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When modifying a designer file the "close" button doesn't indicate it needs to be saved. (Mac)


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When using any other program when you modify a file the "close" button on the top left always has a black dot in it to indicate that you need to save it. Is there a way to have this happen in affinity designer? I know you can see that it needs to be saved by it saying "[Modified]" but I find the black dot easier to see.

Not Saved.png

Saved.png

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There is no way to do this in the Mac Affinity apps. Part of the reason for this may be that the red 'Close" button closes the workspace window -- it does not in itself have anything to do with the document (if any) open in the app.

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

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1 hour ago, Fixx said:

[Modified] in title bar is clear, but so is * in Adobe apps.

If more than one document is open in tabs in the Affinity apps, "[Modified]" is shortened to "[M]" in the tab name. In the Dark UI the same low contrast issue that some of us have been complaining about since AD was first released for Macs can make it difficult to see that in any of the tabs other than the current one. 😠

 

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

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Even without the black dot AD gives me the option to save anything modified when clicked on the red dot, Affinity Designer>Quit, either cmd W or cmd Q are pressed.  With multiple unsaved files there are multiple warnings.

400052352_ScreenShot2020-02-15at6_52_42AM.png.edda63969387a4f9b257a9af63129f27.png329189517_ScreenShot2020-02-15at6_53_03AM.png.de9b71600be7048deb4ccb9f4694932f.png

I always thought that was enough or a warning.  So I don't see what good the black dot would be.

iMac (27-inch, Late 2009) with macOS Sierra

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1 hour ago, Gear maker said:

I always thought that was enough or a warning.  So I don't see what good the black dot would be.

A hard-to-miss, totally passive indicator is desirable because it is a constant reminder that a document has unsaved changes. In an idea world where apps never crashed & all computers had uninterruptible power supplies so nothing ever would be lost, that omission would not be important. In the real world it is.

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

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13 minutes ago, h_d said:

"You're only as good as your last save," feller say.

You're only as good as your most recent redundant saves permit.

Or as an Apple developer once said, you don't own any data until it is saved to a minimum of two independent locations.

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

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6 hours ago, Fixx said:

[Modified] in title bar is clear, but so is * in Adobe apps.

Edit: about the *:

Not only in Adobe apps, it's universal (sometimes in the tab name, on some other apps at the begining of the path displayed), and can be seen with a lot  of tabs opened or in a list of currently opened documents. At least on Windows, I can't remember if it was the same for all the apps when I was on OS X.

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15 minutes ago, Wosven said:

Edit: about the *:

Not only in Adobe apps, it's universal (sometimes in the tab name, on some other apps at the begining of the path displayed), and can be seen with a lot  of tabs opened or in a list of currently opened documents. At least on Windows, I can't remember if it was the same for all the apps when I was on OS X.

I could be wrong but I don't think the * was ever universal in Mac apps. That said, the latest 1.8 Affinity Mac betas have, according to the introductory posts for each one, "Implemented unified toolbar for appropriately modern macOS versions."

What that means is the 'traffic light' window control buttons, the application's toolbar buttons, & (optionally) the name of the document all appear in one row in the toolbar for Mojave & Catalina users. So for example, the left side of my heavily customized toolbar in the 1.8.0.2 AD Mac beta looks like this:

365926996_unifiedtoolbar.jpg.0956bc6d61921e5e7b87643adbbd1ba6.jpg

As you can see, the "Status" item for this unsaved document includes the * to indicate it has unsaved changes. However, if there are several documents open in tabs, the beta still uses the "[M]" in each tab for this.

I don't know if that will be changed for the final release but as I mentioned the Dark UI visibility issue remains a problem in the tabs because only the current document's tab is white text on a medium grey background. The text on others is a medium grey that is only slightly lighter than the background grey. Plus, the tab text is even smaller than for "Personas" in the screenshot.

That makes it hard enough just to read its name or the "[M]", much less something as small as a * character!

