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[1.8.0.499] Serif vs Apple Defaults option


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As I mentioned here, it probably would be a good idea to display a warning dialog if the  "Apple Defaults" button is pressed with a reminder to save to an .afshortcuts file the current shortcuts & a cancel button before changing anything. Either that or change the button behavior to a toggle between the Apple & current shortcuts or some such.

Also, at least while using my Mac Extended keyboard with the beta, with the Apple Defaults, in the preferences panel the 4 shortcuts for baseline are displayed like this:

872267227_Appledefaults.jpg.3648d83503f30d8e5670d30e9f281f6d.jpg

But in the Text > Baseline submenu they are displayed like this:

845977033_Appledefaultsmenu.jpg.b411438ea19ed37c9699fae2d43cbc7c.jpg

Apart from the different icons used for the home & end keyboard keys, the two shortcuts using the Home key (the upward angled arrow in the prefs panel) are missing from the submenu, implying that just pressing the option keyboard key will lower the baseline, which of course it will not.

FWIW, I think with 'old style' US Apple Extended keyboards like I still use the vertical arrows pointing to a horizontal line are used by the OS for the Home & End keys, which explains the difference between the prefs & menu display for the raise & precise raise shortcut icons, so that is no big deal, but the missing Home key icons in the menu needs to be fixed.

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I've logged the shortcuts not being updated on the menu items, thanks for reporting it.

Regarding the "toggle button", does the Serif Defaults button not essentially achieve this?

Serif Europe Ltd. - www.serif.com

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23 minutes ago, Jon P said:

Regarding the "toggle button", does the Serif Defaults button not essentially achieve this?

If you mean the "Reset" button, it also wipes out all my custom shortcuts. I don't want that!

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5 hours ago, garrettm30 said:

That has been one of the confusing things to me. I see no Serif Defaults button, though the beta release notes seem to imply I should find that terminology somewhere.

Same here. From this post by @AdamW, apparently it should be in Preferences > Keyboard Shortcuts, with the second popup set to 'Text Input'. But all I see is the same set of buttons as with any other Keyboard Shortcuts popup setting:

1038279165_kbdshortcutsAPub.jpg.f1995786b73a55dd4a2ad96d999fcb5e.jpg

That is part of why I suggested the 'are you sure' warning item for the Apple Defaults button -- it is always there & always live.

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1 hour ago, Jon P said:

The "Serif Defaults" button only appears in English not English (US), so that's why there is some confusion!

If I switch the app to English I do see the "Serif Defaults" button instead of the "Reset" button, so I assume that regardless of the name it has the same function.

If so, it is still a potential source of confusion because (if I have this right) the Apple Defaults button only resets (some?) text related shortcuts to the Apple equivalents, while the Serif Defaults button resets all keyboard shortcuts to the Affinity defaults (& for that reason it probably should be labeled "Affinity Shortcuts").

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40 minutes ago, R C-R said:

the Apple Defaults button only resets (some?) text related shortcuts

No, I think it resets all shortcuts. It appears that "Apple Defaults," "Serif Defaults" (Reset on mine) and "Clear All Shortcuts" all three work in a parallel way: they all basically just reset to default, the only difference being which default is used. Each button will override every custom shortcut you may have entered.

That seems to be the case in the experimenting I have been doing. Have you found a case where the Apple Defaults does not reset certain shortcuts?

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I have to say that I immediately set my copy of Publisher to the Apple Defaults because I really need to use the old Option Arrow (left, right) to navigate in text. I will get around to setting something up for kerning and tracking later. I expected to lose all the Affinity and custom shortcuts and did.

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Affinity Designer 2.4.0 | Affinity Photo 2.4.0 | Affinity Publisher 2.4.0 | Beta versions as they appear.

I have never mastered color management, period, so I cannot help with that.

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1 hour ago, garrettm30 said:

No, I think it resets all shortcuts.

