Jump to content
You must now use your email address to sign in [click for more info] ×

Recommended Posts

4 minutes ago, v_kyr said:

The theme of this thread is/was clearly how to add just one Undo ...

What it started off as over two years ago & what it became are two different things. 

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
Affinity Photo 
1.10.8; Affinity Designer 1.108; & all 3 V2 apps for iPad; 6th Generation iPad 32 GB; Apple Pencil; iPadOS 15.7

Link to comment
Share on other sites

3 minutes ago, carl123 said:

...The reason was because I am so used to hitting the Save icon in the toolbar that I click it without thinking (every 2 minutes or so) and because it's so convenient to do so

Now I know I could use the shortcut CTRL+S but the way I work is I tend to sit side-on to my desk just clicking away on my tablet, So CTRL+S is quite inconvenient to me and I have to take my eyes away from my screen which breaks my workflow. ...

Hmm, maybe an elapsed time autosave prefs feature would be handy to have in such situations, which then continuously performs an automatic save after a user-set elapsed time period. So you don't have to do this always manually from time to time.

☛ Affinity Designer 1.10.8 ◆ Affinity Photo 1.10.8 ◆ Affinity Publisher 1.10.8 ◆ OSX El Capitan
☛ Affinity V2.3 apps ◆ MacOS Sonoma 14.2 ◆ iPad OS 17.2

Link to comment
Share on other sites

1 hour ago, v_kyr said:

Hmm, maybe an elapsed time autosave prefs feature would be handy to have in such situations, which then continuously performs an automatic save after a user-set elapsed time period. So you don't have to do this always manually from time to time.

Something different from the current, elapsed-time Autosave function?

-- Walt
Designer, Photo, and Publisher V1 and V2 at latest retail and beta releases
PC:
    Desktop:  Windows 11 Pro, version 23H2, 64GB memory, AMD Ryzen 9 5900 12-Core @ 3.00 GHz, NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3090 

    Laptop:  Windows 11 Pro, version 23H2, 32GB memory, Intel Core i7-10750H @ 2.60GHz, Intel UHD Graphics Comet Lake GT2 and NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070 Laptop GPU.
iPad:  iPad Pro M1, 12.9": iPadOS 17.4.1, Apple Pencil 2, Magic Keyboard 
Mac:  2023 M2 MacBook Air 15", 16GB memory, macOS Sonoma 14.4.1

Link to comment
Share on other sites

21 minutes ago, walt.farrell said:

Something different from the current, elapsed-time Autosave function?

Do you mean the "File Recovery Interval"? It doesn't save a users document but rather its own temporary files of type .autosave. Indeed, they often help after an app crash but also they can be useless if Affinity can't open them any more. Also for the user they are more complex than the usual .afpub / .afdesign / .afphoto because they seem to store incremental delta changes only and require an additional main/root document.

macOS 10.14.6 | MacBookPro Retina 15" | Eizo 27" | Affinity V1

Link to comment
Share on other sites

4 minutes ago, thomaso said:

Do you mean the "File Recovery Interval"?

Yes. When it works, it serves to save the user's work across application crashes. And it generally does work well for me.

In some ways it's safer than saving back to the original file, because for some annoying reason a simple Save sometimes seems to corrupt Affinity documents, and you may not realize that has happened until you try to reopen the document. Thus I would not trust an Affinity autosave function that wrote into the original file.

-- Walt
Designer, Photo, and Publisher V1 and V2 at latest retail and beta releases
PC:
    Desktop:  Windows 11 Pro, version 23H2, 64GB memory, AMD Ryzen 9 5900 12-Core @ 3.00 GHz, NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3090 

    Laptop:  Windows 11 Pro, version 23H2, 32GB memory, Intel Core i7-10750H @ 2.60GHz, Intel UHD Graphics Comet Lake GT2 and NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070 Laptop GPU.
iPad:  iPad Pro M1, 12.9": iPadOS 17.4.1, Apple Pencil 2, Magic Keyboard 
Mac:  2023 M2 MacBook Air 15", 16GB memory, macOS Sonoma 14.4.1

Link to comment
Share on other sites

33 minutes ago, walt.farrell said:

Something different from the current, elapsed-time Autosave function?

Don't know if that WebPlus has a settable autosave time interval, but if it has I wonder why Carl then doesn't make use of that function instead of saving manually (?).

