Rocketdrive

I use both platforms, here's what I miss: Windows: a fullscreen mode, i.e. without window bar - or is it called title bar? The one that stretches over the whole app, but houses only the min, max and close buttons. Think of macOS's fullscreen mode, or fullscreen mode for webbrowsers (F11 in most modern browsers, on most platforms). Tabs must stay visible, though. Mac: multiple palette columns. We have them in the windows version, please add them for Macs, too. While I see that some users circumvent this limitation via the multiple windows mode (not sure this is the correct name), that is a no go for me. I prefer the more elegant monolithic, non-overlapping and watertight UIs

My main usecase is illustration, as such I am a little picky when it comes to the brush engine and paint related stuff I used Photo for almost a year for most of the digital illustrations I did. Long story short: I found it suberb for finishing touches and compositing, as well as areas that I could create as vector shapes. But for actual drawing I switched back to other tools. Now I have no desire to bash, but would rather like to point out some areas that could improve the drawing experience a lot. Brush engine. It needs to become more fluid, and natural. Jittering needs to be addressed. Apple has nailed it with Predictive touch and Apple Pencil, and every app that relies on both. Adobe has nailed it with Photoshop and Wacom. I'd love to see Photo get there, too. In fact, Photo and Designer on iPad are much better for drawing than their desktop counterparts. Keyboard shortcuts. I'd love to see more flexibility here, at the cost of a more complex setup. Temporary hotkeys would be great, i.e. a function is active only as long as the key is being pressed. Like, hold "r" while dragging the pen could rotate the canvas. Or hold "s" and drag to change the brush size. Also, I would really need every function, toggle and widget in the UI to be configurable. Selection quality. Selected areas always look (and are) slightly jagged. It's not a biggie, but selection quality could be better.

I, too, would love to have a user configurable, simple hotkey or other method for changing brush opacity and size on the fly. There are many best practices out there, Serif just needs to pick one: Sketchbook has an always visible widget, dragging within horizontally changes brush size, vertically: opacity Procreate has always visible sliders for both Photoshop has a hotkey combo Blender (which has many brush uses) has a hotkey ZBrush also has single hotkeys

HTML 5 based apps and Chrome OS are what comes to mind. Ideally, they don't care at all if the hardware underneath is a tablet, or a server, or anything in between. While not ripe yet for the type who needs his Photoshop, or Designer, it would totally make sense to me to have app packages that run on a lightweight, standardized abstraction layer, whatever it might be called.

Great apps should be available on as many platforms as possible. Because only then will they reach as many great artists as possible. It has always bothered me that some apps work on PCs only, and others only on Macs. If they are cross platform often there is a preferred platform with tradeoffs on others. I hope that this will be over some day, rather sooner than later.

I prefer seamless interfaces. Fortunately most DCC apps offer docking of palettes. There sure is a reason for the single column, but can we please get multiple columns for Affinity apps on macOS, too?

Fortunately the particular printing company I am working with for my customers is tested and trusted with all kinds of PDFs I've thrown at them. But I guess You're right in many other cases.

@Wosven never mind, it was actually a good hint. I just had tested the original file with AFPub, which took as long and produced a PDF as unuseable. After reading comments from You and @MickRose I reduced the dimensions to 4000 x 500 mm (a third). Export was a lot faster (around 2 min) and yielded a useable PDF with totally manageable 9 MB in Designer. I tried the same in Publisher, with exact the same results. So, thanks, guys.

Thanks, @MickRose and @Wosven, for the hint. I honestly assumed that, contrary to working with DTP apps in the early 00's, nowadays I wouldn't have to bother with such size limits ;). But knowing them I'll find a solution.

Hi Sean, I must have deleted the file... Just checked but found .afdesign files only. Which means that I finished the job in Designer. I'll keep the bad boys next time for troubleshooting, though

Hey there, I just tried to export a PDF from Designer. It took 17 minutes and was ... empty, at least in Preview as well as when imported to Photoshop. Would devs mind looking at the files? Designer file: 12000 x 1600 mm banner, CMYK at 300 dpi MacBook Pro 2016 nTB

I found out that on Windows I can dock multiple columns side by side. I tried the same on my Mac, and it doesn't work. Is it me, or "by design"?

Hi, Gabe, thanks for looking into it. Absolutely possible that it was just the one project file. I'll need to do more testing and will get back.

Thanks, Dan. I just bumped into such a freeze again. It worked like 5 times OK, and crashed when I started feeling confident that it always worked Looking forward to the next release.

I just found that "Replace Document" doesn't do what it is supposed to for this scenario: I have a large Designer layout (a poster) I have an embedded document, also created in Designer (a beanie) I have an updated version of said beanie on my disk Selecting the object and pressing "Replace Document" lets me choose the updated file, but it doesn't actually update inside of Designer. No biggie, but I consider this unintended bahaviour and hence a bug. WIN 10 1809, AD 1.6.5.123