Ash

Hi All, We're over the moon to announce that Apple have selected Affinity Photo for iPad as their App of the Year 2017! We weren’t really sure this year could have got any better. From our big launch on stage at WWDC in June, to all the amazing reviews and feedback we’ve had from many of you – we’ve been totally blown away by the response our app has had. It's important to say that to create an app like this has only been possible with all your support. Not just help with the beta and development of the app itself, but in making Affinity such a success over the last few years to enable us to invest in the development of a big project like this. If you haven't yet got the iPad version of Affinity Photo we are running a flash sale, just for the next 48 hours, to get it with a 50% discount. We can't imagine running such a big discount again for a very long time(!) so don't miss out on that. More info on our iPad page here. Also we'd love you to help spread the word about this for us. It's been a while since we've done a competition like this, so if you: Like our Facebook page and share or comment on this post or Follow us on Twitter and retweet this tweet You'll be entered into a free draw to win a 12.9" iPad Pro! The closing date is 12pm GMT on Saturday (when the flash sale ends), and we'll announce the winner on this thread. But more than anything, thanks again for all your continued support. Ash Edit by Patrick. The Winner of the iPad (mentioned in this post) is in a reply to this thread here

Hi All, If you follow us on any of our social accounts you may notice that we have just changed our handles / usernames to @affinitybyserif. While we've grown pretty fond of @MacAffinity over the last few years we have to admit it's not the best handle when one of our big things is being multi-platform across Mac, iPad and Windows. You don't have to re-follow us or anything, you'll just now be automatically following us under the new username. Of course our display names are all still just Affinity and that also means you will still see us appear as an autocomplete when wanting to mention us. Only thing is if have got used to manually typing "@MacAffinity" you might want to try to get out of that habit! That said we have set up new accounts so we still own the @MacAffinity handles, and will of course monitor that for mentions for the foreseeable future. Other main thing is the custom URLs to our social home pages have changed. If you have bookmarked us for any reason, you may wish to update these too. Our URLs are now as follows: facebook.com/affinitybyserif twitter.com/affinitybyserif vimeo.com/affinitybyserif instagram.com/affinitybyserif We'll be updating any links on our sites, emails, etc. over the next few days. By all means if you spot an incorrect link from next week anywhere please let us know. There are some links to our social accounts in the apps too - they will be updated in our next patch which is due pretty soon anyway. Thanks, Ash

Hi All, We’re getting ready to launch the version 1.6 updates of Affinity Photo and Designer and we need your help! To support all the marketing we do – web pages, videos, social media posts or in-app samples – it’s great to have photos and artwork which our users have created to show off the capability of our apps. So, we wanted to reach out to you to ask if you have any fantastic work you would be happy for us to use in this way. In addition to forming part of the publicity campaign to promote the possibilities of our apps to new users, you’ll receive a fee of US$300 to license each piece we use. For our Affinity Photo marketing we mostly need incredible photos of any subject matter - landscapes, model shots, nature, architecture, weddings, sports, automotive, etc. Also any work which utilises focus stacking, HDR, panorama stitching, 360 images or full multi-layered compositions would be great too. For Affinity Designer we need any work created in the app – illustrations, web / app mock ups, icons, logos, print projects, paintings, etc. To get an idea of what we have used before, check out our website (affinity.serif.com) or the latest product videos: AFFINITY PHOTO VIDEO AFFINITY DESIGNER VIDEO If you have created anything you think might be suitable, and as long as you are the copyright owner and hold all the rights to license the work to us, then please get in touch. You can send your photos or designs to consider to affinityart@serif.com. A flattened PNG or JPG (or a link if you have a gallery on Behance, etc.) is fine at this stage, though if you’re successful we’ll ultimately need the full res image or Affinity file. Please keep your initial submission down to a maximum of five files but by all means let us know if have more. The closing date for submissions is 25th August 2017. If you have any questions then please don’t hesitate to ask us on affinityart@serif.com. We look forward to checking out your work! Thanks, Ash

German version has just been released - 20% off too ;) https://affinity.store/

Yeah, actually we just use the same pricing matrix Apple use in the Mac App Store so our Mac and Windows price matches customers in every country. In effect we just set a price in USD and then the other prices come from that matrix. Unfortunately this matrix doesn't get updated very often (maybe twice a year) so at times can mean prices when compared across currencies can seem different to if you used the current exchange rate. Guess it's been amplified with the volatility in exchange rates recently...