☛ Affinity Designer 1.10.8 ◆ Affinity Photo 1.10.8 ◆ Affinity Publisher 1.10.8 ◆ OSX El Capitan
☛ Affinity V2.3 apps ◆ MacOS Sonoma 14.2 ◆ iPad OS 17.2

Link to comment
Share on other sites

9 minutes ago, walt.farrell said:

...Thus I would not trust an Affinity autosave function that wrote into the original file.

An autosave function could also work backup wise instead and so saving individual time stamp related files, it doesn't have always to overwrite one and the same file. - Thus the whole is implementation dependent.

☛ Affinity Designer 1.10.8 ◆ Affinity Photo 1.10.8 ◆ Affinity Publisher 1.10.8 ◆ OSX El Capitan
☛ Affinity V2.3 apps ◆ MacOS Sonoma 14.2 ◆ iPad OS 17.2

Link to comment
Share on other sites

4 minutes ago, v_kyr said:

Don't know if that WebPlus has a settable autosave time interval, but if it has I wonder why Carl then doesn't make use of that function instead of saving manually (?).

Because autosave is a destructive process. E.g. I sometimes just work on a file to try out a few ideas or maybe a new project. There is no way I want to overwrite the original at any point in time when doing that

For destructive saving over an original file, I always want complete control of that process

I would never enable autosave in any app I use

To save time I am currently using an automated AI to reply to some posts on this forum. If any of "my" posts are wrong or appear to be total b*ll*cks they are the ones generated by the AI. If correct they were probably mine. I apologise for any mistakes made by my AI - I'm sure it will improve with time.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

20 minutes ago, walt.farrell said:

because for some annoying reason a simple Save sometimes seems to corrupt Affinity documents

So you never Save your files because it could damage them irreversibly?

Affinity Store (MSI/EXE): Affinity Suite (ADe, APh, APu) 2.4.0.2301
Dell OptiPlex 7060, i5-8500 3.00 GHz, 16 GB, Intel UHD Graphics 630, Dell P2417H 1920 x 1080, Windows 11 Pro, Version 23H2, Build 22631.3155.
Dell Latitude E5570, i5-6440HQ 2.60 GHz, 8 GB, Intel HD Graphics 530, 1920 x 1080, Windows 11 Pro, Version 23H2, Build 22631.3155.
Intel NUC5PGYH, Pentium N3700 2.40 GHz, 8 GB, Intel HD Graphics, EIZO EV2456 1920 x 1200, Windows 10 Pro, Version 21H1, Build 19043.2130.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

23 minutes ago, Pšenda said:

So you never Save your files because it could damage them irreversibly?

I usually Save As into a file with a different name or with a version number.

If feeling particularly paranoid I might Save As twice, with different names (v2a and v2b, for example) and then Open v2a to verify it saved correctly. If it did I can then delete v2b. But I seldom go that far.

-- Walt
Designer, Photo, and Publisher V1 and V2 at latest retail and beta releases
PC:
    Desktop:  Windows 11 Pro, version 23H2, 64GB memory, AMD Ryzen 9 5900 12-Core @ 3.00 GHz, NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3090 

    Laptop:  Windows 11 Pro, version 23H2, 32GB memory, Intel Core i7-10750H @ 2.60GHz, Intel UHD Graphics Comet Lake GT2 and NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070 Laptop GPU.
iPad:  iPad Pro M1, 12.9": iPadOS 17.4.1, Apple Pencil 2, Magic Keyboard 
Mac:  2023 M2 MacBook Air 15", 16GB memory, macOS Sonoma 14.4.1

Link to comment
Share on other sites

36 minutes ago, walt.farrell said:

I usually Save As into a file with a different name or with a version number.

If feeling particularly paranoid I might Save As twice, with different names (v2a and v2b, for example) and then Open v2a to verify it saved correctly. If it did I can then delete v2b. But I seldom go that far.

I also prefer "Save As" to "Save" - it happened too often that a simple "Save" resulted in the error message "can't read / file lost / must close now", which is particularly strange as 1.) there were no problems while I was working and 2.) the Affinity document was still open and available when this message occurred. I suspect it is a nasty bug in the way Affinity handles its various temporary files/folders and possibly cleans up data junk, rather than a problem with the 'affected' documents at all.

