h.ozboluk

Oh yeah. That's why we're here. The work. Besides, the horse is out of the barn. Other apps have this functionality and so the bar is already raised. It's an industry and these are "industrial" tools in some sense. Like @KennyLucius mentioned, charging the hours would feel unethical, but it's a bit more than that. We have to compete against people using apps with highly optimized tools in their arsenal if we choose to go with Affinity. Blends have the "computerized" look anyway that is synonymous with the vector motif. It's unmistakable.
I'm hoping because we got Warp that Blends won't be too far off.

+1
A blend-tool would be a great addition.
Not only would it help create interesting structures faster, but its morphing ability would allow us to construct mediating shapes and curves that are just terribly time-consuming by hand.
So I don't just want it, I need it! 😉

Dear Affinity-Team,
'Toggle Visibility' is sometimes not visible (see screenshot).
When I resize the side panel / window it shows up again.
Best,
Frank
System:
macOS Catalina 10.15.7
iMac 21,5 End of 2012
NVIDIA GeForce GT 640M 512MB
Hardware Acceleration is Off

Just started the trial with "cash in hand" to pay and it seems there is no Object nor Path blend tool.
Unfortunately this is 100% deal breaker for me, for 95% of my vector work is dependent on vector steps blend - fabric textures and hair, no way doable by hand. Come on, guys! I really wish to move away from Adobe. You make it hard.
To give an idea to the doubters, here's example of my work where half-tone vectors need to be blended and modified (theoretically in real time).

 

Mods should make a copy paste from the bugs from V1 and be done with it..
Whenever I create artboards with bleed, and export them as TIFF in export persona (+bleed option ofc!) the bleed disappears.. As usual, 2021 issue since V1.. You can see in the screenshot below.. top window is tiff, bottom is original.
It was logged back then from my post, you will probably log it again now. Will probably be the same in V3 in 2023...

To be clear, the bleed guides are visible, but content placed in the bleed is not visible, you have to trust its there and check in the exported file (it is). This is only documents with Artboards.
Hard to believe that this is STILL not fixed since v1 when bleed was first added. 
 

I did not expect v1 to read the v2 file format, and have not been part of that discussion, but the changed file format is a fact, and therefore this omission is on par with a bug (since it is a management error that this feature is not implemented):
When I open a file in v1 format in v2 of Designer, and make a small change and save, there is no warning that I am overwriting a file saved in the older format with a new format. I am not even notified that the file is in an older format. So it is 100% invisible to the user that there is an update. And thus the file is now finally out of reach of v1 users.
It's a common usability feature in other programs that may be a preference whether to display or not. In that case it should also be possible to turn it off in the notification dialog box (Don't show this again).
It is really bad practice not to protect its customers from such mishaps, which can occur both for individual users but certainly also in commercial environments. And oh... a real scenario for trial users.

Yes, and in that case it is useful. But you can turn it off or on.
However, I always have to live with the fact that even when I turn it off, I don't get rid of the unimaginable visual mess that occurs when working with groups in particular. 
 

Just look at it:


THAT mess should be an opt-in.
Let's then compare it with the beautiful simplicity of v1.10 - same test file - it is the ABSCENCE of these lines and boxes that makes me able to navigate instantly in the old layers panel:

 

Some feedback now I've worked a bit in v2 in complex documents. Dark theme.
Right side of the layers panel I have no problems with - I would prefer an eye symbol which is a de facto standard in graphics programs with layers. But otherwise, I'm quite happy with the very simple design. On the right side!
The left side of the layers panel is almost a disaster. It's a mosaic of black squares, and together it all forms a chaos of visual details. The nice clean design from v1 is gone, and the layers panel is horrible and exhausting to work with.
The first thing I do is turn off the layer type symbol. Next, I turn on group thumbnails. And from there, the panel and my focus are disturbed by ugly frames. Also, the text contrast setting from preferences does not affect the layer name so the layer name doesn't stand out at all.
Oh, and the dark lines! What does have contrast is the vertical and horizontal border/frame lines in the layers panel that I really dislike and would like to turn OFF. I really do understand what-is-what without them. They are just distracting noise to me.
However, thanks for the whole frame with fold in/out symbol now being clickable - not just the symbol in there.
So, all in all you did it perfectly right in v1. 
But this mosaic mess... awful to work with:

Whattt? Is a Joke? In office I have V1, in home V2 , all my files are in V1!! 

