William Overington

In what ways do people make money by using Affinity products? This arises from a post in another thread to which I responded. So I thought I would ask more widely here please. William

Do managements know if this happens? If it does happen at the printing establishment, are customers told up front that the product for which they are paying money will arrive with each copy damaged? Printed beautifully then damaged by being tied up tightly with string, in what is described when I asked on the web as a traditional practice. William

Are they the same type of printing services? What are your printing services? What are Canva's printing services? I had not known of that until reading your post. Do they have the same minimum order value? Available in the same places? Do either deliver the printed products tied up tightly with string so that each copy has a notch in it? William

But it is like a lot of groups. For example, societies about heritage railways. There are some people who are there almost every weekend. There are lots who pay the annual subscription, receive the magazine, perhaps visit sometimes, maybe never, and renew their membership every year for decades. It is just how it is. I hope you don't mind me asking, but how do you make money using Affinity please? I am retired and only use Affinity products for my own hobby projects. I have often wondered how people make money using Affinity products. William

Well, Serif did have MoviePlus and this morning I started to watch a video made with MoviePlus, so maybe Affinity Video will happen. And there was the wonderful Serif ImpactPlus. Maybe Affinity 3DImpact will happen. I hope so. William

@Chills I got made redundant. I had specialist skills that were not what businesses wanted. I know what it is like. So I empathise. Yes. William

On the matter of AI, I have tried AI, just as an end user trying Bing Chat AI, and I have found it to be helpful and interesting, yet also sometimes being misleading. For example, I asked it to produce a sonnet in the Italian style, providing it with some information about the requested content. It produced a sonnet, a sonnet which I consider very good. Yet it purported it to be in the Italian style when it is in the English style of sonnet rhyme scheme. I asked it to produce a nineteen line poem, and it purported to have done this, but each time the result was always 16 lines or 20 lines, never 19. Yet when asked to produce a villanelle, which is nineteen lines, it did that well. I asked it several times to produce a painting of a lady in a long green dress feeding an okapi. Some of the results are excellent, yet some are way off. Long horns on the purported okapi for example. Yet a request for a painting in the style of Claude Monet of a lady in a long green dress feeding a stegosaurus in a garden with a pond with flowering water lilies is magnificent. Similarly a painting of a lady reading haiku to an elephant in a field of flowering lavender with a Roman aqueduct in the background produced by the AI is really good. Yet I could not persuade it to produce a painting including a gibbous moon. It always painted a full moon. Even if the word gibbous was not used and the phase of the moon was described as more than half full yet less than full. Some time ago I wrote a novel. I published it on the web in a collection of PDF documents. I produced the PDF documents using Serif PagePlus. I used PagePlus as a tool so as to produce the result that I wanted to achieve. I was not using PagePlus in order to study PagePlus and every facility it had. So if I can use AI to make a movie without actors, then maybe I can have a movie of my novel. The AI as regards paintings seems to work on the basis that it needs to include content and the more information that the prompt contains then the more like the prompt the output from the AI will be. So maybe an AI that generates video will work in a similar way. William

From my perspective, if someone is stuck and wants and needs the answer to a specific question then if someone else is able and willing to provide that answer and generously provides it free then that is good. William

One of four sessions each scheduled to start at 4 pm, the Affinity one the shortest one at 20 minutes. William

