The Affinity hybrids

[Joachim_L]

I write this post just out of pure curiousity and I do not expect this to be considered in any way. How many lines of code do the Affinity applications really share? With the Personas you can switch from APu to AP and AD and some functions are shared when you switch back to APu although APu does not have this feature directly at hand.

Simple example: I am working right now on a manual converted from a PDF with a lot of technical drawings in APu. There are so many cluttered elements sitting next to each other and I want to tidy up the drawings, so a wire frame would be helpful. Switching to the AD Persona I can turn on wireframe view and work there. Switching back to APu Persona with wireframe view active gives me a wireframe view in APu. This means APu "understands" the wireframe view. So why is there no wireframe view in APu? There are many other areas which share functions, but are not directly available without the Personas.

So here a weird idea I have: Why not starting with a basic Affinity Master application and sell the functions of APu, AP and AD as modules? So tripled code lines could be avoided, many settings could be shared which are right now independent of each other. So we just use the Studio Link and do not have to leave the application at any time. The special Personas AD and AP have could be organised as Sub Personas.

Just an idea.

 

[walt.farrell]

It seems that much of the underlying functionality is in all three applications, and that makes sense because there's really only 1 file format, and all 3 applications understand it.

Thus, for example:

1. The UI for enabling automatic hyphenation of text in text frames is not present in Designer. 
2. However, you could open your Designer document in Publisher. If you do that, you have the UI available to enable automatic hyphenation.
3. If you enable it, and then process the document in Designer, you will find that Designer can perform automatic hyphenation.

For another, Photo does not have the UI to create text on a path. However, you can copy a path text object from a Designer file, and use text on a path in Photo.

Or if you have Publisher and Photo and Designer, you can use the Photo Persona to start recording a macro, then use the Designer Persona to create a path text object, then stop recording the macro. You now have a macro that you can use in the Photo application to turn any path or shape into a path text object. (My thanks to @Paul Mudditt for discovering that capability.)

 

[Paul Mudditt]

3 hours ago, Joachim_L said:

I write this post just out of pure curiousity and I do not expect this to be considered in any way. How many lines of code do the Affinity applications really share? With the Personas you can switch from APu to AP and AD and some functions are shared when you switch back to APu although APu does not have this feature directly at hand.

Simple example: I am working right now on a manual converted from a PDF with a lot of technical drawings in APu. There are so many cluttered elements sitting next to each other and I want to tidy up the drawings, so a wire frame would be helpful. Switching to the AD Persona I can turn on wireframe view and work there. Switching back to APu Persona with wireframe view active gives me a wireframe view in APu. This means APu "understands" the wireframe view. So why is there no wireframe view in APu? There are many other areas which share functions, but are not directly available without the Personas.

So here a weird idea I have: Why not starting with a basic Affinity Master application and sell the functions of APu, AP and AD as modules? So tripled code lines could be avoided, many settings could be shared which are right now independent of each other. So we just use the Studio Link and do not have to leave the application at any time. The special Personas AD and AP have could be organised as Sub Personas.

Just an idea.

 

Effectively that is what they have done, the Master application is actually Publisher which actually contains all the functionality of AD & AP. When you switch personas in Publisher you do not actually leave Publisher which is why it’s so fluid. If you like, AD and AP are the cut down versions targeted at slightly different applications.

So they could have gone down the route of selling “the master package” at £150 then the cut down AP and AD at £50 each but rather generously they kept them all at £50 and the “master program” simply checks that you have purchased the cut down part.

This is my personal view as a retired R&D Manager of embedded software devices, could be wrong but I’m pretty close and really admire what Andy and the team have done.

[dominik]

10 minutes ago, Paul Mudditt said:

Effectively that is what they have done, the Master application is actually Publisher which actually contains all the functionality of AD & AP. When you switch personas in Publisher you do not actually leave Publisher which is why it’s so fluid. If you like, AD and AP are the cut down versions targeted at slightly different applications.

So they could have gone down the route of selling “the master package” at £150 then the cut down AP and AD at £50 each but rather generously they kept them all at £50 and the “master program” simply checks that you have purchased the cut down part.

This is my personal view as a retired R&D Manager of embedded software devices, could be wrong but I’m pretty close and really admire what Andy and the team have done.

Interesting explanation. Thank you for that.

What I noticed is that recently the install files (on Windows) increased in size about 100 MB. I cannot imagine that this is only due to the new 'File new' dialogue. It seems there is some amount of new functionality added behind the scenes.

d.

[Steps]

I also suggested that a couple of times.

At least I want a single install/update file for the whole suite.