valentin.f

Hi Wildscribe! Glad to meet you! We should definitely have a beer someday!! :) For me it was love from the first sight, and probably forever :) What do you do in Xara? I'm not sure is the reason in former Xara developers, or in the British nature of Affinity, but I definitely can see many things inspired by Xara design. And this is great! I don't think Xara features should be just incorporated into Affinity though -- it's a different tool with a different philosophy. Still they could provide hints for making Affinity better.

Regarding colours, I agree -- that's just a different philosophy. The thing which is bothering me though, is that each time you'll want to change the colour, you need to check the mode you're in (fill or outline). And then, depending on the mode, switch it or leave it. This adds some load to brain, and since this is a task you do all the time, it's a huge amount of load :) The Corel and Xara way is more straightforward -- you always get a predictable result when you choose colour, there are no modes. You don't need to check anything. May be I'm wrong in some way, or just biased. Anyway the tool you have now will be very familiar and comfortable for all Illustrator users, which is great. Regarding Xara -- great idea! I never thought anyone would talk to me on this issue, but why not give it a try! Thank you :)

Hi everyone! I'm Valentin from St-Petersburg, Russia. I've started in 1996 with Photoshop 3.0 (it had just got layers) and CorelXARA 1.2 (it had a size of 6Mb then). Of course I had to use every other program over time -- Corel, FreeHand, Illustrator, all of them awkward and painful to use. Xara was my only love for all these years. It is still a fantastic software, but -- only for Windows! So every 3-4 months I'd ask Google something like "Xara replacement for Mac" -- and today I stumbled across Affinity, which definitely has this fantastic spirit of simplicity and great attitude. Happy and can't wait to see what's next! I'm an interaction designer, thinking though sites and applications, and I need a tool to try many different ideas, make beautiful layouts and gain inspiration :) Also looking forward the Publisher software, with a wish to use it for creating interactive prototypes. Here's a sample of a small site I've designed recently --- http://www.hmx.ru/ .

Matt, may I also ask an off-topic question? I'm a UX designer, and Xara always had the best user experience among graphic editors. Who was responsible for designing of all the features? I'd love to know the names of the heroes :) This is truly the highest grade work. Thank you :)

Thank you Miguel and Matt for quick replies! It all works perfectly! Regarding lines -- all depends on the task you do. Probably people who draw illustrations don't need fussing around pixels. But if you do websites and apps like me, this gets very and very important. May be it's out of your focus now. Still there are lots of web and UX designers out there who have to suffer every day in Illustrator and Photoshop. And Affinity, as well as Xara, works very well for them. There's also Sketch on the market. It's very good for creating pixel-perfect interfaces, but it's more a parametric building tool. Contrary to its name, it's pretty bad for sketching and trying out different ideas. So... I think Affinity has great chances for this market :) Regarding the right button -- may be I'm just too Windows old fart, but it's hard for me to imagine life without a right button. And Mac OS generally makes good use of it. There's also another great thing in Xara and Corel Draw -- clicking the colour in the palette with the right mouse button sets the colour for the outline. Actually after getting used to it I never could switch to the Illustrator style, where you have to be aware of the colour mode you are in: outline or fill. I forget the current mode all the time and often set colour of fill instead of outline and vice versa. Very annoying! But I'm not sure this approach could fit in Affinity. Trying to learn the new way of applying colour here :)

Hi everyone! I'm a big fan of Xara since 1996 when I was 14 years old. It appeared to be the universal tool for every design job I had in my life, from logotype design, posters and cd covers, to web and UI design which I'm doing now most of the time. This awesome little program had implemented some really great design philosophy, and it always was a pleasure to use. I'd go on and state that I simply love it. Often I ask people -- is there a piece of software that you LOVE, which brings you joy just from interacting with it? And most people don't have anything to say, because it's hard to make such a thing. Usually programs are just "normal", if not abusive and abjective. Probably Xara was the only program I could say I love -- until today, when I've met Affinity :) From the first sight I could see the same sleek approach to building a powerful design tool. Clearly you've taken some inspiration from Xara, and made things even better. (If the rumours are correct and some of you worked on Xara in the past -- then I want to send you and extra hug :) ). I still use Xara, but on a Mac it's a bit of pain, running a whole virtual machine which get sloppy at times. And with all this Magick thing, Xara now goes a different path... So I'm just lacking words to say how happy I am to see an all-fresh drawing tool, retaining Xara's way and giving it a new birth. Okay... So I've tried drawing things in Affinity and generally it's just beautiful. Still there are things in Xara which are lacking in Affinity, and I think they could do a good job here too. 1. Right-click copy. This is one of the best Xara features: you can drag an object and if you click the right button while dragging, a copy will appear. The Alt-key works well too, but this one lets you do many copies within one drag. As now right-clicking while dragging does not do anything, may be this would not be a hard thing to implement. 2. Rounded corners feature universal for all cornered shapes. Here's a thing that feels strange: two separate tools for a rectangle and a rounded rectangle. They work the same way, have the same toolbar properties, but the rounded corner rectangle has a additional set of controls. Why not just put them into the rectangle tool? That's also important because sometimes you want to switch between rounded / sharp corner in an existing rectangle. So if now I'll draw a simple rectangle and later will decide to try making it rounded, I'll have to draw a new shape... That's not very nice :) Another issue is that rounded corners are very important to other shapes, like stars and polygons. So it would be super cool to have the option to make them rounded too. 3. Line thickness in pixels. In a web or app world, everything is measured in pixels, so setting the line width in points is very inconvenient. It's weird that line points don't change with the document units. 4. Pixel-perfect lines. I know this is a hard issue, but again it's very important for any digital work -- the ability to draw 1-pixel lines. I tried this in Affinity and I get 2-pixel lines of ligher color, which is really sad :( Well.. probably that's it :) Thank you for the awesome tool!