KipV
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Posts posted by KipV
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Here is a video of what is happening at my end:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I6sIDdTFc8w&feature=youtube_gdata_player
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MEB I am not getting that attachment icon after clicking "more reply options". I saw the attachment icon at one point when I wasn't looking for it but know I can't seem to find it now.
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@hifred You are basically arguing over semantics at this point. I don't know how easy it is for a Windows developer to make a Mac product since I am not a developer. When I said "it was easy" what I really meant was it was easier then bringing a product based on Mac technologies over to Windows that doesn't have the equivalent technologies.
Of course bringing it to Windows wouldn't "break everything" I said it would cripple the product. Instead of having a great product you would have a watered down sorry port of Affinity Designer. One of the developers said another reason for not porting the product is they just aren't that impressed with Windows 8. Here is a post on their Facebook page on September 17:
" It's not out of the question at some point but we're focusing on finishing the mac suite over the next 12 months first. To be honest Win 8 wasn't a confidence booster to start ploughing loads of dev on this new suite into - hopefully Microsoft get a better grip on what Windows will become at some stage!"
So yes it's a limitation of Windows 8. I ask you the same question again, if Serif can make a good port of Affinity over to Windows why wouldn't they do that and get paid by all those Windows users? Financially speaking that would be the logical thing to do and ye they don't do it. Why do you think that is?
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@MEB Yeah, I agree that large business will take longer to move over non Adobe solutions.
@HiFred I never said that it would be easy for all Windows developers to write Mac apps and I am sure the task has become even harder with Apple’s move from Carbon to Cocoa programming. What I stated was that it wouldn’t be possible for Affinity Designer to move to Windows, at least not without having to cripple the product in the process.
Here is a fact regarding Windows. Over the last 13 years MS has put out exactly two good desktop operating systems (XP and 7.) Over the same time frame Apple put out 10 good operating system versions. Apple released a lot of great foundation technology that MS wasn’t able to copy. Mac developers can now reap the benefits of all that great technology released over that 13 year time frame.
If the Windows developers you brought up wanted to they could work hard to make a Mac product alongside their Windows products. The fact that they decided not to isn’t some short coming of the Mac platform. You should be complaining to the Windows developers that didn’t bring their products over not to the Mac developers that CAN’T bring their products over to Windows.
This is the reason Affinity is so much better then Illustrator in so many areas. Illustrator can’t rely on the Mac specific technology since if it did it would no longer be a cross platform product. Also there is no financial reason for Affinity to stay on one platform. If Affinity could be ported across to Windows fully in tact why wouldn’t they do that and grab all the extra money?
@Ianstudio Yes, we are in pretty bad need of an ID competitor these days. I think ID did a pretty good job during it’s first decade so competitors didn’t see a need to make a product that would go head to head with it. Now that the recent updates have gotten lackluster it’s a good time to introduce some competitive pro apps. The popularity of ebooks will likely lead to companies that specialize in that area such as iBooks Author.
@CartoonMike Thanks for the education on Manga Studio. I didn’t realize you could only export as raster. It’s good to know that someone else believes that having one large graphics company dominate is something that will die out some. People were able to get their job done when there wasn’t a single large distributor so I don’t see why we can’t go back to that.
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Affinity Designer needs to have the same "essentials" badge that Sketch has. I would post a picture of it here but I can't figure out how to upload photos to this forum.
I think it's also a good idea to post a comparison review in Amazon between Illustrator and Affinity Designer. I wrote a review on the Photoshop page of a competitor and it rose to become one of the top reviews so there is obviously a lot of people who are interested in hearing about good competition on Amazon.
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One of the things that really bugged me about my PS / LR workflow is the way that Photos would get passed back and forth between the two apps. With a typical workflow you start with a Photo in LR and then need to send it to PS to do something that LR can't do. LR makes a copy of the photo so when you are done editing it you now have two similar photos in your library. If you decide you want to edit the photo again you now have three copies and then four etc.
The way this operation should really work is you make an adjustment in Apple's upcoming Photos app, say move the brightness to 27, and then when you export the file to Affinity Photo it uses the same photo instead of a copy of the photo. You should then see your brightness adjustment of 27 in Affinity Photo and then be able to make an adjustment to the brightness again to 15 which should then show up in the settings to Apple's app as you return back to it.
I can understand some of the reasons why Adobe's workflow was clumsy, they were trying to get a 17 year old app to work with a brand new app after all. But now that both Apple and Affinity are both starting out at version 1 and at essentially the exact same time let's try and get the way this works under control. I disagree with many people on this forum that Adobe's photo solution works pretty well I think there is a huge opportunity for taking on Adobe in this area.
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MEB I actually don't think it's unrealistic to see a large number of Mac users move off Adobe. This will not happen over night but I can see a transition one app at a time over to better products. This change may occur over the course of a couple of years but there is a high level of probability for this. The question a lot of businesses will ask themselves is how long do you want to keep spending a premium for mediocre Adobe updates? Most people probably won't want to pay a premium for long if better options exist.
