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Feedback on Help Files and Spotlight etc... Old interfaces? A bit of attention is needed.


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Ok, so I'm trying to find my way around the iPad interface, but I'm discovering that there are some major inconsistencies in what I'm seeing on my iPad, and what I'm seeing in the online help files on the Affinity website and discussions. Including in Affinity Spotlight. In fact, it looks a lot like the Spotlight tutorial for Pen Tools is either very old - or done on the Desktop. The Context Tools don't look a lot like any version I'm using. The interface looks very little like my iPad interface in relation to the context toolbars. And of course the in-app help file while useful as a reference tool is practically useless when working because it's inaccessible from within a project. The in-app help file can't be printed out. Doesn't appear to exist anywhere outside the app, and so remains interesting, but all but useless in a working environment as I mentioned.

I started out by looking at the Move Tool screen, and the default Context toolbar. I wanted to know what the options all meant. The arcane little icons especially the little group of six in the right-hand side have no tags, no pop-up-names, nothing. Unless you exit the project, go to the main opening splash screen, and open Help, then search for Move Tool. and there they are, in a listing. The ONLY way of keeping a copy of that screen is a screen-grab, into Photos to print, or directly export from the screengrab to print. A nice waste of ink, because the whole interface is in dark mode and can't be changed. So it's a white print on a black background deal.

So now, armed with a printout, back into the project and see if I can remember what I was doing. And that's just for the Move tool. The same for the Pen Tool, arguably the most used tool in the system, but there we are. Exit, Help, Search, Screengrab, print, return to the project. How many help screens are there? Too many to keep going down that road.

So here I am, hoping against hope that somewhere in the not too distant future the team will address the lack of fundamental help available for the iPad versions of this great software. Because iPad Photo suffers from the same problem.

We need.

1. An external Help File. Printable or at least in Kindle/eBook format. You have the HTML file in the app. Just export it into an eBook. Just make it available online so I can print it out!

2. Context-sensitive help in-app. This should probably be number 1 actually. A big one I know. But not difficult. Hold the Pen tip on the tool for two seconds, and it displays its name and a short help. ie; 

Add New Curve Add new curve to selected curves object

Used in conjunction with any one of the other modes, it creates additional curves on the same layer as the initial curve.

Now if this is being done already - great. I'd love to know before I go crazy here with the back and forth. This is a fabulous suite of apps, for all platforms, but the iPad versions are beginning to feel like the poor cousins of the desktop guys. Don't go down the Adobe route and end up with flakey products through lack of attention to detail.

regards

Robert

 

iPad Mini 6.  256GB.

Publisher. Designer. Photo for Mac, PC & iOS 

@Affinity-Inspiration

 

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i would expect that most of the tutorials in Spotlight are based on the desktop version.

 

Serif provides a number of video tutorials for the iPad versions of Designer and Photo: https://affinity.serif.com/en-gb/tutorials/designer/ipad/

There are also some courses for sale on Udemy: https://www.udemy.com/course/the-complete-affinity-designer-for-ipad-course/

 

The online help for the desktop versions can be seen at https://affinity.help/, not sure why that doesn't seem to have been extended to include the iPad versions.

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