Granddaddy

I'm disappointed that my simple question about the future of these Affinity forums has not been answered by any forum moderators, Affinity staff, or Canva/Serif principals who might actually know whether Affinity technical support will remain free under Canva ownership.
Sadly, this lack of response is likely to stimulate even more uncertainty and speculation about Affinity's future.
Will there be free user forums for Affinity users? Will Canva/Affinity staff participate in any free forums that might exist? How many of those now paid by Serif to participate in these free forums will still be employed in six months?  How much will Canva charge Affinity users for technical support? 
Responses from knowledgeable people in Canva/Serif would be most helpful.

Thanks for your patience @Granddaddy you'll understand we've had a much higher volume of contacts to respond to since the announcement but to answer your question, things will remain the same i.e the forums and Technical Support will remain free.

Will Affinity forums remain free or will Canva charge a subscription fee for user forums?
Some Affinity competitors charge a substantial subscription fee to participate in community forums, to access user resources, and to view tutorials. Annual fees for what they call "user support" can equal the cost of the software itself.
Affinity's free forums provide one compelling reason to continue using Affinity. In these Affinity forums there is extensive support for all users--both casual and professional, both new and experienced, both amateur and professional. These free forums constitute a fellowship of users. Here users from all over the world come to understand and benefit from their affinity for one another. 
I hope this free community of users will continue under Canva. 
Edited 4/4/2024
I'm happy to say that @Leigh responded below saying: "things will remain the same i.e the forums and Technical Support will remain free."

I'm disappointed that my simple question about the future of these Affinity forums has not been answered by any forum moderators, Affinity staff, or Canva/Serif principals who might actually know whether Affinity technical support will remain free under Canva ownership.
Sadly, this lack of response is likely to stimulate even more uncertainty and speculation about Affinity's future.
Will there be free user forums for Affinity users? Will Canva/Affinity staff participate in any free forums that might exist? How many of those now paid by Serif to participate in these free forums will still be employed in six months?  How much will Canva charge Affinity users for technical support? 
Responses from knowledgeable people in Canva/Serif would be most helpful.

Here's one example:
https://www.on1.com/plus/forums/
https://www.on1.com/products/plus/
Subscription is regularly $55/year, but on sale at a discount at the moment. That's equal to the full price I paid for ON1 Photo Raw 2024 last month on a special promotional offer. They had sucked me in at the end of January when they were giving away ON1 Photo Effects for free, a fact I was alerted to in these Affinity forums.
It was worth the money as I'm learning a lot about a whole different approach to editing, including AI functions. But community support seems poor.
They have some free community forums, but they are pretty empty of content and would give the impression that no one is using their products.
https://on1help.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/community/topics
When you participate in the free forums, your actual name gets posted with your question or comments. I told the company I thought this was a deterrent to using those free forums. I don't know how the paid forums work, but why would they be any different.
 

Will Affinity forums remain free or will Canva charge a subscription fee for user forums?
Some Affinity competitors charge a substantial subscription fee to participate in community forums, to access user resources, and to view tutorials. Annual fees for what they call "user support" can equal the cost of the software itself.
Affinity's free forums provide one compelling reason to continue using Affinity. In these Affinity forums there is extensive support for all users--both casual and professional, both new and experienced, both amateur and professional. These free forums constitute a fellowship of users. Here users from all over the world come to understand and benefit from their affinity for one another. 
I hope this free community of users will continue under Canva. 
Edited 4/4/2024
I'm happy to say that @Leigh responded below saying: "things will remain the same i.e the forums and Technical Support will remain free."

I'm disappointed that my simple question about the future of these Affinity forums has not been answered by any forum moderators, Affinity staff, or Canva/Serif principals who might actually know whether Affinity technical support will remain free under Canva ownership.
Sadly, this lack of response is likely to stimulate even more uncertainty and speculation about Affinity's future.
Will there be free user forums for Affinity users? Will Canva/Affinity staff participate in any free forums that might exist? How many of those now paid by Serif to participate in these free forums will still be employed in six months?  How much will Canva charge Affinity users for technical support? 
Responses from knowledgeable people in Canva/Serif would be most helpful.

