Affinity Designer for macOS - 1.8.4

[Patrick Connor]

We are pleased to announce an update for the MacOS release of Affinity Designer, to version 1.8.4

Changes in this build

The changes in Affinity Designer for MacOS 1.8.4 (over the last release Affinity Designer macOS 1.8.3) are as follows:

Fixes & Improvements:

• Preparations to our macOS apps to ready them for the release of Big Sur later in the year
• Fix for undesirable shapes being created when dragging the start/end nodes of a shape on top of each other to close the shape.
• Improved margin and bleed presets for documents..
• Fix for EPS exporting with black bitmap areas.
• Fix for incorrect rendering of grids in OpenGL past certain zoom levels.
• Fix for poor functioning of 'Force Touch' trackpads in pressure-sensitive tools.
• Speculative fix for occasional lockups in Pencil Tool.
• Added option in preferences to re-enable the old behaviour for deleting objects (we used to previously favour empty selections).
• Added ability to show folders as icons in the layers panel.
• Added option to always show folders as “small” in the layers panel.
• Improved dragging behaviour in the layers panel (make it easier to drag child items around within their container without affecting parenting).
• PDF Import - Import now allows creation of Artistic Text if 'Group lines of Text into Text Frames' is switched off
• PDF import performance improvements.
• Document save performance improvements.
• Text performance improvements.
• Assorted small bug fixes.
• Fix for 'Expand Strokes' failing to consider 'velocity' as a width controller.
• Fix for focus issues when tabbing between text entry fields in the Colour panel with Text objects selected.
• Fix for operation of Command+Right-Click on an object to show the tree hierarchy of the selected node.
• Allow certain documents created on Windows to open correctly (if the document contained a saved reference to exporting as Windows GDI formats).
• 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 and this 1.8.2 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.

[serge]

the updates do not appear in the Mac app store , is that normal? same thing for affinity photo 1.8.4.

[Patrick Connor]

@serge

Yes it is normal, as explained in the second last paragraph of the post

[Dédé]

I'm still waithing but no updates available in App Store. Any other way to download the updates? Designer and Photo. Is it  better to by from Serif.

 

[Pšenda]

1 hour ago, Dédé said:

Is it  better to by from Serif.

Yes, definitely - there is no reason to subsidize resellers who did not participate in the development of the application.

[MarkNZed]

Hi, the software update needs to be improved on OSX. If the download gets interrupted it restarts from scratch. It can take a long time to download 550MB and the chance of the download failing is high. If the application is looking after the download, then it should download in chunks so it can pick up the download from where it stopped.

[Dédé]

I got my updates today...??? When the new versions of Affinity Photo & Designer come out, I will buy them at Serif.