Mariosupa

Apps: All
Platforms: macOS, Windows and iPad
A new QR Code tool is now available from the shapes flyout in the toolbar, making it easy to add a QR code to your documents. 
After creating or selecting a QR Code object you will find a 'Payload' option in the context toolbar. Here you can type whatever URL you want the QR code to link to when it is scanned.


You can insert line breaks in your payload by using the CMD/CTRL + Click on canvas dialog

In addition to URLs you can use other syntax as detailed below to have the QR code trigger other functions when scanned by a device:
SMS
Payload structure: SMSTO:number:text message
Eg. SMSTO:07513123456:Hello mate!
GEO location
Payload structure: GEO:lat:lon:height
Eg. GEO:40.71872,-73.98905,100
WIFI credentials
Payload structure: WIFI:S:ssid;T:type;P:password;;
Eg. WIFI:S:MyWiFiSSID;T:WPA;P:MyPassW0rd;;
 

Apps: All
Platforms: macOS and Windows
As has been requested numerous times we have now converted the typography dialog from a pop-up dialog into a panel so you can now easily dock it / keep it available should you wish. 
This is available both fro the Window menu (note: this is currently at the bottom of the panel listing, but will be changed to be a sub menu from the Text panel options next week), and also from the typography button in the context toolbar  when you have text selected.
 

Apps: Designer
Platforms: macOS, Windows and iPad
We have made some further improvements to the pencil tool.
Firstly we are now using a new curve smoothing algorithm which we believe gives general better, smoother, results when using the pencil tool.
Secondly as has been commonly requested we have now changed the "Auto-close" method so that when you have that option checked in the context toolbar the curve only closes when you are near to the start point of the curve being drawn. You will now get an indicator when you are in range of the start position of the curve so you know when a curve will be auto-closed.

Variable fonts
Apps: Affinity Designer, Affinity Photo, Affinity Publisher
Platforms: All
You're now able to use variable fonts in all Affinity apps, providing a plethora of new typographic design possibilities.
As well as providing predefined font styles, such as light, bold and condensed, variable fonts give you fine control of specific design aspects known as axes of variation, or just axes for short.
To try out variable fonts in Affinity, apply one to some text and then:
- On desktop, click the Font Variations button on the context toolbar (or on the Character Panel).
- On iPad, tap the arrow to the right of Bold/Italic/Underline/Strikethrough on the Text Panel and then tap Variations.
Variation settings on desktop.

 
 
Variation settings on iPad.

 
You'll see settings for each axis that the font designer has made individually adjustable.

Axis' slider being dragged.
Many variable fonts allow you to adjust their width and weight axes, and possibly italic, optical size and slant. These five axes are common enough that they're defined by the OpenType specification.
All manner of other axes may also be adjustable, such as:
- the height of ascenders and depth of descenders to better fit your chosen line spacing.
- the stem terminals, to choose between straight and swelling.
- the width of counters, which are enclosed and partially enclosed spaces within glyphs.
For examples of other possible axes, check out the axis definitions that are available for variable fonts at Google Fonts.
You may see fewer axes in Affinity than are mentioned by a font provider's marketing. For example, Google Fonts lists 13 axes for Roboto Flex and Affinity exposes five of them. This is because we respect font designers' ability to specify that an axis should be hidden. This is part of the OpenType specification and means that software isn't meant to provide an interface for such axes.
Why would a designer do this? Well, a variable font might adjust an axis internally based on your choices for other axes that you can directly adjust. For example, observe how counter widths change when the weight axis is adjusted in the animation above.

Variable fonts and PDFs
PDF doesn't support variable fonts. So, when you export a PDF of an Affinity document that uses a variable font, we create a static instance of the font with fixed settings.
We've taken steps to ensure static instances of fonts are well named. You should find this minimises the need to identify the original variable fonts if you later import or place the resulting PDFs.

Apps: Designer
Platforms: macOS, Windows and iPad
Affinity Designer now includes a new width tool which is available by default alongside the pencil tool in your toolbar:

The Line Width Tool gives you an on-document way of editing the pressure profile of any curve. For example the curve below has 3 pressure points (5 including the start and end pressure). While in the Line Width tool the position of those points are shown along the curve, and you have the ability to drag to change the width and position of them. 
You can also click to add a new pressure point, or double click to remove any pressure point on a curve.

