Can we just get the basics that are missing, and not worry about unique, cutting edge features for now?

[Move Along People]

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[k_au]

@Stephen_H, thank you for this list of important little things! I agree with most of it, especially the colour / swatches / overprinting handling issues. They really need some love... 

Some of the issues that you mentioned may have been fixed in the meantime, or there are work-arounds:

- Snapping to "round" values: using the mouse wheel over a number input field, hold down "Shift" to jump around in steps of 10. If you hold down "Ctrl", you can go by steps of 0,1 in some fields that support it.

- Proofing colors: in Photo, there actually is a "Channels" Studio -- strange that it does not exist in Designer or Publisher. 

- Previewing at export: Photo added a preview at export (not in the export persona). It's not yet great, since it's very slow and sits in a small window where you need to find out how to zoom (hint: Ctrl-mousewheel, or Ctrl-1,2....) But at least it gives some indication on what the result may be. 
There's still no export preview from Publisher or Designer. Hopefully, when it is added, it might provide some overprint/channel checking. 

- Changing the colors of margins & guides: It's possible now to change the colour of the grid and margins -- but not of the guides that you drag from the rulers (really?? or am I missing an option somewhere?)

[eobet]

Agree with this entire thread.

Most of my posts on this forum is either about bugs, or really basic things that I'm very surprised are still missing.

[RareBlue]

It has to be professional and complete imo, to work in real world situations, just like Adobe does in fact.

I've heard of PDF problems and colour compatibility, and those alone are enough to stop me making the leap from Adobe.

[Stephen_H]

Quite disappointing that there is no comment in this thread from an Affinity employee. It would be nice to hear from someone in the know who can tell us what's going on with these basics. IFor example, if they could just tell us that their software is aimed at UX & webdesigners, but also supports print designers, then we'd understand a lot of these "over sights".

Do they use experienced designers to guide their development, and if they do, are they print designers or web designers, and why they don't mind working with these short commings?

Are there any plans to correct/complete existing features, or are they just moving on with adding new features.

What is their view on professional print production? (eg: Do they think a professional workflow is placing RGB PNGs into a doc, then convert to CMYK at export and hope and pray that everything comes out okay? ...like in one of their video launch demos.)

If we know their intent, we can probably throw away a whole bunch of these issues we've been discussing and stop getting frustrated when they seem to be ignoring our cries.

[loukash]

4 hours ago, Stephen_H said:

Quite disappointing that there is no comment in this thread from an Affinity employee.

Recommended reading:
forum.affinity.serif.com/index.php?/forum/52-feature-requests-suggestions

And as has been made clear by Serif staff many times, they won't comment on feature requests, for instance just recently in another context but unambiguously here.

[Frozen Death Knight]

On 10/30/2020 at 12:45 PM, Stephen_H said:

- To duplicate an object by dragging it, I have to press the Alt key before I select the object, not during the drag. Most of the time, I need to be certain I have selected the correct object before I duplicate it, however, now I have to duplicate something and then find out if I selected correctly. I don't know how many times I have moved items I want to duplicate and duplicated items I didn't want to duplicate because of this. An application is not fast to work in if I'm constantly undoing my actions.

On Windows you can do this using ctrl+L click drag. Not sure which shortcut it is on Mac, but it should work there too.

On 10/30/2020 at 12:45 PM, Stephen_H said:

- The colour picker only picks up RGB/CMYK values, not a global swatch. Even if I've pasted a logo into a new document and it's displaying a global color, the eyedropper doesn't read it as a global color so I can't even reliably copy colors from my source logo. 

Agreed. Though, it is possible to copy paste global colours to a new object by pasting the style, which is how Illustrator does colour picking as I recall.

On 10/30/2020 at 12:45 PM, Stephen_H said:

- Changing the colors of margins & guides. If I design a blue brochure, my margins and guides disappear. I need to make them red or yellow or anything. I don't expect to be able to mix my own colors, but a dozen pre-mixed swatches to choose from would solve this problem. (apart from working in wireframe mode)

What's stopping you from doing this in the Guides Manager and the Grids and Axis Manager? Go into the View menu and you can change the colours. You can also create a shortcut to these for easy access. The only thing you can't do is change the colour of the manual guides, which I agree would be good if they added it in (honestly weird that there is no option for that). However, the rest of the functionality is right there.

Hope the devs address the issues mentioned in here in future releases.

[Medical Officer Bones]

On 4/22/2021 at 1:17 AM, Stephen_H said:

What is their view on professional print production? (eg: Do they think a professional workflow is placing RGB PNGs into a doc, then convert to CMYK at export and hope and pray that everything comes out okay? ...like in one of their video launch demos.)

Well, true 1bit support will never be added. They unequivocally stated that last year. Which is a bit of a problem for a variety of professional print production scenarios.

Otherwise? No idea. Let's hope for the best, expect to be disappointed. That is my outlook in regards to Affinity. (And I am very hopeful. 🙂 )