I also don't see why you need to have one company that makes all the software. I can use my Affinity, iDraw, Pixelmator, Sketch files that can interoperate with the Adobe apps. I have been running my business fine recently without hardly any Adobe apps and I think that will continue to be the case as Adobe's competition keeps advancing. I actually don't think retraining is that big of a time commitment. If you used Illustrator and Freehand you can grasp Affinity without major downtime. If you can't find time to learn the program on one of weekdays you could always learn it over the weekend.
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Hifred the PCs developers making the products you talked about could easily bring their software over to the Mac. AutoCAD has returned to the Mac and many 3D products are now available for it. When Steve Jobs first introduced the original Mac OS X he really hyped up Maya being ported over to the platform when the OS just gained the underpinnings to run the software. There are no technical reasons that I am aware that would prevent those PC developers from bringing their software to Mac. There are however a ton of technical reasons why Affinity Designer can't be ported to Windows.
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Affinity seem to integrate pretty well with Adobe apps in my experience. An Affinity Suite would be nice but it's still possible to do your job alongside Adobe apps.
I think part of the reason for there not being a Windows option is that Windows hasn't been advancing as fast as Mac OS has from the 2000s on. At one point they even went 5 years without putting out an update so it just seems unrealistic to me when Windows users expect them to port to an OS that is moving that slowly. For that reason it seems like Adobe could own the Windows market for a very long time.
The Mac OS X updates provided many great technologies for creative apps that I am not sure Windows has. Maybe one of the reasons Adobe has been raising it's prices is that they foresaw losing much of their market on the Mac to smaller companies so they needed to make up the difference on the PC side. Last year I think I spent close to $1,500 on Adobe updates (including all the plugin updates) and I hardly even open their apps anymore!! If other Mac users are doing the same thing I can't see them continuing to pay these high prices for Adobe software as hot new graphics apps seem to keep coming out on Mac every few months. Just about the only thing I use regularly is LR and that can be replaced.
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Does Windows not have a strong modern competitor to Illustrator? What about Corel Draw or Magna Studio?
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Carlos I am not sure if Affinity needs a product that takes on every single feature that is in Photoshop. Some people believe that Photoshop already takes on too many areas and should be split apart into smaller apps. One advantages that some of PS's competitors have over PS is that they don't bring along all the legacy bloat. It's important to keep in mind that the age of many of Adobe's apps can be as big of a negative as it can be a positive. Also I find that I don't spend as much time in PS anymore. A lot of people's workflows have shifted over to raw processing apps like LR, Capture One Pro, and Apple's up coming Photos app for Mac.
I don't know what you are looking for in a page layout app but there are some options out there today. Printworks is a new one that has come out from a great company. I haven't used it but the reviews seem to be pretty good.
I am not so sure what I think about multiple pages in an illustration app. I used to use FH for an illustration program not because it did a great job but only because I found it was less buggy then PageMaker (I didn't have time to learn the fledgling ID back then.) Illustrator didn't get multiple pages until version 13 and I don't think that decision was due to technical limitations by Adobe.
I think the best approach is to do what Sketch does and not have fixed page sizes but instead a unlimited canvas to work with that can later be split into artboards. I think when you make an illustration it's a totally different discipline then doing a page layout. When you start a layout you usually know the dimensions of your book, website, email ad, business card, etc. But sometimes when I start to draw I don't want to think about what size something is going to be. I can worry about a designs dimensions later when I bring my illustrations (and photos and text) into the layout software.
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I have seen this topic come up a lot on these forums and in social media and I was just curious what kind of workflow people are using that would make working on multiple platforms beneficial. I first started using graphic apps like PageMaker, Freehand, and Photoshop in 1995 when the difference between Mac and PC probably hit it’s lowest point ever with the introduction of Windows 95. At the time it would have not been logical to develop for only one of those platforms given how little difference there was between the two of them. Being cross platform was helpful to me at the time since our graphics department at school was all Macs and the computers at my house were always PCs.
Today my set up is nothing like it was in 1995. Nearly all my workflow (outside of a few Adobe apps) are all Mac based. This has to do with the fact that programs that focus on platform specific features, I feel, generally end up being better then their cross platform competitors. Here is a quick scan through my application folder: the Omnigroup apps, Transmit, Sketch, iDraw, Bento, iBooks, iBook Author, Billings, Pixelmator, Automator, HoudahSpot, Tembo, iWork, iLife, etc. If someone were to give me a PC to work on I don’t know what I would do since 80% of my workflow is not available on Windows.
Adobe, on the other hand, appears to be attempting to be about as cross platform as possible. Just a couple of days ago I read an article that said they will be supporting Chrome OS in addition to Mac, Windows, iOS, (eventually) Android, and no doubt others. If you feel that being cross platform is “the right way to do things” then it seems like your ideal set up is already available today. Yes, Adobe costs more but if they are paying all their developers to support all these platforms then it needs to cost more. Since I don’t really use other platforms (meaning non Apple platforms) I don’t see why I need to have to pay for my software to be developed on those platforms any more.