If no backward compatibility is by design, Maybe it's a better idea to differentiate the extension to avoid confusion
because both v1 & v2 has same extension .afdesign
for example for v2 file, it can be untitled.afdesign2
like what Microsoft did with .doc and .docx

Totally agree we won't get it until the customers demand for it increases.
I don't think everyone has realised the implications compounded by V2 as it doesn't run on older Macs which are stuck on V1. This story is going to develop.
Someone suggested round tripping through PSD, for graphics files. I just find it absurd having to rely on a third party format for interoperability of your own product. With Publisher that won't work. 

I've noticed that once you SAVE a file from Photo v2, Designer v2, or Publisher v2.0, you can no longer open these v2 native Affinity files using v1.10.x. Backwards compatibility is important. If nothing else, issue a warning message that the user is opening a file edited or created with a newer version of the software, and that some features may not be supported. But making v2 files unopenable in v1.10.x isn't a great solution, in my opinion. There are at least two problems without backwards compatibility.
1. You can't share work with somebody who hasn't upgraded to v2.
2. I can no longer re-open and edit my own files using v1.10.x. This is a problem because I've had experienced some serious bug and crash problems. Until these v2.0 issues are fully resolved, I need to open and edit in v1.10.5. However, I get the attached error message when trying to do so. So, I either am forced to use v2 with its current issues, or I have to start over from scratch. If I have a huge file with days or work expended, I lose it. The only workaround I currently see is to SAVE AS from v2 Apps and create a separate file. 
Thanks.

I noticed that too, and added A2 and A1 as a preset but was unable to add A0. AD made it 840 * 840, instead of 840 * 1188.

Hi, I'm excited to get to know and use the v2.0 suite of tools. Already, though, I've hit a minor annoyance that in none of the tools is there a preset for a paper size larger than A3. I was in a hurry today to do a quick mock-up, and had to go back to 1.10 in order to quickly do something in A1. Yes, yes, I can create my own preset, but it seems lame to need to do so for professional-level tools.

You are absolutely right!
Even if all three Apps share many common, basic features there are good reasons not to combine them into one "monster" app. The feature set would simply be overwhelming. So it's a good practice to break up key functionality into different apps so the user can focus on the work. The cool thing about Publisher is the studio functionality and overall the ability to seemlessly move a document between all three apps. That's outstanding!
But some users are more focused on drawing or photography and don't have a need for a more complex layout app like Publisher. So there is a specialized app for everey purpose.
I would always buy them all (so did I with Photoshop, Illustrator and InDesign for decades).

To be honest - it's ridiculous even to think about, if this feature "may be somehow usefull, in some cases, only for some apps, but not for alle users, or isn't it, o dear my head hurts..."
This feature is has to be an absolutely basic setting for all three Apps! They already "solved the problem" in Publisher since version 1. And all three Apps rely on the same sets of Classes. If not at least since v2 - congrats....
When to use it ?
If you get copy texts from your clients (typical Word crap) they often contain a bunch of trailing and leading whitespace, manual linebreaks instead of proper paragraphs and indentation filled up with spaces instead of proper tabs, crappy manually indented "list" with fancy bullets etc.
Most time my first action is, to clean up all messy characters and make the whole text a proper sequence of simple paragraphs before setting up any own Affinity text styles.
This is the reason why i allways turn on invisible chars, to check the whole mess and clean it up. Afterwards it's usefull too when it comes to special characters for column and page break and to visualize tabstop indentation, fill chars, and so on.
But sometimes it's simply disruptive to have all the control chars visible when simply check the overall clean appearence of a layout.
An easy way to show/hide special characters is not "a nice to have" - it's simply a basic function in every professional graphics software. It's like select or deselect an Object, show/hide rulers or guides, textframe borders etc. If you need them show them, if not hide them.
This should be a no brainer!

Exciting times. With precious little in the way of recent updates, some users wondered if Affinity was dead—but no, we were promptly told that they were just focused on the next major version. And four months later, here it is!
A common expression amongst users has been 'hopefully in version 2', so here's my list of hoped for changes. I'm about to fire up my new V2 apps for the first time and see if all the hopeful waiting has been rewarded. I've divided my list into two main categories: 'UI frustrations' and 'Missing or broken features'.
 
