affinity designer AD1.8 'Expand stroke'

[Kasper-V]

I was just doodling with some shapes to try out the improved 'expand stroke', and this is what emerged. It started out as a coupe of cogs and an ellipse and a few Boolean operations, followed by a bit of inspiration and tweaking of nodes.

When I was knee-high to a sketch pad, my grandfather -- a talented draughtsman -- told me to invoke inspiration by making a random scribble and seeing what it suggested. Good to see the technique still works in the digital age!

[GarryP]

I’ve read the text and watched the video in the Spotlight article https://affinityspotlight.com/article/5-things-you-should-know-about-affinity-designer-18/ but can’t figure out what the “radical improvements” are.
As far as I can see, the functionality looks exactly the same as it was in 1.7.x. (It actually looks like it works worse in some cases that I’ve tried.)
Is there something I’m missing?

[Kasper-V]

As far as I can tell, it does put in fewer nodes than 1.7 -- usually. I haven't experimented very much yet; I still have 1.7 on my old laptop, so I'll see what's what when I get down to it.

[Murfee]

19 minutes ago, GarryP said:

As far as I can see, the functionality looks exactly the same as it was in 1.7.x. (It actually looks like it works worse in some cases that I’ve tried.)
Is there something I’m missing?

You are not missing anything, a lot less nodes are added, there are still a few problems and also with Booleans but I believe they will be fixed for the next Beta which is due very soon, it was a comment in the Mac Beta forum a few days ago.

[GarryP]

Ah, so what I’m missing is some unnecessary nodes. I suppose it’s one of those things I won’t notice much if I don’t use that feature a lot.