Adjusting the UI gamma has never been a viable fix for this -- no matter how it is set the UI looks washed out & there is no setting that increases the contrast between the greys enough to make unselected things easy to see. It is the equivalent of suggesting that someone should use a sledgehammer to drive a small brad because there is no tack hammer in the toolkit.

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

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3 hours ago, R C-R said:

I could be wrong but I don't think the * was ever universal in Mac apps.

In universal, I thought cross plateform as in OS X, Windows and the Linux distro I used :)

And they were present in tabs for PS, QXD, and other apps I used. I'm not fond of the way the tab is include between toos and icons for apps in your example. I always prefer a hierarchical view in apps using tabs.

About the poor contrast, it wasn't possible to have a better one with the gamma UI setting on Windows either. The "*" seems greyer than the name of the file, and it would be easier to see if it was appended to the last parenthesis (since we read the text more easily that searching the end of a tab of an *).

 

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8 hours ago, Wosven said:

I'm not fond of the way the tab is include between toos and icons for apps in your example. I always prefer a hierarchical view in apps using tabs.

In the Affinity "unified toolbar" implementation, the item showing the document name & save status is called the "Status" item, like my screenshot shows. It can be moved left or right or hidden using the usual Customized Toolbar options, but there is no way in the Mojave or later betas to move it up into a separate 'un-unified' header that just shows the 3 'traffic light' window control buttons on the left & the document title & save status centered in the header with nothing else in the header & all the app's tools & buttons below that in a separate toolbar.

Support for the unified toolbar was added in some earlier macOS version but until recently it has not adopted by very many apps. 

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

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The discussion about indicating that a file has been modified, and how the apps should behave, has been held before, in the announcement of Affinity Publisher Customer Beta 1.8.0.499.

With regards to consistency, this is what i had found out:

"I've done a bit more research on the behaviour of Apple's own 'creative' apps. After all they're supposed to set the standard. This is what came out of it (Application/UI Style/Solution for 'dirty' file):

  • Keynote/Pages/Numbers (iWork) - Tabbed - Suffix
  • TextEdit - Tabbed - Suffix
  • Preview - Tabbed - Suffix
  • Motion - Windowed - Dot
  • iMovie - Single Document only - No indication

Sample size may be a bit small but it looks like Apple is showing some consistency. When the UI style is Tabbed, they make use of a suffix, when it's Windowed, they use the dot (iMovie looks like a special case since the document is always saved, once a file name has been assigned).

So it looks like Serif has shown a solution for dirty files which is close to Apple's own solution. The UI style of Affinity apps is tabbed, and the indication for dirty files is suffix in the file name. If they follow Apple 100% it should read 'Edited', but, given the issues discussed above around available room in the toolbar, using the Star makes sense (to me at least)."

Affinity Photo - Affinity Designer - Affinity Publisher | macOS Sonoma (14.2) on 16GB MBP14 2021 with 2.4 versions

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49 minutes ago, RNKLN said:

Sample size may be a bit small but it looks like Apple is showing some consistency. When the UI style is Tabbed, they make use of a suffix, when it's Windowed, they use the dot ...

The Mac Affinity apps support multiple UI styles: normal window mode is tabbed, while separated window mode is windowed ... & can include document windows that are tabbed:

1636172866_sepmode3docs.jpg.9285fc0aaf46324443b1c48f15e11ae8.jpg

This is a bit unusual in that since none of the three documents have ever been saved, they all use the same default placeholder "<Unsaved>" name, which can be confusing. Of course, this is a beta so maybe the retail version can improve on that with defaults like "<Unsaved_1> " & "<Unsaved_2>" or some such.

I used the Light UI for the screenshot so it would be easy to see everything, including all the 'unsaved' indicators. However, things are not quite so obvious in the Dark UI -- the "<Untitled> [M]" in document #2's tab looks like this: 155316031_untitledM.jpg.199e6b3a73f70edf25e9b43d9d72fdad.jpg

Except for that, I think there is ample indication that a document has unsaved changes.

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

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