Instead of using different names, I use an additional subfolder to Save As a copy with the same name and immediately, while that copy is still open, I do another Save As with an identical name back to the original path, overwriting the previous Affinity document on purpose. This way I don't have to worry about the names and can limit the number of files to two.

macOS 10.14.6 | MacBookPro Retina 15" | Eizo 27" | Affinity V1

Link to comment
Share on other sites

1 hour ago, thomaso said:

resulted in the error message "can't read / file lost / must close now", which is particularly strange as 1.) there were no problems while I was working and 2.) the Affinity document was still open and available when this message occurred. I suspect it is a nasty bug in the way Affinity handles its various temporary files/folders and possibly cleans up data junk, rather than a problem with the 'affected' documents at all.

Remember that the Affinity applications don't necessarily read the entire file into memory at one time. They'll read part of it, and later read more as they need it. If the file can't be accessed for some reason when doing that second (third, etc.) read to get more of the file in, you might get that message.

1 hour ago, thomaso said:

Instead of using different names, I use an additional subfolder to Save As a copy with the same name and immediately, while that copy is still open, I do another Save As with an identical name back to the original path, overwriting the previous Affinity document on purpose.

The problem with that is, that until you open the first file you saved with Save As, you can't be sure it was saved successfully. And until you've verified that, overwriting the original file isn't safe, because you might end up with no good copies of the file left. But, again, that's a consideration for someone who's pretty worried about things going wrong.

-- Walt
Designer, Photo, and Publisher V1 and V2 at latest retail and beta releases
PC:
    Desktop:  Windows 11 Pro, version 23H2, 64GB memory, AMD Ryzen 9 5900 12-Core @ 3.00 GHz, NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3090 

    Laptop:  Windows 11 Pro, version 23H2, 32GB memory, Intel Core i7-10750H @ 2.60GHz, Intel UHD Graphics Comet Lake GT2 and NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070 Laptop GPU.
iPad:  iPad Pro M1, 12.9": iPadOS 17.4.1, Apple Pencil 2, Magic Keyboard 
Mac:  2023 M2 MacBook Air 15", 16GB memory, macOS Sonoma 14.4.1

Link to comment
Share on other sites

4 hours ago, carl123 said:

I know Affinity does not want Undo, Redo, Save icons etc in its Toolbar but what about, say, 5 configurable icons that we can assign whatever shortcut we want to them and add them to the toolbar, as we see fit, for the way we want/prefer to work with the apps? 

What icons would those configurable ones use?

As it is, it is already difficult to tell what some button icons do in various apps, not just the Affinity ones. At least most apps that include the undo & redo buttons use variations on the same 2 curved arrows, although in some apps it is hard to tell them from the very similar looking rotate image left or right ones. Save still seems mostly to use the now antiquated floppy disk icon (prompting some younger users to think a real floppy disk is a 3D printout of that icon!) but unless there is a large set of pre-built & distinctive button icons built into the app (including ones that work well for both light & dark UI mode & monochromatic iconography) then would you want to be able to make your own icons or just use some generic ones that do not suggest anything?

I guess that for Affinity, each of these configurable ones also would need short names for the '"Icon And Text" toolbar option.

It seems to be more complicated than one might think to implement this....

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
Affinity Photo 
1.10.8; Affinity Designer 1.108; & all 3 V2 apps for iPad; 6th Generation iPad 32 GB; Apple Pencil; iPadOS 15.7

Link to comment
Share on other sites

2 hours ago, walt.farrell said:

Remember that the Affinity applications don't necessarily read the entire file into memory at one time. They'll read part of it, and later read more as they need it. If the file can't be accessed for some reason when doing that second (third, etc.) read to get more of the file in, you might get that message.

Do you mean Affinity does not need to read the entire file to open it but needs to read an entire file to be able to save an opened file? If that is the case and / or the reason for these errors it seems to confirm the impression of a buggy workflow in Affinity when handling its temporary files.

2 hours ago, walt.farrell said:

The problem with that is, that until you open the first file you saved with Save As, you can't be sure it was saved successfully. And until you've verified that, overwriting the original file isn't safe, because you might end up with no good copies of the file left.

Fortunately I never experienced issues once a file got saved as successfully. Though I got these errors occasionally when re-opening a saved file it appears to happen erroneously: in the very most cases when such errors occur I can successfully open the 'affected' file with a second or third trail. This, too, makes me think the issue is not in the documents but in the way Affinity reads respectively writes and manages its temp files.

macOS 10.14.6 | MacBookPro Retina 15" | Eizo 27" | Affinity V1

Link to comment
Share on other sites

On 1/13/2020 at 8:33 PM, Marko700 said:

how to put "UNDO" (ctrl + z) button on the ribbon  ?

I find it strange and as a major shortcoming that undo and redo cannot be added to the toolbar via customization. We actually miss quite a few buttons on this toolbar.

