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Affinity Designer Customer Beta (1.9.0.2)


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On 9/15/2020 at 10:46 AM, MattP said:

You can *nearly* do this already - I split out text objects into the main types: Art Text, Frame Text, Path Text, so you currently have to choose which type of text you'd like to select, but it does as you'd expect - traverses the whole document and selects those objects wherever they are, whether they're locked or not

Do you need the 'all' text option still?

Ohhhh really?

Look, you all know I'm terribly biased, but I just have to ask for “Select same font/style/size/character style/paragraph style” (I'm not sure how you'd deal with strings or frames containing more than one of those, though, but I'm sure there could be a way around that, or at least have those options work with typographically homogeneous objects even if it had to fail or otherwise appear greyed out for the rest)… Break it down inside a “Typography” submenu if you must.

This would be great for a lot of scenarios, really (even stuff like the technical drawing for a shop window decoration I'm working on right now, not just complex typography-heavy projects).

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18 hours ago, Mithferion said:

when you mention Mesh, two things come to mind:

  • Mesh to distort vector shapes/text
  • Mesh to work with colors

The one in your screenshots refers to the second one, right?

Best regards!

Yes, I was talking to Ash about Mesh Fills, not geometry distortion/warping... They're obviously very similar concepts, but a mesh fill has less consequences for the document structure and rendering so is easier to slide in without any architecture changes...

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17 hours ago, JGD said:

Select same font/style/size/character style/paragraph style

This is really a different category of selection than the other options.  The current set of options work at the object level but this would almost require discontiguous text selection to be implemented first as these are properties of a subset of a text object, rather than an entire object.

I would suggest that if this functionality is needed Find and Replace should be used instead, though that is only available in Publisher - this could easily take the form of a "Find Same Font/Style/..." option which would configure and execute the search to do exactly that as well as displaying the Find & Replace panel if it is hidden, in one step.

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On 9/15/2020 at 1:37 PM, Mark Oehlschlager said:

Is the Contour tool actually a "Path Offset" tool?

I can't find documentation about the new Contour tool in the help files. Can you post the documentation here, or as part of a new topic thread?

Hello.

Also curious about the Contour Tool. Could Serif please elaborate on what this tools does; maybe a quick video/animated GIF?

Is this their naming for the Path Offset Tool in Illustrator?

Thanks all

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Is it not supposed to add the contour to the shape to which it is applied? Not just expand it? One needs to use it on a duplicate layer? The feature is pretty non-standard and I am sure the beginners - Affinity has many - will not immediately figure this feature out just from pulling and changing settings.

This is also a very basic implementation - one still has to do a lot of manual work (arounds) - fx compared to old Xara:

image.png.c2a833afd1620495e07e3ba87ccb55dc.png

Another tiny update of Designer.

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1 hour ago, Jowday said:

The feature is pretty non-standard and I am sure the beginners - Affinity has many - will not immediately figure this feature out just from pulling and changing settings.

Eventually I'm sure there will be tutorials, and even Help information :)

-- Walt
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4 minutes ago, walt.farrell said:

Eventually I'm sure there will be tutorials, and even Help information :)

No doubt - but usability is about users not needing them to use the software if at all possible. 🙂

  • "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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44 minutes ago, Jowday said:

No doubt - but usability is about users not needing them to use the software if at all possible. 🙂

I'll disagree, at least with respect to the Help info. Not everything can be completely obvious and self-explanatory. In fact, any complex function will have aspects that the user won't fully understand without reading the documentation, or performing extensive experimentation.

-- Walt
Designer, Photo, and Publisher V1 and V2 at latest retail and beta releases
PC:
    Desktop:  Windows 11 Pro, version 23H2, 64GB memory, AMD Ryzen 9 5900 12-Core @ 3.00 GHz, NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3090 

    Laptop:  Windows 11 Pro, version 23H2, 32GB memory, Intel Core i7-10750H @ 2.60GHz, Intel UHD Graphics Comet Lake GT2 and NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070 Laptop GPU.
iPad:  iPad Pro M1, 12.9": iPadOS 17.4.1, Apple Pencil 2, Magic Keyboard 
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1 hour ago, Jowday said:

No doubt - but usability is about users not needing them to use the software if at all possible. 🙂

I remember trying to figure out all the features & options of the first version of Photoshop Elements I installed on a Mac. Even though I had used half a dozen other graphics apps for years, I would have been lost without referring to the help & a bunch of 3rd party tutorials. That old version of PSE did not even have ½ the features of the current one, much less all those of the full version of PS.

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Agree with @walt.farrell. Certain things will always have some complexity to it that are not necessarily intuitive, but for advanced users it will open up possibilities that will push your work further which they can then teach beginners on how to use in their own work. Trying to be as intuitive as possible should of course be strived for, but sometimes unorthodox methods will have to be taught through practice and discovery, which can then be shared to hopefully become common knowledge.

For instance, for the longest time I never used the Channels panel when painting with very few exceptions. This was simply because it wasn't exactly intuitive to use after years of barely even using the Channels panel inside Photoshop. However, when I discovered that you could hide/unhide and activate/deactivate editing of all RGBA channels in any combination you like in Affinity Photo (something that is a lot more limited in Photoshop and in some cases non-existent like editing/locking the alpha channel globally for every single layer), it unlocked possibilities I never could have dreamed of. Now I can't even imagine not having this feature available when painting. Bear in mind that I have been an advanced Photoshop user with a very good understanding of several features and functions, so being faced with a new kind of workflow like this was a delight since I was willing to explore beyond my own expectations of what I thought was intuitive design.

