[System requirements]

12 hours ago, drkanukie said:

You can run Windows 10 on quite old hardware, I'm fed up of my Mac hardware that still works becoming unusable due to software policy. I had two usable Mac's now down to one. I think Electrom apps like Figma are the future. They run on anything.

Isn't Windows 11 required? https://affinity.serif.com/en-us/designer/full-feature-list/#system-requirements

EDIT: Thanks to @walt.farrell for explaining that Affinity 2 can run on Windows 10 😊 

[System requirements]

21 hours ago, kat said:

Just bought v2 but I'm on 10.14.6. How do I get a refund. So sad.

Quote

…If you are not satisfied with your product for any reason, you may return it within a 14 day period after receipt of your product to receive a full refund. Please email affinityreturns@serif.com with your name, order number and reason for returning the item to begin the process.…

Have a look at https://store.serif.com/en-us/help/#return

7 hours ago, fde101 said:

Yes, after the suite (starting with Designer) has been around for eight years.

If the idea is to avoid dropping support for macOS versions within a major version of the Affinity suite, then cutting back to four supported versions now means that the suite would be back to supporting nine major versions five years from now.

The question then becomes, what is the lifespan of a major version of the suite?  If it lasts another five years before v3 comes out, then they will be supporting the same number of major versions of macOS that they were supporting for v1 up until now.

Good points. Developers need to have an income. If Serif keeps the perpetual license model, they probably need a new major release before the next 7 years are over.

Thinking of Adobe, one was able to upgrade from one version to the next but one in the past. That were around 2 years, before one lost the value of a license. As there are no upgrade options for Affinity right now, there'll probably be another sales model. A shorter lifespan of major releases would minimize the need to support older systems thus minimize developing efforts and generate a new income. Of course the requirements could also be raised within the same major version number, as we have seen before with OS X 10.8, but as you mentioned, a new major release is a better reason to drop support.

The question is, what are customers willing to accept to get the latest features and how often. Would be a new major release every 2 or 3 years accepted by most customers or is a 5 year frequency generating enough income for Serif to continue with their developing? Personally, I'm really willing to pay for the Affinity v2 update, but for me it means to buy a new Mac. I'm not sure, if I can afford upgrading to a next major release of Affinity, if it always means to buy a new Mac to get this done.

8 hours ago, garrettm30 said:

I think this is likely the main reason. Apple is pretty aggressive at pushing “forced” upgrades, and developers are in a tight spot: if they want to take advantage of great new features that users on new systems want (or new developments in the API, or even just the change of API to build in the new system), then they are forced to abandon older systems. Some software developers are able to get around it, depending on the needs for their apps, and I am not sure what all is involved to achieve it.

However, I feel (note the subjective word) that Serif must be aware they will be missing out on a lot of sales because of the dropped support of comparatively recent systems, so I conclude that they either had no choice in view of what they are trying to achieve, or else that they estimated that the cost of whatever complicated workaround or complexity of conditional coding would outweigh the extra sales by extending support. At the very least, if it were just a simple extra click of a button in the building process, or even a few hours’ work, they would surely do it for the sake of the extra sales and maintaining customer good will.

So to summarize: I totally understand the frustration of users on older systems (having been stuck there myself at various times), but I put the blame on Apple on this one.

Apple does a good job to release Swift frameworks (formerly Objective-C) that make developers' lives easier. As a developer, it's not only a big time saver, but also makes difficult things possible by just using some advanced high level code. The bad thing is, Apple lost the reliability and endurance of their frameworks long time ago when they started with a yearly system release cycle. That's good for progress of software evolution, but it's also making developers live more complex to keep track of every API change. Apple announced around 4 years ago, that they'll stop short release cycles in favor of returning to software quality. Unfortunately that was not the case and nothing changed. I understand that software needs progress, but it's a pity if quantity comes before quality. I'd prefer a matured rock solid software base over a bunch of features that I don't really need. The only ways for developers to escape from Apple's 'pushing to new framework versions' is to have a broad base of lower level code in their codebase or to use third-party frameworks with slower release cycles. That makes software development slower and more complicated, but it's easier for maintaining long-term support for legacy systems or to port software to other platforms. In contrast, the most developers tend to use more short term solutions as they are faster with publishing and monetizing their ideas. Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard had a release cycle from 2009 to 2011 with 8 minor releases. That was one of the most stable macOS of all time. I'd like to see Apple returning to longer software release cycles and fixing their code, too.

7 hours ago, loukash said:

As far as I know, the latest version of Xcode for Ventura lets you compile only as far back as High Sierra compability. My impression is that Affinity 2 relies on underlying technologies the were not available before Catalina. Perhaps it doesn't necessarily affect features we're seeing in v2.0.0 yet, but it will surely be a factor for new features coming with 2.x updates.

The transition from Objective-C 2.0 to Swift up to the latest Swift 5 release resulted in a lot of deprecated functions and whole framework parts. To release Universal Binaries for new Apple Silicon and old Intel platform, it needs some extra effort. Releasing a binary for legacy macOS versions, often needs development on such legacy platforms and then sticking together the different releases to a single Universal Binary for recent and legacy platforms. As virtualization isn't possible anymore and emulation is needed for running software on a different architecture (ARM vs. Intel), the whole process got extremely complicated. You're right, there might be essential functions in use, that simply don't exist on legacy systems. How much rework should be done for legacy systems? I guess none, as the world is moving forward fast and none wants to look back. That's why I like Open-Source Software, as you can decide by yourself, how much effort you spend to make something work. Maybe Affinity is generous enough to make some extra efforts supporting legacy macOS versions, maybe Affinity will switch completely to Apples software paradigm to give new features only for the last 2 release versions and security fixes for another release back in the past. As we don't know, I would be glad if some Affinity developers would give us some more insights about their philosophy and plans here.