That they are not on the toolbar by default is partially okay, but that they can't even be configured to appear on the toolbar is really annoying.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

1 hour ago, thomaso said:

Do you mean Affinity does not need to read the entire file to open it but needs to read an entire file to be able to save an opened file?

As I understand it, because the native format supports serialization, changes can be written to the end of the file during saves. But it still has to be able to read anything in the file while it is open to know what has changed since the last save ... or something along those lines.

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
Affinity Photo 
1.10.8; Affinity Designer 1.108; & all 3 V2 apps for iPad; 6th Generation iPad 32 GB; Apple Pencil; iPadOS 15.7

Link to comment
Share on other sites

On 6/17/2022 at 6:50 PM, R C-R said:

Maybe more to the point, for either platform what makes it so important to have these toolbar buttons vs. assignable keyboard shortcuts & a dedicated History panel? Like the Affinity apps, Photoshop does not have those buttons, & that does not seem to generate many complaints from its much larger user base.

One possibility for small amount of complaints might be that mobile version of Photoshop (iPad), Photoshop Express (Win/iOS/Android) and Photoshop Web (still in beta, Win, macOS, ChromeOS) all have Undo/Redo on the toolbar, as does Lightroom (Win, macOS) (basically all modern Adobe apps):

image.jpeg.7eb2c04edd131dbcbc9e5c8fcd4fe5f8.jpeg

Adobe Photoshop (and Illustrator) desktop versions (also on macOS) allow Undo and Redo as user defined action buttons (the user can basically have any menu command implemented as a button this way) -- at least from version CS6:

UPDATE: Then there are free plugins like Custom Panel Free that allow addition of menu commands, actions and tools as user-defined buttons with icons or/and labels in preferred layout so that there probably has not been much call for a native alternative.

image.jpeg.750c6c4d5142ce0e3d08a6a5c9aec7fe.jpeg

Link to comment
Share on other sites

10 hours ago, R C-R said:

What icons would those configurable ones use?

It really doesn't matter.

Just 5 generic icons that can be assigned shortcut keys that the user chooses to assign to them will be fine

E.g

numbers.png

But if Affinity chooses to, it could allow you to overwrite those 5 icons with your own - just by using the same filenames

 

 

To save time I am currently using an automated AI to reply to some posts on this forum. If any of "my" posts are wrong or appear to be total b*ll*cks they are the ones generated by the AI. If correct they were probably mine. I apologise for any mistakes made by my AI - I'm sure it will improve with time.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Actually, I wonder what this conversation is for.
Serif probably doesn't even read this information anyway.
Please check my 2017 post this is 5 years ago.
At that time, I was sending a proposal to improve the Affinity interface.
Has anything changed since then?
So I don't believe anything will change on this point anyway.

 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

11 hours ago, carl123 said:

It really doesn't matter.

I think it would matter to a lot of users because generic button icons do not say anything about what the button is for.

11 hours ago, carl123 said:

But if Affinity chooses to, it could allow you to overwrite those 5 icons with your own - just by using the same filenames

Sure, but there needs to be a lot of them because there must be ones that work well with both Light & Dark UI modes & with monochromatic iconography. They also need to be given short names for the "Icon And Text" toolbar option & possibly something for the tooltip.

I have to wonder how many users would actually use this feature & if it is worth Serif's time to develop the necessary code to make it work.

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
Affinity Photo 
1.10.8; Affinity Designer 1.108; & all 3 V2 apps for iPad; 6th Generation iPad 32 GB; Apple Pencil; iPadOS 15.7

Link to comment
Share on other sites

6 minutes ago, R C-R said:

think it would matter to a lot of users because generic button icons do not say anything about what the button is for.

If I assigned a function to a generic icon, I would remember what I had assigned. And if I didn't remember for some reason, the Tooltip would serve as a reminder.

-- Walt
Designer, Photo, and Publisher V1 and V2 at latest retail and beta releases
PC:
    Desktop:  Windows 11 Pro, version 23H2, 64GB memory, AMD Ryzen 9 5900 12-Core @ 3.00 GHz, NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3090 

    Laptop:  Windows 11 Pro, version 23H2, 32GB memory, Intel Core i7-10750H @ 2.60GHz, Intel UHD Graphics Comet Lake GT2 and NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070 Laptop GPU.
iPad:  iPad Pro M1, 12.9": iPadOS 17.4.1, Apple Pencil 2, Magic Keyboard 
Mac:  2023 M2 MacBook Air 15", 16GB memory, macOS Sonoma 14.4.1

Link to comment
Share on other sites

7 minutes ago, walt.farrell said:

If I assigned a function to a generic icon, I would remember what I had assigned. And if I didn't remember for some reason, the Tooltip would serve as a reminder.

