Just bought AD, a few comments

[VectorVonDoom_NoMore]

Bought AD today for my new 12.9 iPad Pro and a had a quick play (waiting for the pencil to arrive). A few initial things I noted.

1. The tool and especially the palette icons are very low contrast, even worse if you set them to monochrome. Using the desktop tool ones would be an improvement, at least they have some real colour and so you can pick them without really looking.

2. Palette pinning that isn't (unless I'm being dumb). I can't imagine many who don't use both the colour and layers palette all the time. However it seems as though pinning is temporary until you use a different palette then you have to re-enable, re-pin. Perhaps give the option of an always on layers palette, it's not such a big deal that the other palettes don't stay put.

3. Scrolling through the layers (unless I'm being dumb again). Sometimes you click on the background by accident, add a shape and it gets put up the top. If you have a ton of layers on the mac it's not too big a deal you use the scroll bar to get down the bottom or wherever it needs to be and only takes a few seconds. With the ipad layers palette it's a 100 swipes to get to the same place. 

4. I was expecting to perhaps sometimes use the pencil tool for areas rather than always using the pen but two problems. The first has been mentioned before, an option to auto close the area would be helpful for that use. However that doesn't really matter as it sometimes takes 10 or so seconds to finish drawing the shape, it does it in slow motion. That seems to depend on how many objects you have. On a blank canvas it works as expected but when I opened a complex one it was unusable.

It looks like I might end up doing what I half expected and use the desktop app and sidecar on anything remotely complex.

[Jowday]

54 minutes ago, VectorVonDoom said:

3. Scrolling through the layers (unless I'm being dumb again). Sometimes you click on the background by accident, add a shape and it gets put up the top. If you have a ton of layers on the mac it's not too big a deal you use the scroll bar to get down the bottom or wherever it needs to be and only takes a few seconds. With the ipad layers palette it's a 100 swipes to get to the same place. 

On the desktop I am - as always - building the layer structure with discipline and named layers and therefore I often suggest that as a minimum a "Search layers" search field in the layer panel would mitigate the problem on both desktop og tablets. We are after all using... computers...

And then of course some tablet specific usability tricks so navigating quickly through the list is easier on tablets.

CorelDRAW shows the way - search is the first item in the equivalent to the layers panel.

[VectorVonDoom_NoMore]

Or perhaps expand the colour tagging/highlighting use them like bookmarks, click on the colour tag and it goes to the next occurrence in the layers, even quicker and you don't have to remember what to search for (but you do have to remember the colour instead so ...) plus more touch friendly. Or a dropdown of user named layers, looks like that's how corel works going by the pic, not used it for years.

[Artsketch]

The biggest problem in Affinity Designer are the bugs in pressure variable brushes. Still producing blobs at the beginning of each stroke.

[ThirtyFiveThousand]

Scrolling through layers can be a massive pain in bigger projects. Organizing things into Layers and Groups helps, but only so much. One object heavy layer can send you back to Slot Machine Simulator territory. There needs to be a “Expand/Contract All Layers” button that allows you to take full advantage of all your careful Layer organization by letting you put all your ‘junk’ back in their respective ‘junk drawers’ so that scrolling can be kept within the limits of ones sanity.  

[VectorVonDoom_NoMore]

On the big group I tried it on it was 10 seconds plus depending how frantically you swipe! On screen it looks like a big swipe and let it scroll then swipe again spins though faster but if you time it it's even slower than lots of smaller swipes.