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Status: Beta Release Purpose: New features, fixes Requirements: Purchased Affinity Designer Mac App Store: Not Submitted Download: Here This is the first beta of a substantial change to our codebase and as much as we have tried to ensure the quality of the code, it should be considered to be not suitable for production use. This means that you should not attempt to use it for commercial purposes or for any other activity that you may be adversely affected by the application failing. In addition it is definitely worth noting that files created in Affinity 1.5 cannot be opened in 1.4 so always make a copy of your important documents before opening them in 1.5 to ensure you do not accidentally overwrite them and are unable to open them in your 1.4 version. To use this beta, simply download the file from the link given above and double-click on the file to open the installer. Follow the instructions to install the beta version. The beta sits alongside the Mac App Store version and will not interfere with it. I am hoping for a brief video overview of the new headline features from Ash very soon and I'll add a link here when it arrives, but here's a quick summary in the interim... Summary: Symbols - Objects can be made into symbols and remain editable on document at all times - instantly updating other instances. The 'Sync' button on the Symbols panel controls whether changes will be made to all instances, or just the current instance. Found on 'View'->'Studio'->'Symbols' Constraints - Objects can be made to constrain in certain ways when their parents change. For example, an object could be anchored to a corner of its parent and told to not scale when the parent is scaled. This is powerful for UI mockups and allows you to see in realtime how dialogs may scale, for example. Found on 'View'->'Studio'->'Constraints' Assets - We now have an Assets panel that you can use to drag any documents into from your document. Dragging items back out creates new objects from them. You can also add Symbols to your Assets if you wish. Found on 'View'->'Studio'->'Assets' Text Styles - We've added support for text styles - and it's really very powerful... It probably needs a video tutorial all to itself to describe how to use it properly! Found on 'View'->'Studio'->'Text Styles' Export Persona - The Export Persona has much greater functionality, allowing you to specify many export sizes and formats from each slice area/object. It also has presets for creating common icons, making Xcode asset JSON and even for creating JSON export for Spine (2D animation software by esotericsoftware.com - we're not affiliated with them in any way, but they suggested they'd like to use Designer for content creation so we tried to enable it) Snapping - This has been greatly improved, as has the 'candidate' snapping system (there are options for this in the snapping setup). We now also support 'gaps and spans' to aid with object construction and object geometry snapping. We will soon add 'measuring' Colour Picker Tool - We've added a colour picker as a dedicated tool. I'm open to suggestions on your favourite shortcut key for this one and we'll add it next time :) Styles - Now has a 'spotlight' style search box. Tool shortcut fixes for International keyboards. You can now drop colours from programs like Chroma (by softpress.com - again, no affiliation but they mentioned they'd like to do it, so we tried) directly onto objects on the document. Embedded documents should now usually export as vector elements rather than being rasterised. Many PDF/PSD import/export improvements. You can now choose which artboard to display for an embedded document (if it contained artboards) rather than being forced to see the whole document. Selection has been improved to hopefully stop people getting frustrated about not being able to click to select the things they can see! New Beta Icon - Perhaps the biggest change, we've finally thrown out the old Beta icon and its terrible, terrible 'chain' hanging the beta sign off the icon! Hurrah! Known Problems: I've accidentally left the Links panel available in the UI and also the option to mirror the document to iOS is still there too... I'd encourage everyone not to delve into any of this... The Links panel allows you to specify for any object which artboard it will transition to and in what way it will transition when it is touched. It's only of any use to you if you have the iOS Mirror application (which we aren't ready to release yet) and by enabling the links on your objects, you may well be left with a document which will not open again in the future if the developer decides to change anything... Also, the Artboard Tool's context toolbar includes Header and Footer controls - this is also related to previewing on the iOS Mirror application and is to enable scrolling website mockups. So there you go, you know what we're up to a little ahead of time, but it would take me too long to build the whole application again without it all! ;) Embedded documents in colour formats/profiles which are different to the parent document might draw strangely - this will be fixed for the next beta, sorry. Assets and Symbols are all currently assumed to be in the current document format and colour space - again, this will be fixed for the next beta, sorry. They also don't currently get snapped as you drop them onto the document - this will be fixed shortly, too. The Future: We'll try to update the beta a lot more regularly again, hopefully weekly but it will depend on whether enough is ready to warrant a new beta. Expect this first beta to have a few snags, but we'll try to get them turned around and a new beta out very quickly when they are identified. We have a number of other smaller things to tweak that will hopefully improve the whole experience subtly and these will also appear in the coming weeks.