Here's one example:
https://www.on1.com/plus/forums/
https://www.on1.com/products/plus/
Subscription is regularly $55/year, but on sale at a discount at the moment. That's equal to the full price I paid for ON1 Photo Raw 2024 last month on a special promotional offer. They had sucked me in at the end of January when they were giving away ON1 Photo Effects for free, a fact I was alerted to in these Affinity forums.
It was worth the money as I'm learning a lot about a whole different approach to editing, including AI functions. But community support seems poor.
They have some free community forums, but they are pretty empty of content and would give the impression that no one is using their products.
https://on1help.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/community/topics
When you participate in the free forums, your actual name gets posted with your question or comments. I told the company I thought this was a deterrent to using those free forums. I don't know how the paid forums work, but why would they be any different.
 

Will Affinity forums remain free or will Canva charge a subscription fee for user forums?
Some Affinity competitors charge a substantial subscription fee to participate in community forums, to access user resources, and to view tutorials. Annual fees for what they call "user support" can equal the cost of the software itself.
Affinity's free forums provide one compelling reason to continue using Affinity. In these Affinity forums there is extensive support for all users--both casual and professional, both new and experienced, both amateur and professional. These free forums constitute a fellowship of users. Here users from all over the world come to understand and benefit from their affinity for one another. 
I hope this free community of users will continue under Canva. 
Edited 4/4/2024
I'm happy to say that @Leigh responded below saying: "things will remain the same i.e the forums and Technical Support will remain free."

Here's one example:
https://www.on1.com/plus/forums/
https://www.on1.com/products/plus/
Subscription is regularly $55/year, but on sale at a discount at the moment. That's equal to the full price I paid for ON1 Photo Raw 2024 last month on a special promotional offer. They had sucked me in at the end of January when they were giving away ON1 Photo Effects for free, a fact I was alerted to in these Affinity forums.
It was worth the money as I'm learning a lot about a whole different approach to editing, including AI functions. But community support seems poor.
They have some free community forums, but they are pretty empty of content and would give the impression that no one is using their products.
https://on1help.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/community/topics
When you participate in the free forums, your actual name gets posted with your question or comments. I told the company I thought this was a deterrent to using those free forums. I don't know how the paid forums work, but why would they be any different.
 

Will Affinity forums remain free or will Canva charge a subscription fee for user forums?
Some Affinity competitors charge a substantial subscription fee to participate in community forums, to access user resources, and to view tutorials. Annual fees for what they call "user support" can equal the cost of the software itself.
Affinity's free forums provide one compelling reason to continue using Affinity. In these Affinity forums there is extensive support for all users--both casual and professional, both new and experienced, both amateur and professional. These free forums constitute a fellowship of users. Here users from all over the world come to understand and benefit from their affinity for one another. 
I hope this free community of users will continue under Canva. 
Edited 4/4/2024
I'm happy to say that @Leigh responded below saying: "things will remain the same i.e the forums and Technical Support will remain free."

Will Affinity forums remain free or will Canva charge a subscription fee for user forums?
Some Affinity competitors charge a substantial subscription fee to participate in community forums, to access user resources, and to view tutorials. Annual fees for what they call "user support" can equal the cost of the software itself.
Affinity's free forums provide one compelling reason to continue using Affinity. In these Affinity forums there is extensive support for all users--both casual and professional, both new and experienced, both amateur and professional. These free forums constitute a fellowship of users. Here users from all over the world come to understand and benefit from their affinity for one another. 
I hope this free community of users will continue under Canva. 
Edited 4/4/2024
I'm happy to say that @Leigh responded below saying: "things will remain the same i.e the forums and Technical Support will remain free."

Users have been requesting fixes to the default export location ever since Affinity was first released about eight years ago. To date we have all been ignored. Sometimes we are told we are wrong to even want such fixes. It is infuriating that files are not exported to the location of the original file but instead are exported by default to the folder last used, which may be for a completely different project and for completely different purposes.  It is especially frustrating when files from several different folders are being worked on simultaneously.
Using Affinity requires a very high level of tolerance for poor design decisions made long ago. Perhaps old coding decisions make difficult what ought to be simple changes. See, for instance, the myriad discussions on the readability of the user interface, especially on modern high-resolution monitors.