There are various modifiers available which you can see in the status bar:
Shift + Drag - allows you to modify the width at any point without adjusting it's position
Cmd (Mac) / Ctrl (Win) + Click - manually enter the width required at the chosen point
Ctrl (Mac) / Ctrl (Win) + Drag - move the point position without adjusting the width
Double click - remove pressure point
Additionally you will find some other options in the context toolbar when using this tool:

Adjust Line Weight - if this is turned on then should you drag the width of any point to be greater than the current line width (i.e. greater than 100% pressure) the line width will be increased to allow you to drag the width unrestricted. If it is turned off then the maximum width you can drag to is 100% of the set line width.
Allow point reordering - This option allows to you to specify whether you want to allow the tool to drag one point past another along the curve, effectively swapping their order, or not.
Snap to curve nodes - This will show any nodes on the curve as small white dots and will snap any pressure points to those nodes
Snap to widths on same curve - this will snap the width at any pressure point on a curve to other widths which already exist on that curve. This only applies when holding shift (i.e. you are adjusting the width without altering the point position).
Snap to curve geometry - this will snap the width to the geometry of any selected curves (again if you are holding shift). 

Maybe Serif should consider allowing plugin development and making a plugin store.
Thus, Serif itself could release first-party high quality plugins as a source of income and at the same time user or thrid-party developer like Astute Graphics could help developing "long wanted, low priority" or some "few needed but hard to implement" functionalities.

on the bottom toolbar there is a button with two curves facing each other. Looks kind of like an "H" deselect that and your points will move freely. This was bothering me a lot also!

Your next purchase (which will be an update to our software) is in no way restricted by any previous purchases, so yes. It's a whole new purchase if you choose, or not if you don't want to 

It's listed in the first post in this topic, isn't it?

I think the difference in the number of lines & the shape they enclose would be enough to tell them apart, even for people with color blindness.
That said, application icons are not something I spend much time looking at, so I don't care much what the look like as long as it is easy to tell one from another.
Besides, if you dislike the Affinity beta ones that much, you can (on Macs at least) replace them with your own version, or maybe save the old 1.6 ones somewhere & replace the new ones with them. Like most other graphics resources, they can be found at path /Applications/Affinity Designer Beta.app/Contents/Resources/DesignerAppIcon.icns & similar path names for the other Affinity apps.

More in depth than the video tutorials? No there isn't. I think the video tutorials are one of our strengths rather than an area where we are "lacking"

They give you access to some of the most common Alignment operations you may need to do, and they're accessed from the selection box. Best way to describe it is by way of video:
 
AlignmentHandles.mov

Hi LCamachoDesign,
The Light UI was probably the most requested feature since the beginning of this forum. There's a huge thread where it was requested/discussed and i'm pretty sure it's easy to find. You may not find it that useful but there's quite a large number of users that requested it. We are not prioritising the wrong features - they may not be the ones you are looking for - but they are useful for other users. We are aware of most requested features (we track the feature requests forum) but some of these requests may depend on other/work features that are not finished/complete yet or that present issues in the current version and as such must be delayed until they are ready/fixed, or may have been delayed due to some specific issue that's not working as desired yet and that the dev team isn't happy with or are dependent on other development conditions/constraints or what's planed for the 1.x cycle. For those reasons a voting system doesn't help as much as you may think as we can't prioritise things based simply on user requests. There's other factors at play here.
 

@Oval
The disappointment of a few users may be more related with the high expectations they set for the products than to what the dev team could realistically achieve with the time and resources they had/have.
Considering that Affinity products have barely reached three years on the market, are now present in three different platforms and are being created from scratch i don't think there's much to be disappointed with. We do miss some basic tools/features and we certainly don't cover all competition's functionality but that's expected if you are comparing Affinity to products that have more than two decades of development. It doesn't really matter what Adobe did two decades ago. They had to start/deal with a different set of problems not comparable to the ones software developers face today. Only time will help to close the tools/feature gap and i think most users are aware of this.
 
Designer and Photo are what they are, with a price that's more than adjusted (i would say cheap) for what they offer - some users know how to take advantage of them and are already using them in production/commercially with what they offer, others will remain frustrated looking just for what they don't have yet. It's up to each one to decide how to look at it. The dev team has been doing their best to fulfil user's requests and fixing what they can and that's all we can promise. 
 
There's nothing stopping users from using Affinity in conjunction with existing third party software if they find some functionality lacking/missing until we get there.