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@VolkerMB I must concur that his point isn't exactly clear. From what I understand, he feels that current Affinity apps try to do to much and that he pays for a lot of functionalities that he doesn't need and that he would rather have a more basic application with optional personas. Like you say, the current Affinity Apps are a bargain. Even if you don't use all functionalities, having too much options isn't a problem as long as they don't hinder your workflow.

I’m having some difficulties opening a few PSD files in Affinity Photo : the application instantly crashes. Meanwhile… Affinity Designer does open the file without any problem ? Even saving the files as Affinity Designer files, opening them in Affinity Photo crashes the application. 11 low.psd

I think that the Affinity team approach was the right one. They relatively quickly built a suite of powerful, professional grade, applications that cover most of the creative uses. Until now nobody has ever been able to manage that and be considered as an interesting alternative to Adobe. The fact that the three applications cost less than 3 month of Adobe Creative Cloud or 100 times less than the defunct Adobe Design Standard Creative Suite is really appealing for freelances and makes it interesting for non professionals also. Now that the current applications cover the basis, I think the team can focus on improving those applications and/or develop more specialized ones. Right now, I’m primarily using Affinity Designer for interface design work, before I was using Photoshop mostly with vector shapes. There are things that would ease my workflow a lot, but it is already nice enough that I cancelled my Adobe subscription without any regret. I’m not sure if optional personas is the way to go but building on the Affinity StudioLink I could imagine a new application focus on interface design with Sketch like features that could instantly switch to Affinity Designer or Affinity Photo tools. A successor to Apple Aperture with non destructive Raw process and instant access to Affinity Photo tools if needed would also be really nice

Since the beginning when you work in full screen on any Affinity App, double clicking a file on the Finder doesn't correctly set the focus on the App. The application is indeed active but it doesn't switch to the correct screen. This is quite jarring since all other applications do this correctly. Most of the time I double clic a second time before remembering and then you can't simply hit cmd + tab since the app is indeed focused just not on the right screen. I don't understand if this is by design or an oversight since you always open files from the Application and not the Finder.

No sorry, it was simple flyers that I could have done with Designer but I wanted the benefits of the better control of the text blocs that Publisher offers.

Small length problem with the missing font notification. The current text "Le document comporte des polices manquantes" translates to "The document has missing fonts". It could easily be shortened to "Document’s missing fonts" witch in French would be "Polices du document manquantes". Otherwise you need to allow text wrapping or define the notification width depending on the content.

I used it for simple jobs and everything was perfect. The most important I think is to remember it is still a beta and to check your PDF thoroughly.

Affinity Designer download is about 260 Mo and 1.2 Go once installed. Affinity Photo is about the same. Now Publisher is still in beta so my guess is there is some debugging code there that will be removed but it won't be significant. As for your rant that it was better before, todays applications are vastly more complex and capable. Would you get back to applications from that era ? That alone could justify the gain but there is also the fact that nowadays icon resources and images are also more common and bigger then before. On macOS a simple application icon with all different states can weight more than 1Mo. If you open the app package you can see that the icons assets weights more than 250 Mo and there are thousands of them.

Being able to crop or define a slice from a selection could be really useful when creating macros. I currently have a few hundred images from a client where I need to crop the extra white border, I was hoping to achieve this with Affinity Photo and a little macro but it seems I’ll have to go back to Photoshop for this.

It isn't well known but Microsoft has done a great lot of work regarding fonts and they did release a few high quality fonts lately

I understand but know that it will be a welcome addition

@Dave Harris Any chance you are also working on optical kerning ? As for optical margin alignement I didn’t ask for it before thinking you’ll get to it when working on Affinity Publisher but I didn’t find anything new on that side.

When I saw this option I was hoping for automatic text kerning but instead it seems to be Indesign optically margin alignement with some nice new options. Can anyone tell me if the optical kerning is hidden somewhere ?

I’m sure that for the developers it doesn’t feel like that

Hi Affinity team, the end of the month is coming really really fast ! Is there a further delay to expect or you are waiting to the last minute in order to polish the code ? PS. Deadlines are the worst

I would love to see Affinity build a tool like the now unsupported Colorschemer studio (mac OS). I know that the team as already a lot to do and that there already are options to create complementary swatches but it doesn’t allow the same feedom in color exploration. It could be either build in the current apps or as a small stand alone tool.

Just to bring up the subject again since a (busy) year after there is no update on this part. I would really love to be able to use the artboard or the parent layer or group as a path variable (or even the artboard parent layer/group). This would make life so much easier to prepare lists of assets.

For that I think a limited application that would be more a reader would be nice.

@seabirdr What kind of spec tools ? You can already have a lot of informations when selecting an element from the contextual menu and you can get the distance to any surrounding element by using a key modifier.

@paulstar08 It seems that they had internally a prototyping tool for Affinity Designer. Adding grids layout can be useful for everyone not only webdesigners so an extra app seems overkill if they can add a prototyping persona. But of course if they do release a dedicated tool I’ll buy it on day one

We are all waiting for it but publishing a half baked software wouldn’t help anyone. The beta is coming in about a month and if it is like the other 2 Affinity public betas, you will be able to use it "carefully" in production right from day one.

When you use Affinity Designer or Affinity Photo in full screen on a Mac, the applications focus are incoherent to what the user would expect. If Affinity Designer is launched and in full screen. When you open an Affinity Designer file from the Finder, the file is opened in the current Affinity Designer space and the app is put in focus but you stay on the current Finder space. If you don’t pay attention to the menu bar you could thing it didn't work. For me the best behaviour would be to automatically switch to the Affinity Designer space (akin to Visual Studio Code). Another solution would be to open the file in the current space with a complete interface like Pages does but this doesn't seems suitable to me.

Indeed, I would love to see a proper grid management. My guess is that it would also be pretty useful for affinity publisher.

You should give more precise exemples to what features you would love to see added. I am an interface designer and work mainly on web applications and site designs and right now I found everything that I really need to fulfil my needs : Multiple artboards allows you to layout multiple pages or layout one page for multiple devices. Global colors and symbols allows you to easily apply changes easily. Constraints allows you to mimic simple responsive design and combined with symbols can be really powerful. Pixel snapping allows you to always be perfect and the pixel preview allows you to easily check it. Finally the export persona is really well thought. My only grievance is that some file formats should be more optimised when a “web” profile is selected. What would you need to work more efficiently ?

Note that this would also be useful for focusing on the content of a page once pages will be available.