Almost 70 years ago, when American government schools still taught English literature, I read the following lines by a famous English poet:
The old order changeth, yielding place to new,|
And God fulfills Himself in many ways
lest one good custom should corrupt the world.
In the 1980s and 1990s, change on my university campus was rapid and anxiety inducing. As soon as you learned how to do your job well with one piece of software on one platform, you were expected to learn to do your job in quite a different way with different software on a different platform. So we evolved from IBM/GML Script on the mainframe to PC-Write to Word Perfect to Word and perhaps beyond. We changed from mainframe computers managed by others to desktop appliances with floppy disks to desktop computer systems with hard drives that we were expected to manage ourselves. We went from printing on a giant laser printer two miles away in the computing center with a one-day turnaround time to printing on dot-matrix printers on our desktop to printing to networked laser printers in our offices.
I found it invigorating. I loved the wonderful complexity of it all. Many did not.
I encouraged my staff to think: "What joy to awake each morning in a world so filled with things to learn."
It turns out that even on university campuses, learning new things is not something people look forward to.
During those times we fought many wars of ideology and practicality over competing products: YTerm/Kermit, Word/Wordperfect, Mac/Windows, Token Ring/Ethernet, Gopher/Web.
My experience in those wars led me to formulate:
Granddaddy's Principles of the Compelling Reason
1.) When a person is satisfied using software that is good enough, only a compelling reason will persuade that person to change to different software 
2.) When a person is dissatisfied using particular software, then only a compelling reason will persuade that person to continue using that software 
I asked recently in these forums if disgruntled users of Affinity had a compelling reason to continue using Affinity.
https://forum.affinity.serif.com/index.php?/topic/201189-each-document-should-remember-export-location/&do=findComment&comment=1190038
 
Apparently Serif company owners found a compelling reason to sell the company to a larger competitor. Perhaps they thought that Affinity does not provide a compelling reason for its users to continue using the software.
Comments in these forums following the surprise announcement that Serif had been sold suggests that many Affinity users will find compelling reasons to change to a different product. How many will find a compelling reason to continue using Affinity is unknown.

Were Affinity Photo to adopt subscription pricing, that would be a compelling reason for me to switch to other software. As an amateur hobbyist, my use of Affinity Photo is episodic, not continuous. During the current tax season and garden planting season, I will most likely go a couple of months without editing a single photo. Even old retired guys have only so much free time for photo editing.
Fortunately, we amateur photographers have many choices when it comes to photo editors, as emphasized by a recent review at
https://www.pcmag.com/picks/the-best-adobe-photoshop-alternatives
Sadly, Affinity Photo is not an editor's choice in any of the nine "Best For" categories. APhoto is mentioned only in passing as if the writer just wanted to assure us he is not ignorant of alternatives. He writes:
"Another popular budget pick for Photoshop alternatives is Serif Affinity Photo though we find it's less polished than Corel PaintShop Pro."
His link is to a July 2023 review where APhoto is described as "Affordable but basic photo editing."
Were that all APhoto was I would not have started using it seven years ago, nor would I still be using it today.
I myself have grown restless after seven years using APhoto, so I bought one of the alternatives about a month ago to see what I might be missing with AI non-destructive editing. The alternative is powerful and eye-opening, but it doesn't provide me with a compelling reason to abandon APhoto. Still, neither have I any compelling reason to continue using APhoto other than familiarity and some features I use only occasionally that are missing in alternative software.
In any case, I am enjoying exploring other software where I am learning how far behind APhoto has fallen in some areas. Perhaps the purchase by Canva will lead to renewed energy in Nottingham.

Were Affinity Photo to adopt subscription pricing, that would be a compelling reason for me to switch to other software. As an amateur hobbyist, my use of Affinity Photo is episodic, not continuous. During the current tax season and garden planting season, I will most likely go a couple of months without editing a single photo. Even old retired guys have only so much free time for photo editing.
Fortunately, we amateur photographers have many choices when it comes to photo editors, as emphasized by a recent review at
https://www.pcmag.com/picks/the-best-adobe-photoshop-alternatives
Sadly, Affinity Photo is not an editor's choice in any of the nine "Best For" categories. APhoto is mentioned only in passing as if the writer just wanted to assure us he is not ignorant of alternatives. He writes:
"Another popular budget pick for Photoshop alternatives is Serif Affinity Photo though we find it's less polished than Corel PaintShop Pro."
His link is to a July 2023 review where APhoto is described as "Affordable but basic photo editing."
Were that all APhoto was I would not have started using it seven years ago, nor would I still be using it today.
I myself have grown restless after seven years using APhoto, so I bought one of the alternatives about a month ago to see what I might be missing with AI non-destructive editing. The alternative is powerful and eye-opening, but it doesn't provide me with a compelling reason to abandon APhoto. Still, neither have I any compelling reason to continue using APhoto other than familiarity and some features I use only occasionally that are missing in alternative software.
In any case, I am enjoying exploring other software where I am learning how far behind APhoto has fallen in some areas. Perhaps the purchase by Canva will lead to renewed energy in Nottingham.