I had not noticed that "Apple Defaults" resets all shortcuts to the Affinity defaults but you are right about that. That makes no sense to me  & certainly was not the behavior I expected, mainly because for many (most?) of the Affinity shortcuts there are no default Apple shortcut equivalents!!! >:(

Moreover, in the first Affinity Publisher Customer Beta 1.8.0.499 post, @AdamW described the feature thusly (emphasis added):

Quote

Text Editing Keys
Choose between 'Serif Defaults' or 'Apple Defaults' for text editing keys. e.g. Serif default for 'Move to Beginning of Word' is <Cmd>-<Left Arrow> whereas Apple default is <Alt>-<Left Arrow>. Available via Preferences.

Surely, that means the intention was for this to affect only text editing keyboard shortcut keys, not each & every keyboard shortcut key?

Regardless of the intention, I think this is the way it should work, that there should be a warning for either default button if any custom shortcuts have been created, & to be a bit pedantic about it that the "Serif Defaults" button should be named "Affinity Defaults" instead.

 

1 hour ago, garrettm30 said:

It appears that "Apple Defaults," "Serif Defaults" (Reset on mine) and "Clear All Shortcuts" all three work in a parallel way: they all basically just reset to default, the only difference being which default is used.

"Clear All Shortcuts" does exactly that -- it deletes all shortcuts, including the default Affinity ones.

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2 hours ago, garrettm30 said:

No, I think it resets all shortcuts. It appears that "Apple Defaults," "Serif Defaults" (Reset on mine) and "Clear All Shortcuts" all three work in a parallel way: they all basically just reset to default, the only difference being which default is used. Each button will override every custom shortcut you may have entered.

Yes, that seems to be what I have experienced as well.

  • Apple Defaults resets all custom shortcuts assigned by the user, as does Serif Defaults
  • The only difference between these two options is the assignment of the shortcuts related to text-editing. In the case of the Apple Defaults button, the text-editing shortcuts of Apple are used, while in the case of the Serif Defaults button, the text-editing shortcuts of Serif are used.

So I have to concur, the description of the feature wasn’t particularly easy to understand. On the other hand, the UI seems to make it reasonably clear that you are resetting all your shortcuts by clicking any of these buttons. For otherwise, the Apple Defaults button would not be visible, whatever menu or tool context you select, using the fly-out menus immediately above the buttons. The Apple Defaults button would probably only appear when you select Text. Does that make sense? :)

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3 hours ago, A_B_C said:

On the other hand, the UI seems to make it reasonably clear that you are resetting all your shortcuts by clicking any of these buttons.

I don't think that is true for the "Apple Defaults" button, for the reasons I already mentioned. But even if you assume "Apple Defaults" means the defaults for Apple's own desktop apps, which app(s) does that refer to, & in what context(s)?

For example, compare the plethora of default keyboard shortcuts for Apple's Pages.app to those for TextEdit.app, where there are not very many, even in "Rich Text" mode (& CMD+Shift+T toggles between rich & plain text modes).

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I agree, they could change the labels of the buttons. But how? :/

As I found … and I guess that’s true …, the Apple Defaults button does the same as the Serif Defaults button except that it changes the shortcuts related to text-editing to the ones used by macOS.

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6 minutes ago, A_B_C said:

I agree, they could change the labels of the buttons. But how? :/

I think they should change the function of the Apple Defaults button, not its name. That button should change only a well documented & limited set of text entry related shortcuts to those most commonly used in Mac desktop apps (for example in Finder, which is an app).

That would give users an option to keep any custom shortcuts they have created for anything not in that limited set, or by clicking that button after clicking the other Defaults button (which I think should be named Affinity Defaults) to do what the Apple Defaults button does now.

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You should find that most Apple shortcuts work even if they aren't listed. For example, Ctrl+k will delete-to-end-of-line by default. Also holding down a letter like 'a' will offer a range of accented variants. Support for this stuff is partly provided by MacOS. Exposing it in a way that lets users disable it seemed a bit pointless. If you define a shortcut to use Ctrl+k, it will hide the Apple text command, but I doubt many people use it.

The few Apple shortcuts that didn't work are things like Cmd+Left, that were used for changing kerning, leading, and baseline. One issue to be aware of is that if you switch to Apple shortcuts, so Cmd+Left becomes move-to-line-start, then shortcut for kerning changes. So it's not just text entry commands that are affected.

