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Free Transform, Perspective & Warp Tools


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13 hours ago, Phojoegraphy said:

I really enjoy the Affinity interface. It's become second nature after a few years, especially since I'm using Affinity Photo in place of PS now. I found VectorStyler via this thread and it's already got a tremendous feature set. However, while it's more intuitive than illustrator out of the gate, it's not quite as intuitive as Affinity. That and I have tons of assets and brushes I rely on keep me here. VS has a TON of features that Designer really needs to implement sooner rather than later. Being able to copy & paste between AD and VS is a huge timesaver to leverage those features Designer doesn't have. I don't mind bouncing over to VS for a quick distort - but I'm sure that won't last long. I hope Affinity catches Designer up a bit as I feel it's definitely stagnated in terms of new features as of late. It's got me starting to look over at the neighbor's yard longingly. 

Well said great leader - homage.... homage

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13 hours ago, ceocan said:

Sounds like Sherif needs to step up their game with VectorStyler coming on the stage!

I don't think Serif will ever focus on advanced vector tools in Designer - I don't see any traces of such intentions and they certainly didn't hire vector gfx specialists recently. Nor did they allocate time to the single one they have who was and is in fact struggling to get booleans and expand stroke to work properly for years. If is was due to lack of qualifications, it is a disaster. If it was due to lack of business priorities that fixing these issues were put on hold for years, it is a disaster that tells you how little vector features means to Serif.

It is quite obvious that the developers involved in VectorStyler are extremely qualified. They certainly also have higher ambitions algorithm-wise / output-wise.

  • "The user interface is supposed to work for me - I am not supposed to work for the user interface."
  • Computer-, operating system- and software agnostic; I am a result oriented professional. Look for a fanboy somewhere else.
  • “When a wise man points at the moon the imbecile examines the finger.” ― Confucius
  • Not an Affinity user og forum user anymore. The software continued to disappoint and not deliver.
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I've had a quick play with VectorStyler. The features are impressive, far closer to AI than AD is, however I thought that some of the UI was a bit clunky and sometimes downright weird and the overall look is a bit blah, not hideous but not nice either. I've not tried a project in it yet, not 100% sure I will, and that's when you find out if it really is any good or how annoying bits of it are.

 

Marc

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9 hours ago, VectorVonDoom said:

and that's when you find out if it really is any good or how annoying bits of it are.

I think as it stands, the layers in Vectorstyler are really annoying, as there doesn't seem to be an easy way to place items to a specific place in the layer stack, unless this is a bug, as all the copy and paste options seem to disregard the current layer you have selected and only paste to the top or bottom of the entire stack, At least that was my findings, so dragging through the layer stack seemed to be the only way to do it -

So frustrating to look back five years or so to when the road map was put up and it looked as though we might be approaching a finished basic toolset within a two or three years, but six years on from release we seem to be discussing Vectorstyler as a solution to plug gaps, which when finally released, will have a complete tool set -

I don't want to use Vectorstyler, I want to use Designer but what choice de we have? 

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10 hours ago, VectorVonDoom said:

I've had a quick play with VectorStyler. The features are impressive, far closer to AI than AD is, however I thought that some of the UI was a bit clunky and sometimes downright weird and the overall look is a bit blah, not hideous but not nice either. I've not tried a project in it yet, not 100% sure I will, and that's when you find out if it really is any good or how annoying bits of it are.

Well, VectorStyler dev decided to put all his skills and efforts into feature set instead of building a nice UI. And "this is the way" 😉
The UX is imo quite splendid, especially for its awesome vector features. While its UI is rough at the edges at the moment, I'm sure it will be polished before its official release.

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I keep coming back to this thread because I am interested in the topic 'Free Transform, Perspective & Warp Tools'. And all I find is an ongoing discussion about another software developer's skills in UI design. I'd call this rather off topic and not very productive or friendly towards other forum members.

Sorry, I couldn't help it to post this. I find all of this more frustrating than the lack of the features in question here.

d.