Almost 70 years ago, when American government schools still taught English literature, I read the following lines by a famous English poet:
The old order changeth, yielding place to new,|
And God fulfills Himself in many ways
lest one good custom should corrupt the world.
In the 1980s and 1990s, change on my university campus was rapid and anxiety inducing. As soon as you learned how to do your job well with one piece of software on one platform, you were expected to learn to do your job in quite a different way with different software on a different platform. So we evolved from IBM/GML Script on the mainframe to PC-Write to Word Perfect to Word and perhaps beyond. We changed from mainframe computers managed by others to desktop appliances with floppy disks to desktop computer systems with hard drives that we were expected to manage ourselves. We went from printing on a giant laser printer two miles away in the computing center with a one-day turnaround time to printing on dot-matrix printers on our desktop to printing to networked laser printers in our offices.
I found it invigorating. I loved the wonderful complexity of it all. Many did not.
I encouraged my staff to think: "What joy to awake each morning in a world so filled with things to learn."
It turns out that even on university campuses, learning new things is not something people look forward to.
During those times we fought many wars of ideology and practicality over competing products: YTerm/Kermit, Word/Wordperfect, Mac/Windows, Token Ring/Ethernet, Gopher/Web.
My experience in those wars led me to formulate:
Granddaddy's Principles of the Compelling Reason
1.) When a person is satisfied using software that is good enough, only a compelling reason will persuade that person to change to different software 
2.) When a person is dissatisfied using particular software, then only a compelling reason will persuade that person to continue using that software 
I asked recently in these forums if disgruntled users of Affinity had a compelling reason to continue using Affinity.
https://forum.affinity.serif.com/index.php?/topic/201189-each-document-should-remember-export-location/&do=findComment&comment=1190038
 
Apparently Serif company owners found a compelling reason to sell the company to a larger competitor. Perhaps they thought that Affinity does not provide a compelling reason for its users to continue using the software.
Comments in these forums following the surprise announcement that Serif had been sold suggests that many Affinity users will find compelling reasons to change to a different product. How many will find a compelling reason to continue using Affinity is unknown.

Almost 70 years ago, when American government schools still taught English literature, I read the following lines by a famous English poet:
The old order changeth, yielding place to new,|
And God fulfills Himself in many ways
lest one good custom should corrupt the world.
In the 1980s and 1990s, change on my university campus was rapid and anxiety inducing. As soon as you learned how to do your job well with one piece of software on one platform, you were expected to learn to do your job in quite a different way with different software on a different platform. So we evolved from IBM/GML Script on the mainframe to PC-Write to Word Perfect to Word and perhaps beyond. We changed from mainframe computers managed by others to desktop appliances with floppy disks to desktop computer systems with hard drives that we were expected to manage ourselves. We went from printing on a giant laser printer two miles away in the computing center with a one-day turnaround time to printing on dot-matrix printers on our desktop to printing to networked laser printers in our offices.
I found it invigorating. I loved the wonderful complexity of it all. Many did not.
I encouraged my staff to think: "What joy to awake each morning in a world so filled with things to learn."
It turns out that even on university campuses, learning new things is not something people look forward to.
During those times we fought many wars of ideology and practicality over competing products: YTerm/Kermit, Word/Wordperfect, Mac/Windows, Token Ring/Ethernet, Gopher/Web.
My experience in those wars led me to formulate:
Granddaddy's Principles of the Compelling Reason
1.) When a person is satisfied using software that is good enough, only a compelling reason will persuade that person to change to different software 
2.) When a person is dissatisfied using particular software, then only a compelling reason will persuade that person to continue using that software 
I asked recently in these forums if disgruntled users of Affinity had a compelling reason to continue using Affinity.
https://forum.affinity.serif.com/index.php?/topic/201189-each-document-should-remember-export-location/&do=findComment&comment=1190038
 
Apparently Serif company owners found a compelling reason to sell the company to a larger competitor. Perhaps they thought that Affinity does not provide a compelling reason for its users to continue using the software.
Comments in these forums following the surprise announcement that Serif had been sold suggests that many Affinity users will find compelling reasons to change to a different product. How many will find a compelling reason to continue using Affinity is unknown.

