot be integrated well in a team environment at all. So, unless simple static web work is what you do, and you are not involved in a team (you're working on your own), and you don't mind running the risks of depending on a proprietary design app and file format, then one of these tools might fit the bill.
Anyway, long explanation to tell you that I think, that unless you are making very simple static sites, it is better to stay well away from such tools, and only choose tools that work directly with the html, css, js, less, sass, etc. files themselves. You should be able to open an existing web page or site in these tools, and be able to edit the code in a visual environment which is based on an actual web browser view.
And this workflow is compatible with a team, as well as a file versioning workflow (like Git(hub)). Pinegrow keeps an automatic local file history, and all changes are recorded.
For me that means Xara, Muse, Sparkle, online solution like WebFlow and the like, and WebPlus are always going to limit you in some way. Wappler is better, but doesn't allow for CSS frameworks outside the ones they support directly, and that leaves Pinegrow for me and my frontend development work. But it is possible to combine both Wappler and Pinegrow in your workflow, because in the end they both work directly with the actual web files. And in a good human readable way, so anyone with a bit of html and css skill will be able to open the code in a code editor and make changes. I can open a Wappler website directly in Pinegrow, and continue to edit it. Can't do that in Muse, Sparkle, WebPlus, Xara, etc.
In short, even if Pinegrow would met its demise in the future, those Pinegrow-built sites are fully editable with other open tools. Compare that to Muse or WebPlus users.
 
 

@hifred
Here is an example screenshot. One could argue that it looks a bit clunky and different, but aside from that, once you get used to the icons, it works really, really well. Everything that's going on that is important to know about is directly exposed: image blend modes are indicated, opacity percentages, the layer type, the adjustment layer type is indicated with an icon, curve adjustments are shown as a thumbnail (love this myself!), which layers are editable, select-able, and or locked, whether an advanced layer blend is applied (fourth layer small icon), which layers have transparency locked, which groups are drawn isolated (asterisk)... and of course layer effects (here indicated with an 'S').
Instead of having to click on each layer to inspect what is going on under the hood, here we just glance over the layer stack, and understand what is happening in this file. I find other image editors' layer panels to be very awkward and inefficient to work with compared - even the "industry standard" Photoshop layer panel (aside from the missing drag option).
For those who are wondering about the checkboxes: these serve as a visual indicator for multiple layers selected, but also as a way to use the mouse only to select multiple layers: something that would require a modifier shortcut key on most other image editors. It's quite handy when working with the Wacom tablet.
What is missing compared to Photoshop: it is not possible to drag-select layer visibility, unfortunately.  For the rest I prefer this layer panel over Photoshop and other image editors/painting tools. (on a side note: PhotoLine's painting tools are however not in the same league as Affinity Photo, let alone compared to the ones in Krita.)
What is also nice is that Corel users can adjust layer navigation options to use the cursor keys to navigate the layer panel. I like the configuration options related to the use of the layer panel as well. And the fact that the user can zoom in and out of thumbnails on the fly by holding down the ctrl and scroll wheel.

 

The lack of a custom layer thumbnail size has been discussed to death before. It is only one of several GUI interaction design issues related to the Layer panel.
Here is what happens with longer layer labels:

As anyone can see, this is a less than desirable situation, and things will only get worse when a custom layer thumbnail size is introduced in the Affinity range. And I agree with your @hifred observation that a checkbox is the wrong indicator for layer visibility. 
There are a number of other design problems, and I again agree the entire panel should be scrapped, and rethought. For example, changing the blending range, changing the opacity, or coverage map: none of these are indicated in any way in the layer panel to show the user that a specific layer happens to have other settings applied to. Layers cannot be tagged with a colour either, nor is a search option provided to filter layers. And it is not possible to drag-select like in Photoshop.
But in this respect Photoshop is lacking as well. With both apps the user must select a layer first before it becomes clear which opacity and blend mode settings are applied. The only application that I know of that does include this information for each layer is PhotoLine, and that works very, very well. Looking at a layer comp in the layer panel immediately tells you how things work. I wish other image editors would allow for this, or at least include an option.
Anyway, the way the layer visibility controls are handled in Affinity reminds me of how a programmer would solve it. But it is only one of a whole list of layer panel issues and limitations. I do hope the developers are working to solve and improve these, but I was hoping to see some much-need improvements in the beta of Affinity Publisher, and noticed how little has changed.  Publisher is presumably the v1.7 version of the Affinity range? If so, we may be disappointed when V1.7 is released.
 