For that to work, you would have to create the tooltip text yourself, & the app to provide some way to add it.

Edit: as for remembering what the generic icon(s) are assigned to do, that might be fine for some users that use them regularly, but I suspect a lot of users would complain that it is too easy to forget what one or more might do if they are used only infrequently, particularly if a user has added a set to each persona, and/or different ones to each Affinity app they own.

Regardless, I think developing & debugging the amount of new code needed to support this would be better spent on other things. 

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
Affinity Photo 
1.10.8; Affinity Designer 1.108; & all 3 V2 apps for iPad; 6th Generation iPad 32 GB; Apple Pencil; iPadOS 15.7

Link to comment
Share on other sites

9 minutes ago, R C-R said:

For that to work, you would have to create the tooltip text yourself, & the app to provide some way to add it.

Why?

I'm only assigning a function that the application already knows about. E.g., an Undo button is simply a way to invoke Edit > Undo, and the application already knows "Undo" and has translations of it for each of the languages supported by the UI.

-- Walt
Designer, Photo, and Publisher V1 and V2 at latest retail and beta releases
PC:
    Desktop:  Windows 11 Pro, version 23H2, 64GB memory, AMD Ryzen 9 5900 12-Core @ 3.00 GHz, NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3090 

    Laptop:  Windows 11 Pro, version 23H2, 32GB memory, Intel Core i7-10750H @ 2.60GHz, Intel UHD Graphics Comet Lake GT2 and NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070 Laptop GPU.
iPad:  iPad Pro M1, 12.9": iPadOS 17.4.1, Apple Pencil 2, Magic Keyboard 
Mac:  2023 M2 MacBook Air 15", 16GB memory, macOS Sonoma 14.4.1

Link to comment
Share on other sites

1 minute ago, walt.farrell said:

Why?

I'm only assigning a function that the application already knows about. E.g., an Undo button is simply a way to invoke Edit > Undo, and the application already knows "Undo" and has translations of it for each of the languages supported by the UI.

Where in the Affinity apps do you see a tooltip (or icon or toolbar name) for Undo, Redo, Save, etc.?

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
Affinity Photo 
1.10.8; Affinity Designer 1.108; & all 3 V2 apps for iPad; 6th Generation iPad 32 GB; Apple Pencil; iPadOS 15.7

Link to comment
Share on other sites

7 minutes ago, R C-R said:

Where in the Affinity apps do you see a tooltip (or icon or toolbar name) for Undo, Redo, Save, etc.?

I don't see a Tooltip, but the function's name is in the menu, and in the Shortcuts dialog in Preferences. The application would just need to select the lowest-level part of the name. E.g., for Undo, the last part of Edit > Undo. For Save, the last part of File > Save. Those text strings are already built-in to the apps, and that's where they would be selected from to appear in a Tooltip.

-- Walt
Designer, Photo, and Publisher V1 and V2 at latest retail and beta releases
PC:
    Desktop:  Windows 11 Pro, version 23H2, 64GB memory, AMD Ryzen 9 5900 12-Core @ 3.00 GHz, NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3090 

    Laptop:  Windows 11 Pro, version 23H2, 32GB memory, Intel Core i7-10750H @ 2.60GHz, Intel UHD Graphics Comet Lake GT2 and NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070 Laptop GPU.
iPad:  iPad Pro M1, 12.9": iPadOS 17.4.1, Apple Pencil 2, Magic Keyboard 
Mac:  2023 M2 MacBook Air 15", 16GB memory, macOS Sonoma 14.4.1

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Join the conversation

You can post now and register later. If you have an account, sign in now to post with your account.
Note: Your post will require moderator approval before it will be visible.

Guest
Reply to this topic...

×   Pasted as rich text.   Paste as plain text instead

  Only 75 emoji are allowed.

×   Your link has been automatically embedded.   Display as a link instead

×   Your previous content has been restored.   Clear editor

×   You cannot paste images directly. Upload or insert images from URL.

Loading...
×
×
  • Create New...

Important Information

Terms of Use | Privacy Policy | Guidelines | We have placed cookies on your device to help make this website better. You can adjust your cookie settings, otherwise we'll assume you're okay to continue.