UI frustrations
Window management (Separated Mode)
Ever since MultiFinder appeared on the Mac in 1987, we've been able to run multiple apps and see their document windows side by side. Over the years came other improvements like drag and drop between apps and documents. You lose some of those benefits when an app takes up the whole screen with a solid background. For this reason, many of us preferred a separated workspace (turning off Application Frame in Adobe apps), but after switching to Affinity, quickly discovered that Affinity's Separated Mode was pretty broken, with document windows and Studio panels seemingly having no knowledge of each other's existence.
After much criticism, Affinity finally responded in June 2020 with a help article titled 'Increase your efficiency with Affinity’s Separated Mode'. There was no admission of any issues though, and I parodied the unhelpful article in this forum comment.
Changes in V2
Affinity seems to have finally acknowledged the issues with Separated Mode. Their solution? Remove it altogether! The new 'Float View to Window' command kind of gives us the worst of both worlds… separate windows that still aren't aware of your Studio panels, and a big old solid-grey app window obscuring every other background app. It looks like Affinity might have just put this one in the too hard basket.
Panel management
Resizing Studio panels in V1 is somewhere between painful and impossible. To be fair, this was never a perfect experience with Adobe either, but Affinity takes the pain to a new level. Can't see most of your Paragraph panel? Hover your cursor very carefully over that one-pixel hairline between panels… Nope, there's the 'no entry' cursor telling you the panel can't be resized (for some unknown reason). Double-click to minimise a panel or two to make more space… only to find that it added several inches of completely empty space to a different panel instead. Try to resize that one. Nope, there's the 'no entry' cursor again. Start double-clicking ALL the panels until you can finally see the one you want. Utter frustration.
Changes in V2
After playing around with panels for just a few minutes, the results are mixed. Firstly, I can resize panels (without seeing the 'no entry' icon all the time)—great! Secondly, the hover-zone seems to have expanded from one pixel to around two—I'll take it! Beyond that, things are still quite unpredictable. For example, I currently have a massive Swatches panel full of mostly empty space, and a tiny Text Styles panel below it which is showing me only two lines. I can resize the Text Styles panel to my liking, but if I then minimise and reopen it, it's right back to the way it was—tiny and useless. Whatever algorithm is determining these panel sizes is clearly not fit for purpose.
On a positive note, on the Mac the Studio panels are now listed under the Window menu—exactly where they should have been all along!
Oh one other thing… I lost the Swatches panel in Designer. As in, it just totally vanished. 😳 I can hide it and unhide it again from the menu, but it does not reappear. Restarting the app doesn't bring it back either. This could be a bit of a problem!! (Edit: Found!)
Working with guides
Creating a simple guide the normal way, by dragging out from the ruler, works fine. Unfortunately though, Affinity apps lack the power and flexibility of other drawing apps like Illustrator, which let you select and manipulate guides like normal objects—positioning them numerically for example, or hitting delete to remove then. Illustrator even lets you convert normal vector objects into guides.
With Affinity apps, you have to drag a guide off the edge of a page to remove it. The issues with this approach are (1) you have to be zoomed out so that you can see the edge of the page, and (2) it's inconsistent with the behaviour of other objects, which can be safely dragged and positioned beyond the edge of the page. This creates confusion for users as discussed on threads like this one.
Instead, Affinity gives us the Guides Manager. It's a useful tool, but it would be less necessary if guides were more flexible in the first place.
Changes in V2
There appears to be no changes to the way guides work in V2.
Working with colour swatches
In my opinion, Affinity seriously dropped the ball in V1 with the way colour swatches are handled. Here are some of the features that are missing or broken:
There's no obvious place to put your custom colours. You have to find the 'Add Document Palette' command first, which then creates something called 'Unnamed'. Other actions may trigger the app to add a second palette named 'Document'. Once a swatch is created, you can't convert it to or from a global or spot colour. You can't select more than one swatch at a time. You can't drag and drop colour swatches between palettes or between different parts of the UI. There's no obvious way to add a Pantone swatch to an existing document palette. (You need to apply the colour to an object on the canvas, select the object, switch back to your document palette and click on one of the two 'Add…' buttons.) New global colours are given generic names (Global Colour 1, etc). Pantone colour names are not preserved when added as global colours (the most common requirement!) and need to be typed in manually. Global colours are not transferred between documents when copying and pasting objects. (You need to explicitly export a palette from the first document and then import it into the second document.) Global spot colours are not added to a Publisher document palette when placing a Designer file (unlike InDesign and Illustrator). There's no search field in the 'Add Global Color' panel or edit colour pop-up, making it almost impossible to select the one you want from a large list of swatches. (They aren't displayed as a list, even if you set the panel appearance to 'Show as List'.) There's no command to find and delete unused swatches from a document palette. There's no option to merge two global colours. When deleting a used swatch, you're not asked what to replace it with. (If you delete a global colour, all instances just get replaced with a non-global version.) Yes, colour swatch management in Affinity V1 is bad—really bad. In one forum comment I wrote, 'That's one thing Adobe got right, and something the Affinity devs would have done well to replicate, rather than trying to get clever and do their own thing. Gosh I hope version 2 starts to take this seriously.' Well let's check out V2 and see…
Changes in V2
(1) The 'Add Document Palette' command now displays a pop-up which asks, 'Please enter a name for the new palette.' It still defaults to 'Unnamed', but it's a small improvement over the previous behaviour.
(9) Both the 'Add Global Color' panel and the edit colour pop-up now feature a search field, making it much easier to select from a large list of swatches. (They also now respect the 'Show as List' setting.)
Aside from those two improvements, very little seems to have changed with colour swatches across the Affinity suite. That's a big disappointment, and seems to communicates that the Affinity team don't share the view of many users, that this really needed an overhaul.
Undo/Redo
In Affinity apps, the action of selecting or deselecting an object gets added to the undo/redo stack. This is counterintuitive, goes against years of established practice, and (if the user is not familiar with it) can lead to data loss. Only an action that alters the artwork in some way should be added to the undo/redo stack, as discussed here.
Changes in V2
Nothing has changed.
 