I'm also surprised how wrong the choice of a checkmark as an icon appears to me. I'm familiar with Eye-Icons or also Lightbulbs in different states to indicate visibility.
But the checkmark? It is an indicator of something in active state – and in this sense it is conflicting with the concept of layer locking. A locked layer, albeit showing a checkmark is not active – but it is visible (that again is nothing the checkmark can tell us).
The layer editor really deserves getting redone from scatch. Coming from Photoshop and being a really lazy layer namer I often don't know what I'm looking at in Affinity Photo – already in documents with just a few layers. Layers and masks being super tiny and displaying square (regardless of the aspect ratio of the document) is terrible, in particular when working on several monitors. In PS I need one click to give a window focus and can see right away that I'm looking at the correct layer stack: Yup, it has a portrait orientation, I can even see what's happening on layers and masks. Affinity by Design holds back all this valueable information, with it's generic 16x16px miniatures.  
 
 

Having the layer visibility control on the far right is a usability problem, and plain bad user experience design. I agree with the OP: it's really frustrating to work with.
The positioning of the checkmark breaks a fundamental interaction design law (Fitts's law) because the user identifies a layer by its thumbnail and/or label, and is then forced to follow the row to the right with their eyes to finally uncheck the visibility. But since the distance between layer identifier and the checkbox is relatively large, the eye will often re-check whether the thumbnail is the correct one in a document with multiple layers. I started noticing my eyes' behaviour even with just 5 or 6 layers, or so. The visual grouping of the control is all wacky.
Aside from the distance, the tiny checkmark target exacerbates this usability issue even further. It really is quite terrible UI design on display here. Beautiful example of how not to implement this basic task.
This design decision would be understandable if the task were a hardly-used one, but controlling the layer visibility is quite a fundamental action, and used all the time during work.
I am unsure what the developers were thinking when they decided to put this action so far away from the layer's visual and textual identifier. This really is basic 101 interaction design theory.
Having said this, perhaps Adobe has a copyright on this particular interface design?
Refer to this simple explanation of Fitts's Law: https://lawsofux.com/fittss-law
 

Indesign has a powerful feature which lets me select the layer-display of referenced (not embedded) Photoshop psd's or Illustrator .ai files. A checkbox in the Importer lets users check select just the layers (or layer comps) they need, but one can re-access the layer display dialog at any time later via Object/Object Layer Options and the display of the placed file updates correspondingly. 
Is similar already available for placed Affinity files or even other layered document types (psd, tif)? If not – is this planned?

You can solve that problem with free programs like Sage Thumbs. 

From what I gather there is no way to hold "ctrl" + "alt" and thus intersect a selection, like is possible in Photoshop when holding both "shift"+"alt".
Could this pretty please be added in the next release (or is there a method I'm missing?)

there are not many Windows programs out there not supporting context sensitive help. I'm just exploring the Affinity Photo trial version and this makes it harder.

I have been telling, from the very beginning, when Affinity Photo was still in beta, that masks are simply greyscale images and, so, everything that is possible to do with a greyscale image should also be possible to do with masks (painting, smearing, dodging, burning, applying filters, etc)
I was told that, internally, in Affinity Photo, masks are not really greyscale images.
But, even if they are not, the average user (and even the professionals) assume that masks are simply greyscale images, because that is how they are displayed and that is how all applications that deal with masks present them.
The main thing preventing me to work almost 100% of the time in Affinity Photo, instead of using Photoshop is exactly the way Affinity Photo deals with alpha channels and additional (spare) channels. It is so much more complicated and limited than with Photoshop. Photoshop deals with additional channels (and that includes alpha channels) in a such straightforward way that is a real pain assuming that I can do the same with Affinity Photo... and I can't

I even created a few videos showing this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W6H_8gjX-eI
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uIN9HYB5Mwc

I think, standalone RAW editors are most useful for those users who can do the full processing of most images in there and who only rarely have a need for compositing, text overlays etc. For those who start with RAW and who typically end up with a layered file, using a separate RAW (by another vendor/which doesn't know anything about the further editing pipeline) only means a needless workflow-complication.
It's interesting though, that some popular programs which started as RAW only tools now add Layers and Text tools and allow editing several RAWs on one canvas - they morph to compositing tools.
 