8 hours ago, François R said:

I believe Affinity did the right thing here possibly updating the Apple framework in the new branch of the Affinity line (v2) - basing v2 on the latest base technology they can making future development easier (and possible) (to integrate with future updates of macOS and ipadOS). From what I have collected and understand Affinity is based on quite a lot of third party products including as much as they can from the OS. Backwards compatibility with older versions of macOS is simply not part of many of these updated frameworks. And sticking to older versions of frameworks and libraries is a losing game.

So that ship has probably sailed. There is no easy fix.

The decision was the right one if you are looking at the future as a company that constantly upgrades their software products.

If you prefer status quo in this day and age, you pretty much have to stick to it; not upgrading anything. 

Yes, you're right. For example the PDF printing engine PDFlib once was responsible for dropping PDF 1.3 support during Affinity 1.8 update and forced us to use PDF 1.4+ output format. As PDFlib 10.x has a minimum requirement of OS X 10.9 there must be some other component responsible for preventing better backward compatibility.

[System requirements]

2 hours ago, fde101 said:

There is a limit to how far they can reasonably go, and a major version release is a good opportunity to prune the need to maintain extra code to support older versions.  The more recent the minimum requirements are, the longer the major version can last without needing to further drop support for the older macOS versions later on, so even supporting 10.15 seems reasonably generous at this point.

Yes, you're right. From developer perspective, I do agree. From customer perspective, we had Affinity v1 supporting macOS 12 Monterey all the way down to OS X 10.9 Mavericks. That are altogether 9 (nine!) supported different macOS versions from Affinity apps, including around 7 operating systems that Apple didn't support anymore. Not so long ago even OS X 10.8 was still supported by Affinity. With the release of Affinity v2, we do have a huge jump of minimum system requirement from OS X 10.9 to macOS 10.15. That are 6 system versions difference and that's a lot.

I do agree with your security concerns, but there are many ways to get a reasonable security even on older OS versions, like using modern third-party browsers, mail clients and firewalls, etc. There are good reasons for keep using older system releases, too. If you want to be productive, you'll need a system that just works. You don't have the time to spend every weekend in installing latest OS versions, fixing important broken workflows or dealing with latest OS bugs. I'm still using old macOS versions as I'm still using Adobe Creative Suite in parallel to Affinity apps. Adobe CS doesn't run anymore on macOS 10.15 and I don't want to be forced to Adobe subscriptions. Indeed, that was a main reason for my transition to Affinity apps. I know there are more people, that want to keep their Adobe CS AND want to use the latest Affinity apps until the transition is complete.

I like all the Affinity apps and I'm sure that those will become my main tools in the near future. Meanwhile I don't ask for supporting OS X 10.9. Supporting macOS 10.12 would be my wish and would be a really great thing. At least supporting macOS 10.14 would do me a big favor, making my personal transition from Adobe to Serif more comfortable and smooth.

[System requirements]

At the moment I'm still waiting for new Mac hardware that is announced for next year. Meanwhile I'd like to use the new Affinity v2 apps on macOS 10.12.x or 10.14.x.

• Are there others who want to see lower system requirements than macOS 10.15.x for the Affinity v2 apps?
• Are there chances, we'll see decreased requirements?

All feedback is welcome.

[Exporting print ready pdfs (split)]

Sorry, I didn't get a note about your reply. Meanwhile the colors are like expect as far as I can tell. Probably it was fixed by some updates years ago.

[PDF export rasterizes vector logo]

Another issue with rasterization, where a file link probably looses some connection to the vector information.

A vector graphic imported to publisher was exporting fine to PDF through Affiniy Publisher's internal engine. After some document versions and one or two AP updates, exporting suddenly started to rasterize. The strange thing is, that the vector graphic started to render pixelated on the screen in AP, too. So I guess it's not the export setting, but the way the vector is linked to AP.

To get rid of the problem, it's enough to embed the file again. It's not possible to refresh the file through resources window as AP sees the file as unchanged and the button is greyed out. The file is the same with the exact same location of the source. It seems that the link within AP lost some information and renders a preview of the file. No effects are applied to the layer. The only difference I could see between the old and the new link to the file is, that the layer of the pixelated image is missing the file extension in its name. In resources window, the file does always include the file extension.

Did anyone have the same issue? Could anyone find a cause or another solution than linking the file again?

[Style Assets Inktober Vectors]

@StuartRc Thank you for sharing.

Frankentoons Guide to Seamless Patterns moved to https://frankentoonstudio.com/design-school/seamless-patterns-affinity-designer/

[Exporting print ready pdfs (split)]

I noticed that the colour values are shifting on PDF export:

Affinity -> Rectangle Fill C=100%, M=0%, Y=0%, K=40% -> Export PDF -> More -> CMYK, ISO coated v2 ECI -> Acrobat Pro -> C=99%, M=9%, Y=9%, K=29%

Am I doing something wrong?

[Bleed for elements on Master slide]

18 hours ago, julien63000 said:

But for me, event in regular page, it doesn't export the rectangle elements.

Did you check PDF export settings -> More -> Include bleed?

[Bleed - Guides]

+1

I'd really much appreciate these features for bleed in an upcoming release:

• bleed set-up in the dialog window for new documents, too (should be saveable in templates)
• linking option to fill all fields for right, left, top and bottom by entering a single value
• a view mode in the editor that shows visible crop marks or a visible frame for the bleed area
• ability to set the size of crop marks in PDF export dialog