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23 hours ago, MattP said:

I was talking to Ash about Mesh Fills, not geometry distortion/warping...

Damn!

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15 hours ago, walt.farrell said:

I'll disagree, at least with respect to the Help info. Not everything can be completely obvious and self-explanatory. In fact, any complex function will have aspects that the user won't fully understand without reading the documentation, or performing extensive experimentation.

Of course but still - a user interface should do its best to avoid old school manual reading. It is the perfect place to miss something important too.

In my line of work people CALL us when they are stuck. We try to avoid it. And with the help of usability experts we reduced the number of calls dramatically. It is just possible to be creative with the user interface too and avoid many help file sessions. And what it worse than users reading the help file is users missing important uses of the tool. 

Advanced tools like channels of course can't be explained via the user interface. But not in a simple manual either. You have to read/watch tutorials with step by step workflows explained. 

  • "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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1 hour ago, Jowday said:

You have to read/watch tutorials with step by step workflows explained. 

The same can be said for PS, as evidenced by the plethora of Adobe & 3rd party PS tutorials on the web.

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On 9/23/2020 at 5:25 PM, Jowday said:

The feature is pretty non-standard and I am sure the beginners - Affinity has many - will not immediately figure this feature out just from pulling and changing settings.

I'll be the first one to bring a tutorial about it. 😉 

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22 hours ago, R C-R said:

The same can be said for PS, as evidenced by the plethora of Adobe & 3rd party PS tutorials on the web.

Looks like you completely misinterpreted @Jowday's comment about advanced things like channel editing.

He wasn't complaining about Affinity needing tutorials for channel editing.

He was acknowledging that channel editing is such a complicated subject that tutorials are needed for doing that in any app.

 

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My comment was not intended to be about any specific feature, advanced or otherwise. I assumed that would be reasonably obvious from my "plethora" comment because of the abundance of tutorials for even the most basic PS features, & to a lesser extent from my earlier comment about learning to use PSE.

Regardless, what is considered to be a basic or standard feature or implementation vs. an advanced or non-standard one is largely subjective because it is based on assumptions about prior knowledge & experience, which in turn becomes the basis for different UX implementations. That's why all apps do not work the same way, & why we will always need a wide range of tutorials & other learning aids.

In that respect, I think it is obvious even to Affinity's most ardent supporters that they have a long way to go before their in house & 3rd party learning aids can match those of their more mature competitors.

All 3 1.10.8, & all 3 V2.4.1 Mac apps; 2020 iMac 27"; 3.8GHz i7, Radeon Pro 5700, 32GB RAM; macOS 10.15.7
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2 minutes ago, R C-R said:

My comment was not intended to be about any specific feature, advanced or otherwise. I assumed that would be reasonably obvious from my "plethora" comment because of the abundance of tutorials for even the most basic PS features, & to a lesser extent from my earlier comment about learning to use PSE.

Regardless, what is considered to be a basic or standard feature or implementation vs. an advanced or non-standard one is largely subjective because it is based on assumptions about prior knowledge & experience, which in turn becomes the basis for different UX implementations. That's why all apps do not work the same way, & why we will always need a wide range of tutorials & other learning aids.

In that respect, I think it is obvious even to Affinity's most ardent supporters that they have a long way to go before their in house & 3rd party learning aids can match those of their more mature competitors.

Now you have misinterpreted my post and gone off on a tangent. Nothing new about that, of course. I often wonder what pleasure you get from pretending to be a fool. Well, I hope it is only a pretence.

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41 minutes ago, anon2 said:

Now you have misinterpreted my post and gone off on a tangent.

My comment had nothing to do with yours, other than to further clarify what my two earlier posts were intended to say about the need for learning aids for anyone who did not understand that is what I have been talking about.

All 3 1.10.8, & all 3 V2.4.1 Mac apps; 2020 iMac 27"; 3.8GHz i7, Radeon Pro 5700, 32GB RAM; macOS 10.15.7
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32 minutes ago, fde101 said:

Serif has already indicated in the past in various other threads that 2.0 will be a paid upgrade.

However, it is unclear if there will be any sort of special discount for 1.x version owners, or by the time the 2.0 versions are released if that would be possible for purchases made through either the Apple or Windows stores.

We can guess that there might be a special sale price for a short time after the initial release, similar to what they have done in the past, but there are no guarantees about that or even what the full retail prices will be.

All 3 1.10.8, & all 3 V2.4.1 Mac apps; 2020 iMac 27"; 3.8GHz i7, Radeon Pro 5700, 32GB RAM; macOS 10.15.7
Affinity Photo 
1.10.8; Affinity Designer 1.108; & all 3 V2 apps for iPad; 6th Generation iPad 32 GB; Apple Pencil; iPadOS 15.7

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20 hours ago, R C-R said:

However, it is unclear if there will be any sort of special discount for 1.x version owners, or by the time the 2.0 versions are released if that would be possible for purchases made through either the Apple or Windows stores.

We can guess that there might be a special sale price for a short time after the initial release, similar to what they have done in the past, but there are no guarantees about that or even what the full retail prices will be.

Our whole ethos has always been about fair prices and policies - I wouldn't expect to ever see any change to that mantra, personally....

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