Missing or broken features
1-bit black and white artwork (line art)
Graphics applications have, since the beginning of time, supported true 1-bit black and white artwork, so many professional users were understandably shocked to discover that Affinity V1 apps offered no support at all for 1-bit files. The only workaround is to work with grayscale and manually compress your lightness levels. This is anything but reliable, as compression algorithms at export time will not recognise the difference between a faux B&W image and a grayscale one, downsampling line art to an unacceptably low resolution and adding unwanted antialiasing.
Changes in V2
Incredibly, there's still no support for 1-bit black and white artwork.
Turning off antialiasing
The ability to turn off antialiasing of exported graphics is an essential feature for any professional graphics application. Affinity V1 apps lacked this feature entirely in the beginning, but in response to a forum post in 2015, one of Affinity's developers added highly-customisable, per-object control of antialiasing. Then, in 2020, it got better, with a simple on or off option, which you can apply to multiple objects at once.
This is a huge improvement already, but some of us would still like to see a simple on/off checkbox at export for outputting something like a raster print versions of a logo. As I explained in the same discussion: 'it's about tailoring the artwork to different output media. That should be an export function, not something I have to hard-code into the design file.'
Changes in V2
Turning off antialiasing cannot be done globally at export—it must still be hard-coded into each object of the file.
Reliably exporting for print
Affinity Publisher's default PDF export settings for print-ready artwork ('PDF (press-ready)') turns black (K:100) to a CMYK mix (e.g. C:71, M:66, Y:66, K:76), which would be a disaster if not detected before your job goes to print (something which is difficult when there are no pre-press tools provided). There are other issues too, like line art being downsampled and antialiased (related to the previous two issues).
Changes in V2
This has not been fixed. The 'PDF (press-ready)' export preset still has an all-or nothing 'Embed profiles' option ticked by default, and still causes black artwork (like text) to get converted to a CMYK mix.
Previewing colour separations
Affinity has no alternative to Acrobat Pro. For print professionals, this means no way of previewing and checking colour separations before going to print. When combined with the issues mentioned above, the chances of poor quality artwork and printing are high.
Changes in V2
There are no new apps or built-in tools for checking colour separations.
 