Almost 70 years ago, when American government schools still taught English literature, I read the following lines by a famous English poet:
The old order changeth, yielding place to new,|
And God fulfills Himself in many ways
lest one good custom should corrupt the world.
In the 1980s and 1990s, change on my university campus was rapid and anxiety inducing. As soon as you learned how to do your job well with one piece of software on one platform, you were expected to learn to do your job in quite a different way with different software on a different platform. So we evolved from IBM/GML Script on the mainframe to PC-Write to Word Perfect to Word and perhaps beyond. We changed from mainframe computers managed by others to desktop appliances with floppy disks to desktop computer systems with hard drives that we were expected to manage ourselves. We went from printing on a giant laser printer two miles away in the computing center with a one-day turnaround time to printing on dot-matrix printers on our desktop to printing to networked laser printers in our offices.
I found it invigorating. I loved the wonderful complexity of it all. Many did not.
I encouraged my staff to think: "What joy to awake each morning in a world so filled with things to learn."
It turns out that even on university campuses, learning new things is not something people look forward to.
During those times we fought many wars of ideology and practicality over competing products: YTerm/Kermit, Word/Wordperfect, Mac/Windows, Token Ring/Ethernet, Gopher/Web.
My experience in those wars led me to formulate:
Granddaddy's Principles of the Compelling Reason
1.) When a person is satisfied using software that is good enough, only a compelling reason will persuade that person to change to different software 
2.) When a person is dissatisfied using particular software, then only a compelling reason will persuade that person to continue using that software 
I asked recently in these forums if disgruntled users of Affinity had a compelling reason to continue using Affinity.
https://forum.affinity.serif.com/index.php?/topic/201189-each-document-should-remember-export-location/&do=findComment&comment=1190038
 
Apparently Serif company owners found a compelling reason to sell the company to a larger competitor. Perhaps they thought that Affinity does not provide a compelling reason for its users to continue using the software.
Comments in these forums following the surprise announcement that Serif had been sold suggests that many Affinity users will find compelling reasons to change to a different product. How many will find a compelling reason to continue using Affinity is unknown.

Almost 70 years ago, when American government schools still taught English literature, I read the following lines by a famous English poet:
The old order changeth, yielding place to new,|
And God fulfills Himself in many ways
lest one good custom should corrupt the world.
In the 1980s and 1990s, change on my university campus was rapid and anxiety inducing. As soon as you learned how to do your job well with one piece of software on one platform, you were expected to learn to do your job in quite a different way with different software on a different platform. So we evolved from IBM/GML Script on the mainframe to PC-Write to Word Perfect to Word and perhaps beyond. We changed from mainframe computers managed by others to desktop appliances with floppy disks to desktop computer systems with hard drives that we were expected to manage ourselves. We went from printing on a giant laser printer two miles away in the computing center with a one-day turnaround time to printing on dot-matrix printers on our desktop to printing to networked laser printers in our offices.
I found it invigorating. I loved the wonderful complexity of it all. Many did not.
I encouraged my staff to think: "What joy to awake each morning in a world so filled with things to learn."
It turns out that even on university campuses, learning new things is not something people look forward to.
During those times we fought many wars of ideology and practicality over competing products: YTerm/Kermit, Word/Wordperfect, Mac/Windows, Token Ring/Ethernet, Gopher/Web.
My experience in those wars led me to formulate:
Granddaddy's Principles of the Compelling Reason
1.) When a person is satisfied using software that is good enough, only a compelling reason will persuade that person to change to different software 
2.) When a person is dissatisfied using particular software, then only a compelling reason will persuade that person to continue using that software 
I asked recently in these forums if disgruntled users of Affinity had a compelling reason to continue using Affinity.
https://forum.affinity.serif.com/index.php?/topic/201189-each-document-should-remember-export-location/&do=findComment&comment=1190038
 
Apparently Serif company owners found a compelling reason to sell the company to a larger competitor. Perhaps they thought that Affinity does not provide a compelling reason for its users to continue using the software.
Comments in these forums following the surprise announcement that Serif had been sold suggests that many Affinity users will find compelling reasons to change to a different product. How many will find a compelling reason to continue using Affinity is unknown.

Users have been requesting fixes to the default export location ever since Affinity was first released about eight years ago. To date we have all been ignored. Sometimes we are told we are wrong to even want such fixes. It is infuriating that files are not exported to the location of the original file but instead are exported by default to the folder last used, which may be for a completely different project and for completely different purposes.  It is especially frustrating when files from several different folders are being worked on simultaneously.
Using Affinity requires a very high level of tolerance for poor design decisions made long ago. Perhaps old coding decisions make difficult what ought to be simple changes. See, for instance, the myriad discussions on the readability of the user interface, especially on modern high-resolution monitors.

