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KipV

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Everything posted by KipV

  1. 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.
  2. 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.
  3. 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.
  4. I see, looks like that is also where we can turn palettes on and off as well. Good to know.
  5. 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.
  6. I don't know how to bring those palettes over to the draw persona. Could you tell me how to do that?
  7. 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.
  8. 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.
  9. 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: http://www.amazon.com/review/R37N9QYFC1JY6L/ref=cm_cr_dp_title?ie=UTF8&ASIN=B00CS75KKI&nodeID=229534&store=software 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.
  10. 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.
  11. 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.
  12. 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.
  13. 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.
  14. @Quarian I did the same thing on my old mac except I had the two OSs on their own hard drives. I have gotten over using Freehand at this point. With all the good things you could say about it there were a number of things it didn't do very well. The layers panel was really bad and it had too many panels that just floated around the screen, and the effects features were painfully slow. It was a good product for it's time but mostly dated now.
  15. It's good to know iCloud Drive will be made available. Having a cloud services built into the OS is a big deal to me.
  16. If there is a Affinity developer who uses Google+ he might as well try out a G+ community and see what happens. Lots of graphics communities are doing really well on there.
  17. Yeah, I am welll aware of Google+'s lack of engagement in general but it's communities features is actually used quite heavily. Just look at the involvment between the iDraw groups in FB and G+: Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/groups/iDrawusers/ Google+: https://plus.google.com/communities/106357204714127901725 It's not uncommon for the G+ group to get 10 comments per post. Also check out how they sort the topics. There is a section for types of illustration, discussion area, the ability to view just the photos by themselves, planned events, etc.
  18. I saw that Affinity runs a Facebook and Twitter account but I would also suggest that they should run a Google+ community. I don't think it is all that important to have a Google+ profile as much as it is to run a community page. I subscribe to several communities of graphics programs on there and I find that they work better then Facebook groups. They are wonderful for displaying artwork, posts can be categorized easily, and it has a notification system that works across all Google products (YouTube, Gmail, Google search.) Despite the stigma that supposibly no one uses Google+ I find that the communities are at least as active if not more so then their corresponding FB groups.
  19. I think the best solution for running old software like Freehand is to have two computers; an old computer for the old software and a new computer for the new software. I just don't think it is realistic for software companies to support an OS from five versions back. I liked freehand a lot too but that was thirteen years ago, at some point you just need to keep the old with the old and the new with the new. If you only use the program occasionally it shouldn't be too big of a difficulty to move back and forth between two machines. I guess one of the reasons I am against really old OSs is that I would like to see Affinity take advantage of some of the latest features in Mavericks and Yosemite particularly those that have to do with file managment (duplicate, rename, move, revert to, iCloud Drive, etc.) Other graphics apps like Sketch and Pixelmator already have these features so I would like to see Affinity catch up in those areas as quickly as possible but I don't think that can happen while they are simultaneously trying to support Snow Leopard. Pixelmator actually requires Mavericks to run so they aren't doing any backwards compatibility at all. I can see maybe going back one old version but if you do much more then that the program won't be able to live up to it's full potential.
  20. I was so excited when I first opened mission control and saw that you could choose to open a file by either using tabs or mission control! With every other app they forced me to rely on tabs only or mission control only. My feature request is to do just one little adjustment to perfect this feature. Usually when you have several windows open and then switch to the view all windows by all applications mode in mission control an app will have several windows open will tile each window and you can then pick which window you want from there. Would it be possible to add that feature from an app like Affinity that uses tabs? That would be super useful if it worked that way.
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