efinity

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.

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.

I am also one of those users caught in the grip of being on Mojave. I have other software packages that I use that necessitate remaining on 10.14.6 in my production workflow (one of whom is Art Director’s Toolkit, which is not made in 64-bit and has no single equal). I do however have a old ZBook studio G3 that’s running Windows 10—that was upgraded to 32GB of RAM—that is currently running Affinity 2.0 and a 6th Gen iPad w/iPad OS 15.5 that I’m able to run 2.0 on (haven’t used it in production yet; I’m sure it will probably run slower than on a newer iPad but will probably have to upgrade eventually). Fortunately, the new installs don’t require installing over v1 and, as long as that is effective, it helps. Not the desired solution, but a sidestepping one. My 2015 MacBook Air will run Catalina BUT, as it only has 8GB of RAM including 1.5 GB that it dedicates to the video processor, it’s considered that—as 10.15.6 requires 4GB of RAM—2.5GB of RAM might not be the best option to run Affinity 2.0 on.
 

I was really excited about an updated Affinity 2 suite. I downloaded the 30 trial. Unfortunately my 2019 macbook pro still has OS version 10.14.6 as well. The reason is I want to keep this particular version of the OS is that I want to keep itunes and if I upgrade I will lose that.

Honestly 2019 isn't that old of a computer for these programs not being compatible. Very disappointing.

No. 

 

If they provide a discount for existing customers a 1-2 year frequency would be fine.

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

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

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. 

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

One thing to remember is that Apple no longer supports those versions of macOS.  No security updates.  
Using them on the open internet gets riskier the older they get.
Apple supports the current major version and two previous versions - with macOS 13 out now, that means that macOS 11 is the oldest supported version (the oldest version which will continue to get security patches and the like).
Serif is already supporting one version older than Apple is, which imposes limits on what they as developers can do as newer APIs become available and older ones are deprecated by Apple.  To support newer versions of macOS sometimes developers need to switch to newer APIs which don't exist on the older versions, because the older APIs don't work on the newer macOS.
It also increases the testing effort and the need to keep the older versions available (which is risky to them as well with the lack of security updates) in order to provide support and handle bugs and the like.
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, 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.

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.

I'm also on 10.14.6 and thus locked out for the time being. Obviously would love to see Mojave making a comeback on the support list. In my book Catalina is a climb down and one to definitely stay far away from, Big Sur perhaps a minor improvement on that and whatever the current one is called only recently got its firmware issues for my hardware worked out, otherwise a somewhat mixed bag.
So from a productivity perspective they're all unattractive choices to me. Especially when you factor in that upgrading the OS and especially when jumping a few version numbers at once usually also means upgrading (or replacing) other software for compatible versions.

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.
So I'm almost as sad as anyone else who doesn't want or can't switch to Catalina or higher, but I can understand the move. Maintaining legacy compatibility comes at high costs for developers, and not many have the resources for that. (One recent example is 2manyrobots.com, developer of the brilliant Yate app for audio files tagging. He is currently providing two separately compiled versions to ensure compatibility with Intel Macs that cannot be officially upgraded beyond El Capitan, e.g. like my spare MacBook Pro 2008. Amazing!)
I have a Catalina partition more or less in sync with my main El Capitan partition (using a lot of symbolic link trickery, haha), and I will install Affinity 2 later today. But for the forseeable future I will stick to El Capitan as my primary workspace. My main MacBook Pro is 10 years old, so inevitably I will have to get a new one rather sooner than later anyway, I guess.

Not to speak about hardware! I have a bunch of perfectly working Firewire audio interfaces which I'm using regularly for multitrack recording with Logic Pro. They are the main reason to stay on El Capitan because one of them – while already using hacked drivers – won't run on anything beyond.

Hi efinity
Was CMYK, ISO coated v2 ECI the colour profile used in the document when creating it? If not this will simply be down to colour space conversion

Ok thanks I will Correct the link.. this thread is quite old now!
Seamless Patterns
Sort of evolved my own construction method for seamless patterns: you can find it here

@StuartRc Thank you for sharing.
Frankentoons Guide to Seamless Patterns moved to https://frankentoonstudio.com/design-school/seamless-patterns-affinity-designer/

Hi
These assets just styles that can be added to the style panel to help you apply preset design settings to objects and speed up work flow. This set was created as I found it a quick way to apply tints/colours to vector elements without searching through the swatches to find the appropriate colour. They are arranged on the sheet to include a single colour and an equivalent highlight and shadow as a tint.

To install: just unpack the .zip file and drag {name .afstyles file into AD window area OR install from dropdown menu on right of Styles Panel

The thread is getting quite old now and there have been a lot of enhancements to AD tools and functions.. Styles can be used in conjunctions with the 'newish' Appearance Panel/Stroke settings/swatches panel/Fill (bitmaps & images) options. 
If you wanted to experiment with more complex options there are many style freebies in resources...Also the way I opt to work with them has changed considerably. If you want experiment with the options on how to use them...The later versions of Style Pattern Experiments can be found here... in Resources. There is also a explanation sheet here
 
But also some of the links below will help you!...There are many others!
Tutorials
There are a lot of tutorials available that will help you understand Styles and where to apply/use them
1. Installing assets...There is a comprehensive guide to installing all assets here
2. Effects and Adjustments AD Affinity Tutorial and others and Multiple Strokes and Fills
3. Patterns: Affinity Spotlight article or Seamless Patterns or Frankentoons Guide to Seamless Patterns

Yes - we have this reported and agree it is a very annoying bug

Experiencing the same bug.

Suggest very early fix for this persistent bug:
slider controls in User Interface preferences (eg for selecting no of dec places) persist on screen even after Prefs window is closed. They even persist at top layer on screen above other application windows. Am attaching screenshot of Publisher sliders visually interfering with this Safari window.

As INDD is a closed format – other than AI and PSD – there is no reasonable way for the developers to make an import option for INDD.
However they could make import option for IDML, which is an open format. QuarkXpress did that in their latest update. But this would mean that you would have to export every single InDesign Document as IDML. 

+1
visible bleed guides is a must for professional working.
This must be selectable both when working and when exporting.
:-) Gerhard