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Discussion on Affinity Suite for macOS 1.8.6 release


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22 hours ago, Boldlinedesign said:

I am debating if I should buy one of the latest intel-based macs before they run out and use that for a while until the new chip situation resolves itself after a couple years.
I'm in a tough spot because I still use CS6 regularly for my work though I'm trying to do more of it with Affinity and Vectorstyler. I'm still running El Capitan to keep CS6 alive.
My computer is older and I was planning to get another one next year, but this switch to ARM and away from Intel has me wondering if I need to make a move now.
I could have stability in terms of what I have been doing, I could keep running CS6 as I wait for Affinity to do all I need it to do, and I could delay having to deal with a whole new system in terms of file structure, etc.
On the flip side, staying with intel and maintaining use of El Capitan means that many of the apps can't be updated past a certain point (though that hasn't caused major issues so far) but also web browsers are warning me that they won't be updated past a certain date fast approaching - same with Flash support, etc.
Ideally, I would want to stay current so I can appreciate the new improvements to other applications, be better protected with my browsers, etc.
Is it feasible to wait and get a new mac next year and run a copy of virtualization software like VM Fusion to have a copy of el capitan available to run CS6 in the future for the times I need it?
Ultimately, I'd love to have a way to never lose access to CS6 even as I transition away from Adobe so I always have the option to use it when necessary.
Perhaps I'm working too hard to avoid enslaving myself to Adobe's subscription model? Perhaps letting this effort to maintain CS6 go and go with the subscription until Affinity catches up? - my fear there is it takes them another five years to add in the standard things we've asked for over the last five years?

 

I was in the same boat really. Stuck on El Crapitan to keep CS6 alive while waiting for Affinity to add the things required to make it workable in a pro environment. In the end (just last month) I was forced into buying a couple of new machines for my studio which only come with the latest MacOS, so no CS6 available, and as such I've been forced to upgrade my entire studio to Adobe CS (at over £600 a month) and unfortunately Affinity is now just a hobby for me. Which is a shame as I've been waiting since the beta of Affinity Designer to get rid of Adobe and have an Affinity exclusive studio. So I bit the bullet on Intel iMacs knowing the ARM ones were on their way but my hand was forced and thats that really.

Seeing the massive improvement that Apple Silicon has over Intel, if I were you I'd go with an ARM Mac. Even when running emulated apps apps via Rosetta 2 the performance is still better than running on Intel in a lot of cases! Just run the Adobe Subscription until you can finally swap. Adobes ARM stuff is still only BETA though at the moment.

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@Nazario - Glad to hear I'm not the only one in this predicament! I'm sorry you had to make the move over to subscription. You make a good point, the new chips are so much faster, I'm sure a virtual machine would  run well on them. Thanks for sharing your situation and your input.
For the record, I'm excited about where the combination of Affinity Designer and VS - I'm hoping when I do upgrade to the new macs, I can try and do almost everything I need to between them and not need Adobe so much.... that's my goal

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13 minutes ago, Boldlinedesign said:

@Nazario - Glad to hear I'm not the only one in this predicament! I'm sorry you had to make the move over to subscription. You make a good point, the new chips are so much faster, I'm sure a virtual machine would  run well on them. Thanks for sharing your situation and your input.
For the record, I'm excited about where the combination of Affinity Designer and VS - I'm hoping when I do upgrade to the new macs, I can try and do almost everything I need to between them and not need Adobe so much.... that's my goal

Just to clarify when I say 'emulated apps' I mean apps running under Rosetta 2. Not things like FusionWare. I imagine those will be slower but maybe not.

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22 minutes ago, Nazario said:

Just to clarify when I say 'emulated apps' I mean apps running under Rosetta 2. Not things like FusionWare. I imagine those will be slower but maybe not.

I don't know that I could run CS6 with Rosetta, since it stopped working on Intel macs shortly after El Capitan.... Is there a way to run CS6 on Big Sur?

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14 minutes ago, Boldlinedesign said:

I don't know that I could run CS6 with Rosetta, since it stopped working on Intel macs shortly after El Capitan.... Is there a way to run CS6 on Big Sur?

