Affinity Designer for macOS - 1.8.3

[Patrick Connor]

We are pleased to announce an update for the MacOS release of Affinity Designer, to version 1.8.3

Changes in this build

The changes in Affinity Designer for MacOS 1.8.3 (over the last release Affinity Designer macOS 1.8.2) are as follows:

Fixes & Improvements:

• Fix for collinear curve segments causing boolean operations to fail.
• Fix for exiting pixel preview mode when Guides are toggled on/off.
• Fix for expand stroke applied to objects with sharply varying pressure profiles near their start/end..
• Fix for boolean ops acting differently on larger objects by accident.
• Fix for deleting the last curve handle (and hence deleting the object) causing selection to be lost.
• Additional PDF export fix (related to converting colour profiles in exported images).
• Fix for autosave/recover not working correctly when crashing while and editing existing documents.
• Fix for focus issues with the Colour Studio when tabbing between text fields with a selected object.
• Improved selection behaviour when nodes and layers are deleted.
• Improved boolean geometry results (not Divide).
• Alignment Panel tweaks
• Fix XOR selection logic 
• Fixed Designer no longer being able to choose ‘Document’ for an embedded document’s artboard
• Many PDF export fixes and improvements.
• Fix for some selection-related problems while trying to xor selections.
• Help and Localisation improvements

Earlier changes and fixes in 1.8 since 1.7 (including the new 1.8 features) are listed in some detail in this 1.8.1 update announcement.

 

UPDATING TO THIS VERSION (Free for existing customers)

The software version can be seen on the splash screen and the About dialog (in application menu, Affinity Designer > About).

If you’ve purchased from the Mac App Store— updates are done automatically next time you run your software after it is available in the Mac App Store. If this does not happen for you, open the Mac App Store app and go to the Updates page and then Store > Reload page or press CMD+R. This should hopefully force the update to show. Apple sometimes phase roll outs around the world which can mean it may take up to 72 hours for your update to be available.

If you’ve purchased from the Affinity Store— each time you start the software it will check for updates and offer to download and install any available update, or in the application main menu there is an option Check for Updates. You can download the latest installer by logging into the affinity store here and find the order in your account and use the "Download" button in there. Alternatively, this new release (and previous versions of Affinity Designer for macOS) can be downloaded from this link (that installer is NOT for Mac App Store purchases and needs a product key).

[Patrick Connor]

All Readers

This thread is solely for commenting on this announcement.

Please do not post bugs or problems that you find when using this version of the software in this thread, instead make a new thread in the Designer Bugs on MacOS section and questions about usage go in the Desktop Questions forum.

[Jeremy Bohn]

Update is available for me in Western Canada, Mac App Store.

[Jaybaysg]

It is now 2022 and the same issue still persists on most .ai files.

You try opening the file and a blank dartboard appears

[walt.farrell]

6 hours ago, Jaybaysg said:

It is now 2022 and the same issue still persists on most .ai files.

You try opening the file and a blank dartboard appears

AI files are a proprietary, undocumented format that Affinity supports only when the user told Illustrator to save the file in Compatibility Mode, which adds a PDF copy that contains some (but not all) of the data.

From some other comments in the forums, it seems there are no other applications which can open AI files completely correctly. Some get more data than Affinity applications get, but some get less, and none get all. To get any data without Compatibility Mode a developer needs to do extensive experimentation and reverse engineering to figure out the contents of the file.