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38 minutes ago, dominik said:

I keep coming back to this thread because I am interested in the topic 'Free Transform, Perspective & Warp Tools'. And all I find is an ongoing discussion about another software developer's skills in UI design. I'd call this rather off topic and not very productive or friendly towards other forum members.

Sorry, I couldn't help it to post this. I find all of this more frustrating than the lack of the features in question here.

d.

Awww, here, here...

Well, since this whole forum is all about workarounds, usage of Inskcape, VectorStyler and other software is a workaround to Designers missing features, thus this whole discussion is very on topic, @dominik.

Sorry, but I couldn't help and post this.

Take care!

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So in conclusion... if you need perspective tools or want to discuss alternatives for this, Serif Software, the Affinity Suite or forums.affinity.serif.com is no help. All we have is people wasting time waiting or debating and nothing results from this besides hurt feelings and people using workarounds for years and years.

What did you expect from this thread? Serif is not contributing and Serif is not delivering these features either. Of course the debate will circle around what is possible and in the horizon. We cant debate a fools hope forever here... People need solutions. Not threads only with contributions from loyalists.

If you find it frustrating that customers voice their frustrations and look elsewhere, don't blame THEM. Just hope they won't vote with their feet when you loyalists try to silence them - same goes for potential costumers. The debate here will disappear when the features appear.

  • "The user interface is supposed to work for me - I am not supposed to work for the user interface."
  • Computer-, operating system- and software agnostic; I am a result oriented professional. Look for a fanboy somewhere else.
  • “When a wise man points at the moon the imbecile examines the finger.” ― Confucius
  • Not an Affinity user og forum user anymore. The software continued to disappoint and not deliver.
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2 minutes ago, CLC said:

Well, since this whole forum is all about workarounds, usage of Inskcape, VectorStyler and other software is a workaround to Designers missing features, thus this whole discussion is very on topic, @dominik.

I'm not against workarounds that involve the use of other softwares as long as the workaround concentrates on solving a task that cannot be done in AD itself. I posted things like this myself. I refer to the not too short part of the discussion about the UI and usabilty of a different software in general that has nothing to do with the topic at all.

Apart from that, the forum ist not only about workarounds. That is overexaggerating (or maybe ironic 😉 ). There are many very interesting and usefull things to find and learn.

Take care!
d.

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4 hours ago, CLC said:

Well, VectorStyler dev decided to put all his skills and efforts into feature set instead of building a nice UI. And "this is the way" 😉
The UX is imo quite splendid, especially for its awesome vector features. While its UI is rough at the edges at the moment, I'm sure it will be polished before its official release.

There's no reason you can't have both after all you're looking at it for hours at a time. The UX is far from splendid it seems cobbled together with little thought on usability or workflow. It reminds me a lot of a typical linux app, the functionality is there but it's not fun to use or look at. See how many different palettes and then dialog boxes you have to go in to to do fairly simple actions on an object.  Lots of modal dialogs are a pain anyway. Even little, and I would have thought obvious, things like direction being a slider so you have to remember angles instead of a dial.  One thing I tried was saving the object's style and effects. Once I managed to find where you do that it told me it had saved the preset. Where did it save it exactly? There isn't a preset palette according to the menu, it wasn't in the colour swatches palette, couldn't find it anywhere, so I gave up. AI sort of has an excuse of feeling a bit cobbled together as it has been added to over and over for many years and could do with a big tidy up, this can't use that excuse as it's new.

 

 

Marc

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21 hours ago, VectorVonDoom said:

There's no reason you can't have both after all you're looking at it for hours at a time. The UX is far from splendid it seems cobbled together with little thought on usability or workflow. It reminds me a lot of a typical linux app, the functionality is there but it's not fun to use or look at. See how many different palettes and then dialog boxes you have to go in to to do fairly simple actions on an object.  Lots of modal dialogs are a pain anyway. Even little, and I would have thought obvious, things like direction being a slider so you have to remember angles instead of a dial.  One thing I tried was saving the object's style and effects. Once I managed to find where you do that it told me it had saved the preset. Where did it save it exactly? There isn't a preset palette according to the menu, it wasn't in the colour swatches palette, couldn't find it anywhere, so I gave up. AI sort of has an excuse of feeling a bit cobbled together as it has been added to over and over for many years and could do with a big tidy up, this can't use that excuse as it's new.