Previously we had two buttons, Reset and Clear all shortcuts. Both of them would remove all user customisation without warning. 1.8 effectively adds another Reset, to different defaults, and it works the same way as the other two. I think this is clearer and simpler than having the three buttons work differently with some only affecting a handful of shortcuts and some affecting all. We've never had an "Are you sure?" prompt for the old two buttons so we didn't add one for the new button either.

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6 hours ago, Dave Harris said:

Support for this stuff is partly provided by MacOS. Exposing it in a way that lets users disable it seemed a bit pointless.

Maybe I am not being clear but I am not asking for that. What I would prefer is for the Apple Defaults button to affect only any text-related shortcuts that differ in the Affinity apps from those provided globally by the Mac OS. So for example it would have no effect on the accent feature for certain held down keys, which BTW can be changed in at least some supported Mac OS versions via a 'defaults write' terminal command back to the old key repeat behavior. (A bit off-topic but If anyone is interested in that the attached Repeat or use accents.zip includes an AppleScript app that makes it simple to toggle between the two behaviors. It should work on 10.13.x or earlier but has not been tested on later OS versions.)

The 'global' part is an important consideration because both Apple's own apps & third party ones can have different sets of text-related keyboard shortcuts, not all of which are the same or even available in all those apps. For example, if you have Apple's Pages.app installed, open its keyboard shortcuts help page & compare that to the ones available in TextEdit or Finder. (In fact, from what I can tell for Pages, the defaults vary somewhat depending on the attached keyboard & language.) That's why I suggested that the affected shortcuts should be well documented in Affinity's help -- otherwise, the only way to know what will change is by experimentation.

6 hours ago, Dave Harris said:

Previously we had two buttons, Reset and Clear all shortcuts. Both of them would remove all user customisation without warning.  1.8 effectively adds another Reset, to different defaults, and it works the same way as the other two.

The old names made it reasonably clear that they would do that. IMO, that is somewhat less clear for "Apple Defaults" & for "Serif Defaults" -- otherwise I doubt this topic would have received any attention from other users. I understand why you might be reluctant to add an "Are you sure?" prompt to the apps, but I think clarity would be improved if at the least "Apple Defaults" was changed to "MacOS Defaults" & "Serif Defaults" was either reverted back to "Reset" or maybe to "Affinity Defaults."

Edited by R C-R
typo "Mac Defaults" corrected to "MacOS Defaults"

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3 hours ago, R C-R said:

The old names made it reasonably clear that they would do that. IMO, that is somewhat less clear for "Apple Defaults" & for "Serif Defaults"

I agree with this 100%.

The reset behavior is not strongly implied by the new button names, and switching to those names is problematic if you are keeping the old behavior without presenting a warning or at least labeling them clearly in the window as being resets.

One way to do this would be to put them in a group box of some kind that was labeled "Reset to:" to call this out.  Another would be to stack the buttons vertically so there is more space and actually name the buttons "Reset to Serif Defaults" and "Reset to Apple Defaults".  Either way this should really be made more clear if you are going to keep the functionality this way.

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41 minutes ago, garrettm30 said:

Besides which, for the sake of plain old accidental clicks, I like confirmation on operations that are not easily undone. After more than 30 years using a mouse, I find I still miss my target on occasion.

I think that would be more consistent with most of the other non-undoable operations in the Affinity (& many other) apps, but as long as we are talking about that, why is it that there is an 'are you sure' warning when deleting a brush but not when deleting a macro from the Library panel? I find it much too easy to accidentally delete a macro when I just wanted to rename it! >:(

But if we can't have 'are you sure' confirmations for these buttons, could we at least have popup tooltips that say a bit more about the extent of what they effect?

Anyway, since it seems the names are going to be changed, these are the (English language) ones I would prefer, & briefly why:

  • MacOS Defaults, because they are provided by the Mac OS.
  • Affinity Defaults, because "Serif Defaults" could conceivably be confused with the defaults for their 'legacy' PC-only products.
  • Delete ALL shortcuts, because everybody should know what "delete" means.

It would also be helpful if these buttons were a bit harder to hit by accident, like by making them a little less tall, with a bit smaller text, &  no wider than necessary.

All 3 1.10.8, & all 3 V2.4.1 Mac apps; 2020 iMac 27"; 3.8GHz i7, Radeon Pro 5700, 32GB RAM; macOS 10.15.7
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