Integration of Affinity Apps

[beez]

Affinity/Serif is making a mistake currently with the way Designer, Photo and Publisher are being published as three separate apps. I'm finding there are feature disparities between each app and will make the same argument I did to Adobe before they went into the toilet:

Integrate design (vector), bitmap and page layout all into a single app.

All of these functions are frequently used together and in order to keep separate or additional income you can simply have a purchase for each one in the app so that it's just a matter of adding functionality as you want it. The cohesion and predictability are pinnacle and keeping them separate with different maintenance cycles is unnecessary and wasteful. Adobe had a killer app at one point after the Macromedia acquisition: Fireworks. Their decisions to kill Fireworks and push Photoshop and Illustrator vs integrating all THREE into a single app was a death blow and here we are - wanting a better solution with Affinity*.

[Pšenda]

Personally, I would like one application in which you could buy the appropriate packages/modules features - Photo module, Design module, Publish module (Personas). No annoying Edit in .., no limited StudioLink.

[Sivadharshan]

Hello People!

Affinity Suite of applications already use a common file format that are editable in all of the applications. Moreover, I believe putting together all the three applications might not be necessary since:

• There are already personas inside each application and it would be confusing to combine them all.
• All the applications have a little bit of the capability of the other two: Designer can do bits and pieces of affinity photo's work in pixel persona and if you want to, you can still create small e-books and presentations in designer. I used to do that before publisher came out. So people looking for light photo editing and majorly vector work need not buy the "whole package of photo editing" and get confused with it. Designer will suffice them.
• The way they work tend to be completely different: Say let's take Publisher. For book creation, the kind of flow and options the application should have is completely different from the need to make an illustration.
• The people they are directed at are very different too. For example, Affinity photo is majorly for photographers and compositing work but it still is capable of doing simple graphic design works like posters or social media posts
• I believe "Edit in" and Studio Link technology are one of the best in class and makes designing more seamless and easier (also thanks to the common file format) than the popular alternatives out there. Adobe went into toilet for different reasons. Also, adobe's intercompatability (between photoshop and illustrator) is not as good as affinty suite's. I feel like they are sort of finicky and ask too many questions.
• Not much of a developer but with that much options loaded into one application, it might be hard for your computer to handle the disk and CPU needs of the application. Then, people might come complaining that the application "crashes often" and "is too RAM hungry". I've seen my old computer stutter a bit when I used all three apps at once. Assuming by considering the price range, affinity's users mostly might not be the kind of people who pump a lot of money into hardware. So that could be a serious problem, when the company needs to scale.

Affinity have made things as simple as possible but making anything simpler might not be a great idea. So I believe, affinity should stick to the current model and continue to develop more awesome and highly compatible applications in the future!

Have a great day.