Günther

... and another saying from the past about simplicity: with regard to the difference between Windows 3.1 and macOS there was the saying: who clicks 2 times, clicks 1 time too many. This comparison comes to mind when comparing FreeHand and Illustrator. Affinity Designer fortunately tends towards the 1 click variant.

Oh, a small collection. My devices are a little more unbalanced in terms of time, as I have repeatedly parted with devices. My work equipment is an iMac 27" i7 2.8 GHz OSX 13.6 and a MacBook Pro i7 2012, as well as an older MacMini with 10.6 . In the meantime, the 3 Macs are also equipped with SSDs, the best way to breathe new life into lame devices. I've noticed that the old race to see who can get 100 MHz more out of their processor no longer plays a role. Even 10-year-old computers have enough power for demanding work, e.g. Photoshop with 10 GB files. Most of the time, the graphics card, the system bus and the OS support are the limits. In the attic I still have a G4 Quicksilver and a SE 30 classik with Samsonite bag, the early form of the mobile PC. You need to be in good shape to carry its weight 🙂 Attention, two SSD partitions for OS 10.6 and 10.13 don't work, I had a fair amount of data loss when I tried this, probably due to APFS formatting. I'm excited to see the performance of an M1, that will be the next step and then hopefully I'll retire. Yes you are right, not everything is bad, Affinity Designer is already a good program. But if a function is missing or limited at important points in my workflow, then the good rest is not much use to me. For me as a cartographer, a FreeHand killer function is, for example, deselecting with the tab key or simply clicking through the layers with the command key + ctrl. This speeds up my work many times over and is a huge pain in Illustrator. Sometimes it's the little things and not the big functions. I found the text styles, here even changing the style afterwards works. So much for consistency... Many thanks for the tip and greetings

Hello Loukash, I am comforted to know that I am not the only one suffering. I certainly only need a part of my FH document archive, they are also very old jobs, here and there even FH 3 files still appear... My repeated attempts to start OSX 10.6 in a virtual environment have failed miserably so far. The only way to work professionally is to combine Ai CS5 (for conversion) and CC. When I have to do time-critical drawing, I use an old MacMini with FreeHand 11. Illustrator is a disgrace in many respects and produces a lot of superfluous mouse kilometres. In the context menu I found the command to create a text style, but nothing happens, will have to look into that, but thanks for the tip. Let's hope that version 2.0 will bring improvement. Best regards Günther Translated with www.DeepL.com/Translator (free version)

As a longtime Macromedia FreeHand user, I have a hard time getting used to the cumbersome and obese Adobe Illustrator as an inadequate alternative for making maps. Affinity Designer in version 1.9 is promising, but still has a way to go. About Affinity Designer: Big construction site: the styles palette. First, kudos. There are only a few palette windows to format an object, everything is quickly accessible and clearly arranged. Great. 1. With my documents, 50 to 100 different styles come together quickly. A simple adjustment of the styles is essential. Example: Stroke: outline 1 mm, black >saved as style. What do I have to do to change the formatting of the style, if the stroke should now be 2 mm wide? I find only 3 commands to do this: in the "Edit" menu and "Context menu" > "Create style", and in the Styles palette > "Create style from selection". But I don't want to create a new style, just update an existing one. 2. My styles palette needs order. How can I change the order of the styles? Certain styles belong together thematically, e.g. all street or all surfaces. In an evolving design, new styles are added to the end of the list, creating a big, unsorted mess. 3. A nice feature in the Layers palette is automatic scrolling. Why isn't this logically available in the Styles palette as well? 4. Why is the square so big in the list view? A lot of space is wasted without much benefit. It would be desirable to have an extended option to reduce or enlarge the square individually. 5. Do I understand it correctly that the style categories are always all visible, no matter which order is opened? In addition to my hundreds of cards with different designs, there are so many other print products. Do I have to export and delete the categories to have a clear category menu? This would mean at least one additional category file for each job - this is an additional source of errors and inconvenient. 6. In the drop-down menu of the Styles palette there is a command "Create style from selection". Why is this function missing in the "Text Styles" drop-down menu? The Layers palette -a smaller construction site 1. A really good feature is the automatic scrolling on layers, which makes the work much easier. My last walking map has 123 layers on which tens of thousands of individual objects are distributed. Very rarely do I need the sublayer of a single stroke or object, the main layer is enough for me. OK, sublayer is now opened and displayed, not nice for me, but I can live with it. But: why don't the sublayers close again automatically? With tens of thousands of objects on 123 layers, the list becomes felt 10 kilometers long. For me extremely annoying, confusing and unproductive. 2. More direct access to lock levels. Currently I only find the possibility (or on a specific selection) to act on all via the menus, so lock/unlock all. My wish would be a combination of keyboard command and mouse: e.g. hide/lock these 10 or 11 layers over which I move with pressed mouse button. You can do this with the program FreeHand and it is very comfortable. Important: a visible lock symbol. Where is to see which layer or which object is protected? This can be an almost impracticable search for a lot of objects. Otherwise, my praise for the upcoming Illustrator alternative, but it is a well-meant tip, it is worth analyzing the interface of Macromedia FreeHand. With kind regards Günther Translated with www.DeepL.com/Translator (free version)