No you can't. I meant in general apps running user Rosetta 2 on ARM were faster than current apps running on native Intel, at least in single core scores apparently. 

I know there was a workaround for CS6 whereby instead of installing the software as usual by running the installer as intended you could open the installer package and run the executable from there and it would skip some kind of check and would then install on unsupported hardware. I tried it once AGES ago but I cant remember what MacOS it was other than one that was not officially supposed to run CS6. Had no issues. I imagine by now though MacOS has changed so much that its impossible to run CS6 now.

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  • Staff

Ladies and gentlemen I refer you to the pinned post.

Quote

This thread is solely for commenting on this announcement

You are now effectively discussion how to keep your Adobe suites working, and much as I do not like to ban conversations, I would say that this thread is not the place for that discussion to keep going ad-infinitum

Patrick Connor
Serif Europe Ltd

"There is nothing noble in being superior to your fellow man. True nobility lies in being superior to your previous self."  W. L. Sheldon

 

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@Patrick Connor

The network effect advantages that Adobe enjoys is a powerful enemy to challengers. In spite of all the resentment felt toward Adobe, for the subscription model and other reasons, fear of dropping out of the professional network as a result of dropping Adobe has end users behaving like a bunch of heroin addicts.

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7 minutes ago, Mark Oehlschlager said:

The network effect advantages that Adobe enjoys is a powerful enemy to challengers. In spite of all the resentment felt toward Adobe, for the subscription model and other reasons, fear of dropping out of the professional network as a result of dropping Adobe has end users behaving like a bunch of heroin addicts.

...then they just need to find a different corner of these forums to get their fix ;) 

Patrick Connor
Serif Europe Ltd

"There is nothing noble in being superior to your fellow man. True nobility lies in being superior to your previous self."  W. L. Sheldon

 

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41 minutes ago, Patrick Connor said:

Ladies and gentlemen I refer you to the pinned post.

You are now effectively discussion how to keep your Adobe suites working, and much as I do not like to ban conversations, I would say that this thread is not the place for that discussion to keep going ad-infinitum

You could also look at it as for whatever reasons (there are many littered within these forums) your customers are still having to rely on your competitors tools. 

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@Mark Oehlschlager

No doubt. I keep an active subscription 'just-in-case' — they are the industry standard after all—but more and more folks are actively looking for viable alternatives. Increasingly I'm seeing Fortune 500 companies removing Adobe from their list of preferred vendors, with alternatives such as Affinity, Sketch and Figma replacing them. In recent years, they simply would have continued with Adobe without a second thought. While Serif will never replace the entire Creative Cloud suite of applications, they are very well positioned to take on Illustrator, Photoshop and InDesign, but gaps (and bugs) still remain, and the silence does not go without notice. Work-arounds are temporary measures, not solutions. I wonder how much of the fear of moving on is simply not knowing when (or if) the thing(s) you are moving to will be able to meet the majority of your requirements without issue?

I'm hopeful. I think much of what Affinity is doing is brilliant, and brings a sense of joy to my work that I haven't had in years. Is it perfect, no… but I'm really hoping the days of hedging our bets by relying on Adobe will soon be behind us.

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Thanks BoldLineDesign

The problem here is this specific post is linked to from the update notification within our mac Affinity Store applications. It is one of the only threads that I try to control it's content and keep on topic. Customers who have never ever seen our forums before click an update notification in the app and find a thread full of bickering and strong opinions on operating systems and competitors software (sigh).

It's really hard to say where this discussion does "belong". I think it would be best if I just split this whole OT discussion off to the suggestions forum, as I feel there are many here who will just ignore me anyway if I leave this plea here.

Patrick Connor
Serif Europe Ltd

"There is nothing noble in being superior to your fellow man. True nobility lies in being superior to your previous self."  W. L. Sheldon

 

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22 hours ago, Mark Oehlschlager said:

@Patrick Connor

The network effect advantages that Adobe enjoys is a powerful enemy to challengers. In spite of all the resentment felt toward Adobe, for the subscription model and other reasons, fear of dropping out of the professional network as a result of dropping Adobe has end users behaving like a bunch of heroin addicts.

