Search the Community

I'm long-in-the-tooth in the graphics world. I was involved with evangelizing early graphics and multimedia programs, working with Apple, at the dawn of the personal computer age. One company, Macromedia, had a great idea: Unify vector and bitmap programs under one powerful hood. Fireworks was the eventual product. Unfortunately, Macromedia made some bad business decisions, and Adobe, which badly needed Dreamweaver, and feared Fireworks, bought the company, put Dreamweaver at the front of the suite and marginalized Fireworks. Why? Because they had already joined Microsoft in the idea that a program that is complicated sells training, but TWO programs that are complicated sell even more training. More than 30 years later, we're still stuck with that legacy. It is counter-intuitive though. If you're a designer, you're in and out of Affinity Photo to do this or that, and they've given you some basic text and illustration tools, just like our friends at Adobe, to appease you so you're not in and out of two programs all day, gathering your digital pitchforks and rioting at the inefficiency of it all. If you're a photographer, and you have a messy line around someone's neck edge, you COULD spend ten minutes airbrushing it, OR, you could, if you are in a vectored environment, just build a skin tone line, up it to 2-3pt. and gaussian blur it until it matches the edge of the neck. In the real world, we have one desk, with lots of tools at our disposal, when we're doing physical layout work. Why do we need to keep two in our digital workflow? A modern program which brings the entire suite of tools together in one space, so you're not in and out of two programs, improves workflow, reduces wasted time switching, and allows creatives improved creativity that leads to better work at a lower production cost. Man hours, after all, are man hours, whether you're billing them or paying for them. Steve Jobs said it best back in 1977: Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication. So make Affinity the most sophisticated product out there and create Affinity One, a unified product, and I know that I, and thousands of other graphic and photographic professionals will be HAPPY to tell Adobe what they can do with their kludgy, klunky outdated products.

Hi, I've been using Affinity now for two professional projects and it's good. I noticed there are a few panels which can be consolidated to use the same template as the layers panel, this would lower the API surface area and improve maintainability over time. Just my 2 cents.