 

Well. I believe I said VetorStyler (free beta, about a year in development) is still rough at the edges, but it delivers. I couldn't phrase this better.
With Affinity Designer (paid product, 6 years in development, app marketed as a professional solution), we do have a nice UI, but it doesn't deliver, you constantly have to use dozens of workarounds to get the job done.
What's better? To me, the product that delivers does have a splendid UX, while the product that does not doesn't have a good UX, despite it's nicer and tidy UI.
How about you?

Don't get me wrong, I still DO believe that Serif will man up and finally fixes the most annoying bugs and adds features professional designers desperately need.
I still didn't give up on Affinity, otherwise I wouldn't be here.

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The trouble with a crappy UX is that it's likely to remain a crappy UX forever, possibly becoming even worse as things are added. Although I agree AD hasn't progressed anywhere near as far as I expected, when things are added they are added to a decent UX.  Depends what your needs are. If AD fulfills them then I'd choose AD over what I've seen of VS (it will be twice the price of AD if that matters). If VS's UX was better then I could easily ignore the not too pretty UI and it would do the majority of things I swap over to AI to do. But that's a hypothetical "if" as it's unlikely to change in any major ways.

 

 

Marc

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9 hours ago, Xzenor said:

I think the lack of communication is a huge contributer to the frustration.

After the roadmap got buried, It set my mind aflight with all kinds of rammell - maybe the whole engine needs re-writing from scratch in order to simply drag the corner node of a group of vector objects? - maybe the capability is all in place, it just needs switching on once the comedy value has died down and the Affinity gods have done laughing? - maybe "professional" designers and Illustrators dont need this capability has it's just cheating? 

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Mac Pro Cheese-grater (Early 2009) 2.93 GHz 6-Core Intel Xeon 48 GB 1333 MHz DDR3 ECC Ram, Sapphire Pulse Radeon RX 580 8GB GDDR5, Ugee 19" Graphics Tablet Monitor Triple boot via OCLP 1.2.1 - Mac OS Monterey 12.7.1, Sonoma 14.1.1 and Mojave 10.14.6

Affinity Publisher, Designer and Photo 1.10.5 - 2.2.1

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Another day, another frustrated wish for just grabbing those pesky corners and tweaking - VS to the rescue - I'm really really hoping the Affinity boffins have something up their sleeves to match this: 

Daz1.png

Mac Pro Cheese-grater (Early 2009) 2.93 GHz 6-Core Intel Xeon 48 GB 1333 MHz DDR3 ECC Ram, Sapphire Pulse Radeon RX 580 8GB GDDR5, Ugee 19" Graphics Tablet Monitor Triple boot via OCLP 1.2.1 - Mac OS Monterey 12.7.1, Sonoma 14.1.1 and Mojave 10.14.6

Affinity Publisher, Designer and Photo 1.10.5 - 2.2.1

www.bingercreative.co.uk

 

 

 

 

 

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On 12/6/2020 at 4:38 PM, DoubleDragan said:

This can be done with CSS, in a browser.

But not in a vector based native app with many, many years of development.

I'm not dissing anyone at all, I very much like Designer.

But I wonder what the holdup is?

I'm pretty sure we all very much like Designer. That's why everyone is so vocal about it.

If everyone hated Designer then nobody would care about this missing basic feature.

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20 hours ago, Xzenor said:

I'm pretty sure we all very much like Designer. That's why everyone is so vocal about it.

If everyone hated Designer then nobody would care about this missing basic feature.

Well, that wasn't my point at all.

I merely said I like Designer and that I'm not here to post something like "Affinity is a joke for not fixing this, I'm going back to Adobe" which others have (sort of, paraphrased).

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