@albertkinng I recognize that AI will not replace the expertise of professional designers. I like to think of this situation in terms of a concept that I thought of many years ago, namely time and microtime. Consider, just as a basis for a thought experiment, even if not necessarily exactly the case, that human activity has units of 1 second, and consider that computer system activity has units of 1 microsecond, even though I know many modern computers are much faster. So the 5 seconds that we observe the AI system taking to produce a picture is five units in our ambience, yet 5 million units in the ambience of the AI system. So, what is 5 million seconds in our ambience? 5 million divided by 3600 hours 5 million divided by 3600 divided by 24 days 5 million divided by 3600 divided by 24 divided by 365.25 years What is that? I'll start the calculator program. 57.8 days. That is working continually, day and night. More related to human work is the following. 5 million divided by 3600 divided by 7.5 divided by 5 weeks. So 37 weeks of continuous 5 day week human employment. That not counting tea breaks, bank holidays and so on. So the AI picture produced in 5 seconds is roughly equivalent, for this thought experiment, to almost a year of a human painter producing a painting. Yet that does not mean that the two paintings are equally as good. A painting produced by any artist, human or AI, in the artist's time ambience, depends so much on the artist. However, what needs to be considered is that I have here some framed prints of paintings produced by an AI system, indeed paintings specified in a general sense by me in a text prompt to the AI system. I appreciate that a professional art appraisal of them might not be palatable, yet the fact of the matter is that I could not have afforded to hire the services of a professional artist to produce them. And the prints are not at "art print" print quality level. Yet I am pleased to have them and enjoy looking at them. However, a however within a however, I am not purporting the AI system to be better than, nor a replacement for, professional artists. So I regard AI produced art as interesting and enjoyable, and having a place somewhere on a spectrum of art quality. William

William

This is experimental as a learning exercise. The vertical panels are each such that rotation angle plus shear angle equals zero. The height of the three inner panels adjusted "by eye" this time. I need to learn the calculation. Angles of 30 degrees, 15 degrees, and 0 degrees. William

So were they comparing it to using Canva? I have not used Canva. Is using Affinity products a "speed up" from using Canva? Do Affinity products do things that Canva does not, or just the same things but in a speeded up manner? William

Is it possible to export a png graphic such that it includes the isometric grid used when drawing the picture please? William

I have never thought of Affinity products as to "speed up". To produce quality output, yes. Yet I am retired, not running a business, so maybe "speed up" is very relevant to some users of Affinity products. William

I have found that if I draw a straight line using the Pen Tool from any point that I choose to any other point that I choose then the Transform Panel shows the length of the line in a box labelled L that is to the right of the box labelled R. That is the box that for a shape shows the shear angle, but for a line the box shows the length of the line. William

Start a document and set the measurement units to inches. If you then draw a line using the Pen Tool and hold the Shift key down while you do it, then a line drawn by you at "around" horizontal will lock on as exactly horizontal. Then, once it is an object, the length of the line will be displayed as the width in the Transform panel. You could then rotate the line without changing its length, either using the mouse pointer or by entering a number in the box labelled R in the Transform panel. Then move it to where you choose. I hope this helps. William

No, I took a mathematician's approach. William

The answer is 85 degrees, on the basis that the hour hand moves 30 degrees in an hour, so moves 5 degrees in 10 minutes. At exactly 11 o'clock. the hour hand is 30 degrees from the vertical, so at 10 minutes past 11 o'clock the hour hand is 25 degrees from the vertical. At 10 minutes past 11 o'clock the minute hand is 60 degrees from the vertical. 60 + 25 = 85 so the answer is 85 degrees. William

I have been trying to think how a video could advertise Affinity Publisher. With Affinity Designer there could be various adverts, each showing someone drawing something, different artwork in each advert, with different background music in each advert, watercolour with harpsichord music, line drawing with some ragtime, abstract with colourful filled shapes with some jazz, an oil type seascape with an instrumental version of Beautiful Dreamer. So several adverts and an occasional additional one so that people would look out for them. With Affinity Photo could there be someone out with a mobile phone, gathering a photograph, in a house loading it into a computer, adding some effect and printing it out and then placing the framed print on display on a wall in the house. Yet for Affinity Publisher? William

So here is a design puzzle, one which might bring @Alfred into the discussion as he may like this design puzzle. If one uses Affinity Designer to draw a clock face where the time is ten past eleven, what should be the angle between the two hands? William

https://www.alzheimers.org.uk/get-involved/world-alzheimers-day Autumn equinox time or thereabouts. How the Clock-Drawing Test Screens for Dementia (verywellhealth.com) William

But if it were framed and on a gallery wall, what would people make of it? I am reminded of the following. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/may/27/pair-of-glasses-left-on-us-gallery-floor-mistaken-for-art William