Related to this update...it seems Affinity has both put out Optimized for the new chip and compatiblity of the latest Apple OS....are these things not expected for many months from now in the Adobe "alternative" lineup?

Affinity reported some 2 million users a while ago or something like that.  Seems it is time for us Affinity users to utalize the "network effect advantages" we have.  

I'm not a MAC user, but the fact Affinity just made this announcement and what I'm hearing from the dark side that the competitiaon is many months out from optimizaiton and full support, suggests Affinity is playing in that professional network space.  The number of users with the M1 chip today???   Pretty much beta testers, so they are well ahead of the curve.  

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Both Photo and Designer waste 1 additional GB on my ssd........ 6 GB for the 2 apps now !!!???

We really don't care about having the Apple Silicon binaries that our computers will NEVER use (or vice versa) so, please do your job correctly and optimize the app size, and just ship 2 versions (x86 OR arm).

PS: It is totally ridiculous that the apps even were 2GB. Please ask the devs to compile their code correctly and to remove redundancy in the app binaries !

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4 hours ago, emfx said:

It is totally ridiculous that the apps even were 2GB. Please ask the devs to compile their code correctly and to remove redundancy in the app binaries !

Maybe you should advise the devs how to compile their code correctly.

2017 27” iMac 4.2 GHz Quad-Core Intel Core i7 • Radeon Pr 580 8GB • 64GB • Ventura 13.6.4.

iPad Pro (10.5-inch) • 256GB • Version 16.4

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9 hours ago, emfx said:

PS: It is totally ridiculous that the apps even were 2GB. Please ask the devs to compile their code correctly and to remove redundancy in the app binaries !

I agree !

iMac 2017, 16 GB RAM, Intel Iris Plus Graphics 640 1536 MB, MacOS Ventura 13.6.6 (22G630) - Affinity V2-Universallizenz 

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Having a laugh.

After 30+ year of using software like Illustrator, CorelDRAW, Designer, Gravit, Freehand... I can now install a "lesser" program delivered on a mountain of code running on a operating system re-re-re-invented on hardware re-re-re-invented. Or the same programs I ran before.

Do we really need to transport a few bags of cheap rice in a Cybertruck? Carry our lunch pack in a Samsonite?

I liberated myself from focus on hardware and operating systems once and kind of forgot about them. Run my software in full screen mostly and whatever I do my brain and creativity is the hardware that is put to the test. And means the most.

Now software developers by the thousands are using precious time and resources migrating code to new environments and hardware. Again. We do this at work on a regular basis too. Entire releases are upgrades of our product to the upgraded product. Except for one switch to a much more competent product our staff didn't get much from these updates.

The constant moaning about Adobes subscription is funny. Your hardware + software setup is the major subscription you have always been tricked into. Your new computer is on its deathbed the day before you buy it. And then you update the operating system as often you can accelerering its death and making it run slower. Who benefits. Them? Or you.

Personally (at home) I am running an Adobe Cloud subscription on older trusty hardware on Windows 10 professional and both delivers so far. 

  • "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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  • Staff

I have split all the discussion from the announcement thread for the reasons I gave in this post. Most of the posts above were on topic, but some were a mix and deciding which to leave behind was not possible, so I have moved them all

Patrick Connor
Serif Europe Ltd

"There is nothing noble in being superior to your fellow man. True nobility lies in being superior to your previous self."  W. L. Sheldon

 

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@Aidren

Welcome to the Serif Affinity forums :) 

5 hours ago, Aidren said:

Does this mean the end of the road for us with old imacs and old os's?? like 10.11.6??

No, it means we have ADDED Big Sur support to our existing list of supported operating systems.

Patrick Connor
Serif Europe Ltd

"There is nothing noble in being superior to your fellow man. True nobility lies in being superior to your previous self."  W. L. Sheldon

 

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