AdrianB

It's your loss, have fun paying Adobe instead. Even with some rough edges the current suite of Affinity apps are more than capable and the price is a steal compared to the competition. 
 

It's your loss, have fun paying Adobe instead. Even with some rough edges the current suite of Affinity apps are more than capable and the price is a steal compared to the competition. 
 

It's your loss, have fun paying Adobe instead. Even with some rough edges the current suite of Affinity apps are more than capable and the price is a steal compared to the competition. 
 

It's funny that we live in a time where people think their pet peeve feature is the only priority the developers should have at a software company with multiple products for multiple plattforms. 🙄
Yes, it sucks that this part of Affinity Designer does not work better. No, people are not claiming that Designer is feature complete and can do everything Adobe software does. No, that does not make the Affinity suite of applications worthless.
Depending on your needs they go a long way, but yes there are still features missing here and there. Some of them might even be a dealbreaker. And then there are other features that are way better than Adobe's (the unified file format is absolutely genius and works so well). And if you compare the cost of ownership the value is tremendous.

Just added my voice to an older request, but I'll repeat it here as well: +1 on better dashed corners. 

I can't understand the negativity in some of the posts on this thread.
The Affinity suite is very much under active development, with six updates in 2021 alone, and a patch in March this year. The focus seems to be on refining the details for a professional workflow rather than on feature parity with other platforms. Serif has made it clear elsewhere that a major upgrade is in the works for 2022, and it will be a paid upgrade.
Affinity's value is outstanding, for software which (for me) delivers fully professional results in both newspaper and magazine illustration and greeting cards. 
For comparison, the Creative Cloud multi-app plan that most professionals use costs $600 or €737 annually -- more than 4 times the once-off cost of licensing all 3 Affinity apps. 
Even plugins for Adobe Illustrator are now adopting the subscription model. Phantasm now costs $140 a year plus tax (23% where I live). Again more than all three Affinity apps combined. Another plugin, EXDF-Pro (for importing DXF files) is $99 a year plus tax.
So I'll be happy to support a paid once-off upgrade given the alternative!
No inside information, but I wouldn't be surprised if Serif made some announcement next month to coincide with the Apple developer conference.

I wish Affinity Designer had the fields studio panel.
Or even better: I wish it was a field in the export dialog, since I often export selections to PDF files in Designer. So I would like to change the title for each export. 
That is unfortunately not possible in the free version of Acrobat Reader DC, as far as I can tell. 

It's funny that we live in a time where people think their pet peeve feature is the only priority the developers should have at a software company with multiple products for multiple plattforms. 🙄
Yes, it sucks that this part of Affinity Designer does not work better. No, people are not claiming that Designer is feature complete and can do everything Adobe software does. No, that does not make the Affinity suite of applications worthless.
Depending on your needs they go a long way, but yes there are still features missing here and there. Some of them might even be a dealbreaker. And then there are other features that are way better than Adobe's (the unified file format is absolutely genius and works so well). And if you compare the cost of ownership the value is tremendous.

I wish Affinity Designer had the fields studio panel.
Or even better: I wish it was a field in the export dialog, since I often export selections to PDF files in Designer. So I would like to change the title for each export. 
That is unfortunately not possible in the free version of Acrobat Reader DC, as far as I can tell. 

Aperture, for image management, is still (IMHO) king. There just isn't anything available that can do what it can do with ease and speed… and then there's the Light Table feature, which is still unique (within the world of photo editing/management apps) to Aperture.

Despite Aperture being killed off by Apple years ago, I still keep it running happily on a dedicated older Mac to maintain a massive library of edited/completed images. Whilst Capture One has taken over the batch image processing duties, its image management abilities are shockingly bad in comparison to Aperture.

Every time an image editing/management app has been released or got updated, the feeling of disappointment continues as all the developers seem to concentrate on nowadays are new features that might create headlines or outdo their competitors. Feels a bit like the car manufacturers game of chasing stupid horsepower or acceleration figures. I really wish someone, anyone (I no longer care if Serif/Affinity can/will do this or not, but great if they can/will), would come up with a proper image management alternative to Aperture that goes beyond just the basics.

Aperture was light years ahead of the competition when Apple decided to kill it / embed some of its functionality in photos. In many ways some of its more desirable features have still not been duplicated.
 
RIP Aperture

It's funny that we live in a time where people think their pet peeve feature is the only priority the developers should have at a software company with multiple products for multiple plattforms. 🙄
Yes, it sucks that this part of Affinity Designer does not work better. No, people are not claiming that Designer is feature complete and can do everything Adobe software does. No, that does not make the Affinity suite of applications worthless.
Depending on your needs they go a long way, but yes there are still features missing here and there. Some of them might even be a dealbreaker. And then there are other features that are way better than Adobe's (the unified file format is absolutely genius and works so well). And if you compare the cost of ownership the value is tremendous.