Welcome on the forum @Max Sheridan,
These are known issues with many user complaints. Reported often to bring attention to it many times but without response from Serif.
This is cuased mainly by:
using the wrong shades of gray for the UI frame, using wrong colors for control elements, icons and their states (active, hovered, disabled) overal poor contrast that on one hand results with blending some elements with the App frame and on the other makes some elements standing out to much wich is not good for the eyes and downgrades the overal feeling when working with Ui designed like that. Changing UI settings like: 
Background Grey Level UI Brightness UI Contrast Thist doesn't help much and even does more harm than good. When you adjust the contrast, while you may notice a slight improvement in the contrast between icons vs application frame but on the other side the contrast between other elements will start to bee to disruptive for the eye despite it was no problem with it before the adjustments.
@Pšenda as an experienced user, you should already know this.🤔

Users have been requesting fixes to the default export location ever since Affinity was first released about eight years ago. To date we have all been ignored. Sometimes we are told we are wrong to even want such fixes. It is infuriating that files are not exported to the location of the original file but instead are exported by default to the folder last used, which may be for a completely different project and for completely different purposes.  It is especially frustrating when files from several different folders are being worked on simultaneously.
Using Affinity requires a very high level of tolerance for poor design decisions made long ago. Perhaps old coding decisions make difficult what ought to be simple changes. See, for instance, the myriad discussions on the readability of the user interface, especially on modern high-resolution monitors.

This is a request that Shortcuts be made searchable in Preferences.
I had hoped that as part of the "Something Big" launch of APhoto Version 2 we would see a useful Search function in the Preferences dialog box. Especially the Shortcuts should be searchable. It's a feature that has been requested for many years. The inability to search Shortcuts is especially frustrating when trying to create new shortcuts.
The need for this Search was discussed at some length 2-1/2 years ago in the thread athttps://forum.affinity.serif.com/index.php?/topic/110065-publisher-for-windows-18-using-preferencessearch/
and 
https://forum.affinity.serif.com/index.php?/topic/68413-preferences-window-ui-is-frustratingly-designed/
I reported this lack of searchability as a bug in APhoto Version 2
https://forum.affinity.serif.com/index.php?/topic/171185-search-box-in-preferences-does-nothing/
I now understand this lack of functionality is not considered a bug because the Search works as designed and coded. That's why I am now making this a feature request.
 
 

I've been using APhoto for about 7 years. I'm comfortable with the APhoto way of doing things. But I've grown restless.
Last month a competitor with several AI products offered one of its programs for free. I installed it on my computer. It was a revelation. I finally understood why so many people in these forums are requesting AI in APhoto.
A few days after I registered my free program, the competitor offered an inexpensive upgrade to their full photo editor, so I bought it. If I never used it to replace APhoto, I could just treat it as an educational expense. It was another revelation.
I had never imagined that an editor could automatically select animals in the image even when the animal was barely visible in an old framed photo in the background behind the principal human subject. You don't even point at the animals. You just choose "Animals" from a list of categories of things in the photo that can be selected for further processing and adjustment. The list of categories is unique to the photo you are working on. The list is generated by the AI as it loads the photo. And portrait manipulation is stunning. Whiten teeth, recolor lips, enhance brows, brighten and whiten eyes, resize eyes, smooth skin and remove blemishes--all can be done with sliders without having to make any selections at all.
I'm still wallowing around in my ignorance trying to gain an understanding of workflow and where functions are and how to do things this new way after doing them the old way for so long in APhoto. The approach to non-destructive editing is very different from APhoto's approach. So I'm reading manuals and watching videos. Meaning is beginning to emerge. 
One disappointment is the competitor does not offer a free forum like these Affinity forums that are so valuable and helpful and fun. As an amateur, I consider the cost of the competitor's forums to be prohibitive. Also, I don't see a way to participate anonymously as we do here in the Serif forums. That's a deal breaker for me. I don't want my name broadcast to the Internet every time I post something. Also the concept of clipping masks seems absent from this competitor's product. I use clipping masks all the time when making collages. I saw a request addressed to the company to add clipping masks, but that was dated three years ago when it was labeled as being under consideration.
This competing product is no replacement for APhoto as yet, but it sure will be easy to use it to do a lot of very routine snapshot editing and perhaps enhancing images exported from APhoto. I'll be able to avoid some of the tedium of using APhoto for some editing tasks.