Summary
V2 may have brought some cool new features, but it has only brought modest improvements to a few of the features which matter to me the most, while other issues have been overlooked completely. Having waited so many years for the first major update, I have to say, I'm pretty disappointed.
I'll still purchase all the apps, and I'll still recommend them to family and friends. They do a lot of great things, and you certainly can't beat the price.
Of course, this is not an exhaustive list of the issues I have with the Affinity apps—just a few that frustrate me the most. If I've left out some of your biggest issues, feel free to add them below with a note on whether V2 fixed them for you.

Hi,
I know there is a diversity of opinion of the recent V2 upgrades, but the universal feeling seems to be that it has been a step backwards in terms of the User Interface - there is not a lot in the forums supporting the new changes.
I think the 'new' look and feel is horrible, and significantly detracts from usability rather than enhancing it.
- Why has the Export Persona been so badly mangled ?
- Why has the New Document dialog been similarly treated ?
- What has happened to Separated View mode ?
- Why has so much been made worse, and so little made better ?
- Why are all the fonts so small in the UI ?
- Why are button layouts so clunky and amateurish - ironically, particularly in the UI prefs panel ?
- Why are buttons and fonts so small, when there is far too much empty space in prefs panels ?
- Why don't the apps honor the MacOS 'limit motion' settings ?
- Why has the issue of contrast been so poorly factored into icon design and screen colours ?
- Why do the new icons look like something from a GameBoy app designed for 8-year olds ?
- What is the point of redesigning icons at the expense of fixing bugs ?
- Why do the new icons do a worse job of representing the function of associated buttons ?
- Why have checkboxes been replaced with meaningless dots, where you can't tell whether they are on or off ?
- Why has the 'linked' icon been replaced with something so ambiguous ?
- Why are icons and controls so impossibly small when using a hi-res monitor ?
- Why are some controls virtually invisible when using high-contrast mode ?
On a scale of 10, I'd give v2 a score of 3 compared to V1.
 

Would also like to see this. Or even staying selected while the program is open. I usually go with 17x17 and have to select it every time I open a new image in a tab.

Dear all, 

is there any way in Affinity Photo to set a default size for the color picker tool?!
Everytime I start the application or open an image the picker size is reset to 1x1 pixel
and to resize it manually everytime is unneccessary work. 
Preferably I would like to have something like 5x5 or 17x17.

It would also be great to have it change automatically depending on file and resolution.

Thanks in advance
 

Blend tool (object blending) has been requested since 2015. It's a crucial part of doing parametric / creative work. Any chance to put in onto priority / pipe?
Thanks

Yes. That wasn't the question though. The question was why there's no reward for existing users.
Serif basically treats every existing user like a new user. I also hoped for a better upgrade price, which extends over the initial release sale period. In a few weeks time, the Affinity apps will cost 84,99 €, even for owners of the v1 apps.
20 € for an upgrade would have been cool. Let's be honest, there are not that many new features in v2.

Please tell me I'm wrong. I 've paid good money for the full Afffinity suite, way back. Now I'm being invited to buy Version 2 (so much better, so, by implication Version 1 not so good any more). But I'm being asked to pay the same price as first-time buyers! In the good old days, when apps were called software, existing users got a discount price for an upgrade. That was a logical approach to pricing, which encouraged existing users to move onwards and upwards, when they had less incentive to do that than first-time buyers.
I'm sorry Affinity can't find it in themselves to thank me for ditching CS whatever it was for their software. That I have previously bought their stuff counts, it seems for nothing. I am of no more interest to them than a new customers.
Thanks, guys. I'll stick with my existing versions. Even though they don't have a scanner interface. But then, ninety quid's worth of V2 doesn't either.
Y'know, I liked Affinity a lot. I recommended it to everyone I know.  Now, I feel like a mug.
Loyalty, guys, is a two-way street.
Yours,
Roger

I've just committed myself to Affinity Designer after over three decades of drawing vector artwork and I can hardly believe that there's no function for blending objects. Surely this is a basic function of vector software? I congratulate the developers on a magnificent product but without the ability to blend it's both left-wanting and, compared to the rivals, very much in the slow-lane.
Blending really is a necessity and I urge that it's available as soon as possible.