The crazy thing is we actually really did want to make sure our long standing Serif customers – as well as those people who helped us so much with the beta period – got a special deal. And that is what we did both with a discount and £50 of free extras. The problem was as well as working on the app, we have also been developing a new store system and database (hence the requirement for setting up a new account, etc.) We were hoping to have some form of voucher functionality or similar in before launch, but unfortunately we ran out of time. Fundamentally right now we have no way to offer different customers different deals. We did only include mention of some of the bonuses (the brush packs) in the Serif customer and beta customer email (you’ll see it was never mentioned on our blog post or any press we received). But yes it’s true that anyone who does buy at the moment does in fact end up being able to get them and so gets the same deal. We felt ok with that as we knew while everyone would in effect get the same deal, the vast majority of people ordering in the first week would be those customers we wanted to give the special offer to. Better that then not giving any offer, or an offer not as good, so we ran with that decision. As it has happened I can tell you that 86% of customers who have ordered so so far are either customers who were part of the beta test programme or customers who previously owned a latest version Plus range product. So yes it could be said that 14% of customers have ended up with a better deal than they would have done if we could have in some way locked the offer down to only Plus range and beta customers. Clearly we should have been more open about this, but at the same time I don't think it makes us the devil as we have genuinely tried to do the best thing we can and give a fantastic offer. We have got an incredibly fantastic team of people here, and we’re a small company. Some comments seem to suggest the belief is we are some big corporation. The part of the company involved in development, testing, documentation, marketing, graphic design and web development is 38 people in total. That’s it – and we’re (including me) all sat in the same room in a unit in Wilford Industrial estate in Nottingham. Adobe probably have 5,000 employees fulfilling the same functions. We do just genuinely want to write fantastic apps, and have as many people using them as we can by offering them for a reasonable price. You will not find a team anywhere who are as committed, as focused, who takes so much pride in their work as what we have here. For many of us this is an all consuming, huge part of our lives and over recent months the hours which have been going into this (as well as our Mac updates, progress with iPad, etc.) has been phenomenal. I say this to explain why perhaps at times we can get a bit defensive, because we literally put everything we’ve got into it. Anyway, please take this as as apology that I realise we have got our communication wrong and also to put the blame for that entirely on me as it was me, after all, who wrote the email. I’ll make sure we sort out some additional freebies or something similar to give exclusively to our latest version Plus range users in the future once we have a way to do it. Thanks, Ash

Yes, in the form that it was - however, we are working on something else which will be revealed in the not too distant future ;)

Hi All, For a number of months now behind the scenes we have been producing a workbook for Affinity Designer, and I'm pleased to let you know it is available from today! This is a big book - 448 pages, in hardback - and it includes fantastic projects created by some top designers, as well as a comprehensive reference to all our tools and panels, and a set of core skills tutorials. You can find more information about it here. Usual price is $49.99 / £37.99, but we are running a 20% discount for the launch making it only $39.99 / £29.99 (+ shipping and handling). It's worth pointing out that right now the book is only available in English but we do plan to do a German version which should be available towards the end of the year. Hope you like it! Thanks, Ash

Having packed up recently I like virtually making non-smoking areas.

Yeah, looks like help is wrong too. This is a problem caused by us having 4 modifiers available to us on Mac (cmd, alt, shift and ctrl) but only 3 on Windows because, naturally, Windows needs it's very own key just for itself. Messes with a few mappings which we'll have to work through...

Alfred - I took it as meaning that at the moment in the Windows version holding ctrl while dragging a selection box doesn't modify the behaviour so the selection box only needs to touch objects to select (as in Mac version), rather than the box needing to completely encapsulate objects you want to select.

Good spot - that's a bug. We've logged it!

The pen tool has a straight line mode available in the context toolbar. You can drag a straight line then, hold shift while doing it constrains...

Check the 5th item in the list in the new updated beta which has just been made available ;) https://forum.affinity.serif.com/index.php?/topic/8476-affinity-photo-public-beta-12024974/