It's another one of those...Geez, R C-R moments...
Serif needs to use a sidecar file. Which is how most all RAW developers work. There's nothing, and I mean nothing, patentable about sidecar files. They are (usually/often/always) XML files that store the settings for a given image.
I personally will not develop in PS or Affinity Photo or anything else that doesn't either A) use sidecar files or, B) does not store the live settings (ala Photoline, which I also do not use for developing for reason A).
Dedicated RAW developers are far faster to run images through whether the shoot is consistent or not. And did I mention one can return to change those settings at will and with ease and speed?

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.

A great workflow helper for keyboard driven work in Photoshop is what I know as sticky keys – but it works different from the Windows accessibility feature with the same name... If anyone knows a better name – please comment. 

The principle is simple but powerful and doesn't get into the way of anyone who doesn't want to use this feature: Pressing and releasing the E key from say the brush tool will switch to the Erazer tool permanently, just as usual. If one however presses and  keeps holding down the E-Key one can quickly eraze some strokes. Letting go the E key automatically switches back to the brush tool. The principle is similar to the way Panning via Spacebar is hooked up already – on release the previous tool gets re-activated.

The same principle might be useful for Designer and Publisher as well (Adobe uses it in AI and ID too).

Hehe, no I'm not even talking about seriously large and complex files...
While I have made larger compositions in the past, the task I use Image Editors for mostly in recent time is a trivial one: Series-processing of E-Commerce imagery – a job that's offered at bargain rates by countless vendors in Asia. I help my partner out with this not exactly creative work – and if I'm at all willing to series process images, I want to do it quickly. Right now I see no way to do this bread and butter job effectively with Affinity Photo.

I shoot as RAW to have some headroom, also for creating realistic looking variations from just a single frame (for products that are available in various colours).
Then I use Bridge to cull and throw a dozen or more RAWs into Photoshop to apply common corrections with its ACR workspace. Afterwards I cycle through these open frames and see if any of the individual shots needs some extra tweaking with ACRs combination of various tools in one brushstroke approach. (Does anyone know a good name for this layer-less editing principle?)

Last I bring all of these images as Smart Objects into Photoshops classic workspace, with the RAWs embedded (they remain editable in ACR). These dozen or twenty open RAW files don't impress PS at all, it's rather me who with too many open images at some point loses track of things :o).

Inside Photoshop I usually only clip objects out to present them on a purely white background and paint back in a bit of of ground shadow – that's it. For this task I merely need basic tools but they have to work well. Cropping / rotating frames without stuttering, selection and selection refinement which work instantly. Good mask editing, also painting on masks with blend modes (essential for editing masks on hairy stuff). A streamlined way to turn every supported item type into pixel selections. Well functioning brush controls for Pen Display users, fully hooked up keyboard shortcuts to quickly change the brush flow.

All of this is either...
not at all possible due to the way Serif has set up the foundation of its RAW handling not (yet) implemented implemented, but in a needlessly convoluted manner available, but not functioning well enough for binge editing ;o)
  verysame:  What app did you use to capture these Task-Manager gifs?

So to use dynamic zoom you have to hit spacebar then ctrl. Is there a way to swap this or allow it to do both? I'm so used to hitting ctrl + spacebar. With my mindset being: start from the outside of the keyboard and working my way inward while hitting hotkeys.
Thanks!

Edit: Affinity Photo is in some cases really pleasant and imo superior like for example the  auto preview when changing Layer Blend modes which Photoshop didn´t have for like three decades.
For potential new customers which come from Photoshop, Affinity Photo needs some changes;

~two Layer blend modes from PS CS6 are still missing in Affinity Photo. (the implementation so far is excellent!)
GPU acceleration for Windows.
quicker startup times are needed
All Affinity products need a lot more optimizations so it takes less ram when editing big images.
Even Photoshop CS3 which is ancient by now has had much better resource management and less hunger for RAM than Affinity photo while editing 16k-px images.
Text layers within exported PSDs would be needed.
a much better channel packing is needed and connected to it an easier editing/previewing of the alpha channel.
TGA,DDS,WebP export
compression options and previewing of to be exported images is needed.
 