I guess it all comes down to the expectations. I agree 100% that Affinity would need a couple of features to really compete with Illustrator for everyone. How much you rely on these features to do your work determines your success or failure in using Designer. For me, there are things I would like to see, but I have about 95% of the features I need ATM. If you need Live-Trace or Vector transform all the time, then AD is not for you right now, and you would need to try Corel or Adobe. But it would make little sense for Affinity to add a feature like trace when it works badly. Inkscape, Vectorstyler and Vectornator all have this feature, but the results are very poor most of the time, especially for color images. Even Illustrator is not very good at that. And if you only need B/W vectorisations, either trace yourself or use an online convertor. Only if Affinity adds one that does a proper job am I going to use it.

I agree wholeheartedly! One think I really appreciate is Affinitys use of these forums to post updates on new versions and even new beta version with detailed changelog (like this). There is often Affinity replies to user feedback on specific bugs there as well. That is very useful in my opinion, and not seen from many of the larger software companies.

This is what I did, only more quickly. A 14-day trial enabled me to export 15 years' worth of .idd to .idml, and now I can open them all with Affinity Publisher. Note: I also took a hard look at just what exactly I needed to export -- turned out to be about 85 files in the end.

I believe .idml came at cs4.
The only means of porting cs3 and earlier ID files may be Markzware's utility, which at present is Mac only. And perhaps a script that's out there, but it may require a more recent version of ID.
Else find someone with cs4 or newer to batch open and convert your files for you.

Serif DrawPlus (from the legacy Plus line of Serif products) did have a super sample option. Maybe we should consider one for Affinity apps too. I will pass this to the dev team to see what they say.

In these unique times, we want to help users transitioning to and from other DTP applications. We know that many designers are having to make budget cuts, and many are moving from Adobe to Affinity. We want to help you guys move your existing work to Publisher. So, we are giving away the full version of IDMarkz for usage through the end of May 2020. This is not the freebie version that locks out the IDML export; it's the full version with all features enabled. There are no charges or signups required to take advantage of this; it's how we feel we can help during these unprecedented times.
 
If you are already using the freebie version of IDMarkz you can use the following license details to activate the full version to be used through May 2020:
 
Email Address: doingourpart@markzware.com
License ID: bf2f3a43-8466-4861-b5e6-2e0e00e4ac83
 
If you don't have the freebie, you can get all the information you need to get started here. Please feel free to share this with your friends and colleagues.
 
We'll be monitoring how this pandemic affects those in our industry, and we may extend the free usage beyond May 2020.
 
Sorry Windows users, I can't give a timeline, but we are actively working on a Windows version.

Thank you, I've seen some of these issues with incorrect scaling and had at least one hard crash, so I'll try this beta!

Oh, thank you, I didn't know about that command! Works fine for selected text with multiple text styles (but did not work for an entire selected text frame, but that is not a big issue). 

As a workaround, I have found that the menu item Text->Reapply Text Styles works in most situations.

Yes, thanks, Mike. IDMarkz can convert InDesign files (INDD) to IDML, without InDesign present. It is a macOS only product (currently). But if you have InDesign files that you need to open, and don't have an InDesign license, IDMarkz gets the job done. I've discussed with my team, and we've gone ahead and reduced the price on both the subscription and perpetual products by $50, starting immediately (now $99 and $149). 
Opening INDD files in Publisher could be completely automated, double click the InDesign file in the Finder, and within seconds you can be editing in Publisher.
Here's a link to a video showing the Open in Affinity Publisher feature in action (https://markzware.com/idmarkz/open-in-affinity-publisher/).
If you have any questions or would like a file converted by IDMarkz for testing, please feel free to reach out to me.

Another +1 on what Ulysses said. 
Still clinging on to Aperture I would absolutely love to hear if Serif is making a DAM but it is definitely not unfair om them to not reveal their business agenda and pre-announce future products.
If anything, I'd advice them not to (not that they need my advice), until they have something real to show. Pre-announcing software development projects early on is asking for trouble. If they take more time than planned (which software development almost always does), people will be disappointed. If business priorities changes along the way, people will be disappointed. And so on. 

Keep in mind this thread was not begun by Serif themselves. It was a consumer that posted the poll and comment thread based upon a number of rumors and a few isolated unofficial statements made by forum moderators. Very few companies pre-announce their future products at least until they are only weeks or months away from delivery. If they have nothing near delivery, then I don't expect to hear anything from them. 
This thread says less about Serif and more about how consumers' minds work. We don't "deserve" better treatment by Serif. They've already gained my trust, and I signal that by spending my $$$ on their imaging products. If and when they release a DAM, I'll be happy to check it out. But for now, there are other capable products that perform this function well enough for my workflow.
Creating a true DAM (which Lightroom itself is NOT) is difficult business. I hope Serif figures out how to define and design one that fits in with the aesthetic and capability of their rest of their tools.

Um…that's what user forums are.
Nonsense. The former in no way implies the latter. And the contrary is more often demonstrated in this forum than in any other software user forum in which I participate. But there's no need for the company's developers to answer each and every repetitive rant.
And you said "either…", which implies an "or…", which you did not provide. So I will:
...or the Affinity team (i.e., the privately owned company) is following the development path (priorities and sequence) which makes most senses for its (not your; not my) product development, and has neither time for, nor interest in, listening to a bunch of repetitive, rude, insulting immature rants from self-proclaimed 'professionals' convinced that their personal pet peeve is always the one upon which the future of the graphics world pivots, and that everyone else is an amateurish dolt.
JET