Personally I don’t see the value in being cross platform at all these days. From my point of view it is a dated concept that once made sense but a sea change has occurred over the decades since then. I have been waiting for 6 or 7 years for someone to take full advantage of features on the Mac with pro apps and that is finally starting to happen over the last couple of years. A windows port (or Linux, Android, etc) would force the developers to strip out most of the greatness that makes Affinity Designer Affinity Designer. Their product line without the foundation that it is built on would end up being a totally different product, one that is crippled. This then begs the question why don’t they just make a product that is Windows only? This is exactly what Serif is already doing.
If any other platform makes logical sense to port Affinity to I think it would be iOS. Since Mac and iOS share so much of the same code base it seems most of the work would be in creating an interface for a touch screen which would seem manageable to me (ok, I’m not a developer so I probably shouldn’t say that with absolute certainty.) Also when you consider that as Affinity focuses on developing for the Mac iOS will at the same time continue to become more mature. Maybe all the Mac features are currently not available in iOS 8 but what about when it reaches iOS 10 or 11?
I don’t mean for this post to sound pro-apple and anti-windows. I am just stating that for this product line it makes more sense for it to be single platform. Even if Microsoft succeeds in remedying the problem that is Windows 8 and Windows 10 comes out and it is a wonderful release I still don’t think that gives justification to support it’s development necessarily. Windows has a different foundation so it makes more sense for someone to develop a product that tries to take full advantage of the technologies that it provides from scratch. Another issue to deal with is that MS is so hit and miss regarding their OS releases. If Windows 10 is a success but Windows 11 flops (like Vista and WIndows 8) that is going to make developing for this platform difficult. Apple has generally had a proven track record with OS releases so Serif is basing their product line on a platform that will continue to improve and not get worse. Again if you have rational for what a cross platform solution would offer that an Apple based platform does not I would like to know what the rational is. We have seen a lot of companies become very successful by staying limited in focus so the argument for adoption of broader platform support would have to go up against a long list of arguments against it. -
Ok, that's good to know.
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A question just occurred to me when thinking about how iCloud will work with the suite. Affinity shares the same file format across all the apps right? So in other words I will be able to open my Affinity Designer files in Affinity Photo? If that is the case then how does sandboxed iCloud storage work? If I save one of my Affinity Designer files in the iCloud sandbox then when I go to Affinity Photo it won't be in the Affinity Photo sandbox.
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I see, looks like that is also where we can turn palettes on and off as well. Good to know.
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I found them. For some reason they were hiding down in the lower left portion of the screen. I don't think I moved them there but maybe I did by accident.
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I don't know how to bring those palettes over to the draw persona. Could you tell me how to do that?
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Those palettes are really nice to have at the side of the screen though. It would be nice if they let the users customize the palettes so they could pick if they wanted them to show up or not despite the persona they are in.
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I noticed when I move over to the draw persona that the colour, line, swatch, and brushes palettes vanish. I was wondering why this is? It doesn't seem like any of the tools are raster specific, in fact those tools seem to be available under the fill and line boxes on the left side of the screen when working in draw persona.
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Earlier this year I wrote a review on the Photoshop CC page at Amazon describing the advantages that Sketch had over Photoshop. The review got a lot of positive votes and rose to the featured reviews section. Now that I found out about Affinity Designer I gave some equal time talking about it in my review. If anyone here would like to mark the review as helpful it will keep it in the featured section and will be a great way to give Affinity more exposure to potential Adobe customers. See the following link to get to the review:
I also would have mentioned Affinity in my Illustrator review as well but to be honest it didn't get rated very high. If someone would like to do a review comparing Illustrator to Affinity in the Illustrator section that should give it some good exposure. A lot of the reviews just focus on being anti-Adobe but rarely give you suggestions for what you should replace Adobe with. I am glad someone mentioned Affinity in the Adobe forums and I am sure many Amazon customers would appeciate knowing about this software as well.
- peter, Cynthiaket and Raskolnikov
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To me the problem isn't just the rental price but the fact I think the last great update was CS4 from a really long time ago.
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I will be interested to know what their plans are for Publisher. I haven't like the last few updates to InDesign at all. The employee on their Facebook page said details on publisher should be coming out soon.
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One other thing to add, the price of good performing Macs have come down considerably since the time you bought your computer. When I bought my Power Mac with Cinema display the configuation set me back about four grand. This last year I bought a Mini for around $1300, nearly a third the price of the Power Mac. Even a $600 Mini is a good performing machine these days, certainly better then a 2006 laptop.
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The vector brush issue appears to be a software problem. This topic has been raised in in these forums and the developer said they can make improvements to it's performance. I run the latest Mac Mini that is fully maxed out and even I have performance issues.
Also I should specify a little more what I meant when I said "old computer". I was mainly talking about people with really old operating systems. It is worth pointing out however that Mavericks will support computers that are around 5 or 6 years old. That is one reason I am not terribly sympathetic about people who are not upgrading their OSs for hardware reasons is that if you are not able to run Mavericks your computer might just be too old. My previous machine was a 2004 Power Mac and that thing is painful to use these days compared to a new Mac. A 2006 computer has been around for nearly a decade at this point so it's probably about time to look at upgrading. You can then keep your old computer around for running Freehand and other old apps.
Then, this happened!
in News and Information
Posted
I hope that YouTube link is showing up for you.