 
 
 

We are pretty much in the same boat.
I think I read you also need to work fast on quite heavy compositions, same situation here.
I had a lot of expectations when Affinity came out for Windows. I then realized that I couldn't expect a full working PS replacement right away. Then I realized I also had to come up with several workarounds if I wanted to get the job done, which is OK to some extent. I never say no when it comes to finding alternatives, as long as they don't affect my productivity down the road. Then I learned there were also shortcomings to deal with and sometimes they really do affect the productivity significantly.
Lastly, there was the stability/performance issue, and at that point, I said that's it.
Just as a comparison, here are a couple of screengrabs from the Task Manager, one using PS the other using Affinity. For the record, in PS I'm editing a half gigabyte image (2480 x 1420 px), and in Affinity a 30 MB image (520 x 520 px).
In both cases, I'm adding a few adjustment layers, mostly curves and HSL, that's it. In PS I can keep editing and do more elaborate work, the load on the CPU is still quite the same.
 

Wow, it's really fascinating in what different ways one may perceive that same reality :o)

I could fully understand your point of view, if Affinity Photo was a node based app or if one had chosen to build a full image compositing app, based on the layer-less multi-tool editing approach typically found inside RAW processors. I would get what you say when Affinity Designer had an interaction concept which rather resembled paradigms used in 2D CAD programs, or when Publisher was LaTex-based, rather than wysiwyg ;o).
I don't see any of that being the case.
I see all three Affinity programs made with a very clear focus on matching the expectations of an as broad as possible audience. And Serif knew that a lot of their potential customers were already used to Adobe products. From day one the whole interaction concept in all three programs was extremely similar to what's found in comparable Adobe programs. Things have the same names, are found in the same place, work pretty much in the same way, look similarly, very often even use the same keyboard shortcuts. This is not to say that Serif would not know how to implement deviating concepts, but Serif (like many other software houses) conciously voted against doing so.
After having decided to take an extremely similar route one simply has to expect constant comparisons + the desire to fine tune existing functionality, to match the (better, simpler) Photoshop/Illustrator/Indesign implementation. That's the price one has to pay – anything else was extremely naive.
In the case of Affintity Photo I only see one concept where Photo cleary differs from Photoshop: That's Layer/Mask nesting (but that implementation once again isn't exacly an invention – it existed for many years in other image processors too, Photoline comes to my mind.  Well RAW handling is also done differently, but one could also call this workspace quite raw (sorry ;o) and unfinished. Where do you see the fundamental differences to Photoshop?
I personally find quite interesting what's recently going on in the field of programs which used to be purely RAW editors:
Firms like  On1, Alien Skin, ACDC , Skylum and others are transforming their RAW converters into fullblown compositing programs – I'm curious what they come up with.

I think the reality is that most image editors out there, even cheaper and free ones are conceptually very much influenced by Photoshop. It doesn't matter if one has used Paintshop Pro, Corel Paint or Draw Plus – none of them as an editing concept that one could call truly unique. A person with a solid Photoshop background is instantly at home in all of these packages.
There's a variety of quite different principles for editing images visually, I mentioned a few in my second-last post, but the majority of applications took the familiar Photoshop route for compositing programs. Just look at how one deals with the canvas, with layers and masks, how layer effects and filters and all these fundamental functions are hooked up. Serif with Affinity Photo even went a lot further in terms of similarity than the majority of competing programs. Also (btw. pretty well made) marketing positions the Affinity Suite quite aggressively as an alternative to Adobe. Developers stating the opposite in a forum post here and there sure don't change anything about the public perception.
 
I don't think that a lot of these Photoshop users care greatly about pricing. Adobe's Photo bundle is affordable – even for hobby users. But one loses access to possibly years of work, as soon as one cancels the SAAS contract. My driving interest therefore is authority over my data. I had no issues paying ten times the current cost of Aphoto for a program that is actually as good as Photoshop, or even better. 

Those who are the mayority of software-users don't create such posts. And a lot of those who did still subscribe to the Cloud.
I as a CS6 user can honestly say that I didn't have the slightest problems caused by Adobe's software architecture used in that particular version, for the last 6 years.
Obviously I do like slim and elegant – but I'm even more interested in great performance: For me Fatty wins, hands down.
Unfortunately I can not agree and I'm not happy at all with Affinity. Right now I honestly can't stand editing a single image from start to end with APhoto.
For performance reasons alone –  and I have run numerous side by side comparisons for the same task. Realistically it will take a couple more version numbers (and a useful RAW editing implementation!) before I will eventually switch over. You btw. forgot mentioning a possible reason for a purchase: Supporting a promising competitor.
 

That's the crucial sentence here. You could safely replace "a lot of users" with everyone, but a handful of nerds.
What you list here may all be perfectly valid: But this stuff isn't visible, has practically no effect on how users interact with the software* and doesn't explain itself in any other way. This under the hood stuff is utterly irrelevant for the experience of average users – it's not there.
All they see is programs which look and work similar to Adobe products.
_____________________
*Adobe also offers extremely nice interchange options between its applications. Strictly from the user perspective I see zero disadvantage in comparison to Affinity.
A program with a much older code base has hooked up a lot of stuff in ways one would no longer use nowadays – that is another story.

A clean slate and profiting from success and failure of older implementations is an advantage every younger programs has. The result of all this elegance and slimness sure isn't superior performance: The often called bloated Photoshop (+ half a decade old CS6 in my case) is crazy fast in comparison to Affinity Photo.

Wow, it's really fascinating in what different ways one may perceive that same reality :o)

I could fully understand your point of view, if Affinity Photo was a node based app or if one had chosen to build a full image compositing app, based on the layer-less multi-tool editing approach typically found inside RAW processors. I would get what you say when Affinity Designer had an interaction concept which rather resembled paradigms used in 2D CAD programs, or when Publisher was LaTex-based, rather than wysiwyg ;o).
I don't see any of that being the case.
I see all three Affinity programs made with a very clear focus on matching the expectations of an as broad as possible audience. And Serif knew that a lot of their potential customers were already used to Adobe products. From day one the whole interaction concept in all three programs was extremely similar to what's found in comparable Adobe programs. Things have the same names, are found in the same place, work pretty much in the same way, look similarly, very often even use the same keyboard shortcuts. This is not to say that Serif would not know how to implement deviating concepts, but Serif (like many other software houses) conciously voted against doing so.
After having decided to take an extremely similar route one simply has to expect constant comparisons + the desire to fine tune existing functionality, to match the (better, simpler) Photoshop/Illustrator/Indesign implementation. That's the price one has to pay – anything else was extremely naive.
In the case of Affintity Photo I only see one concept where Photo cleary differs from Photoshop: That's Layer/Mask nesting (but that implementation once again isn't exacly an invention – it existed for many years in other image processors too, Photoline comes to my mind.  Well RAW handling is also done differently, but one could also call this workspace quite raw (sorry ;o) and unfinished. Where do you see the fundamental differences to Photoshop?
I personally find quite interesting what's recently going on in the field of programs which used to be purely RAW editors:
Firms like  On1, Alien Skin, ACDC , Skylum and others are transforming their RAW converters into fullblown compositing programs – I'm curious what they come up with.

Wow, it's really fascinating in what different ways one may perceive that same reality :o)

I could fully understand your point of view, if Affinity Photo was a node based app or if one had chosen to build a full image compositing app, based on the layer-less multi-tool editing approach typically found inside RAW processors. I would get what you say when Affinity Designer had an interaction concept which rather resembled paradigms used in 2D CAD programs, or when Publisher was LaTex-based, rather than wysiwyg ;o).
I don't see any of that being the case.
I see all three Affinity programs made with a very clear focus on matching the expectations of an as broad as possible audience. And Serif knew that a lot of their potential customers were already used to Adobe products. From day one the whole interaction concept in all three programs was extremely similar to what's found in comparable Adobe programs. Things have the same names, are found in the same place, work pretty much in the same way, look similarly, very often even use the same keyboard shortcuts. This is not to say that Serif would not know how to implement deviating concepts, but Serif (like many other software houses) conciously voted against doing so.
After having decided to take an extremely similar route one simply has to expect constant comparisons + the desire to fine tune existing functionality, to match the (better, simpler) Photoshop/Illustrator/Indesign implementation. That's the price one has to pay – anything else was extremely naive.
In the case of Affintity Photo I only see one concept where Photo cleary differs from Photoshop: That's Layer/Mask nesting (but that implementation once again isn't exacly an invention – it existed for many years in other image processors too, Photoline comes to my mind.  Well RAW handling is also done differently, but one could also call this workspace quite raw (sorry ;o) and unfinished. Where do you see the fundamental differences to Photoshop?
I personally find quite interesting what's recently going on in the field of programs which used to be purely RAW editors:
Firms like  On1, Alien Skin, ACDC , Skylum and others are transforming their RAW converters into fullblown compositing programs – I'm curious what they come up with.