Affinity Designer Customer Beta 1.9.0 (1.9.5)

[MattP]

Status: Beta

Purpose: Features, Improvements, Fixes

Requirements: Purchased Affinity Designer for iPad From App Store

App Store:  Not submitted

Download link: Join the TestFlight

 

Hello,

We are pleased to announce the immediate availability of the Affinity Designer Beta 1.9.0 for iPad.

If this is your first time using a customer beta of an Affinity app, it’s worth noting that the beta will install as a separate app - alongside your store version. They will not interfere with each other at all and you can continue to use the store version for critical work without worry.

This beta is significantly different from the 1.8.6 version available for purchase - we strongly recommend that you do not use this beta for real work as data could be lost and the files you save are not guaranteed to open in previous / future versions of Affinity Designer.

Thanks again for your continued support!

Matt

 

Changes Since 1.8.6

- Fix for colour-picker not working correctly in brush tools
- Fix a number of potential symbol-related problems
- Text improvements - particularly relating to mid-word punctuation
- Snapping tweaks - you can now snap to column guides if they're hidden and you have 'snap to hidden objects' turned on
- Added hierarchical antialiasing control - accessed from the Layer Options view in the layers studio
- New cat shape (accessible on Friday 13th)
- Fix for printing of passthrough PDFs
- Misc PDF export tweaks
- Fix for Column Guides not updating correctly
- PDF Import improvements (particularly around tinted colours and unknown fonts)
- Application registration and content streaming (see post below)
- Fix for pixel layers inside symbols occasionally acting incorrectly (painting may not apply to all symbol instances, items may transform oddly, for example)
- Fixed sporadic crash with Pencil Tool (yay!) and hopefully generally improved product stability
- Fix for artefacts occasionally noticed in the noise pattern while editing objects with noise on a linear fill
- Enable image placement options in Designer (you can now choose Linked or Embedded)
- Added option for Designer to be able to show/hide overflow text - particularly useful for text on a path
- Fix for terrible rendering problems - particularly affected cropped items with layer effects applied
- Added Contour tool.
- Select Same / Select Object functionality. I'm happy to consider requests for extra options, so if you have a favourite, just say...
- Improved performance with large documents. I will aim to improve this further over time.
- Added a new “Divide” blend mode.
- Allowed snapping to the bounds of the pixel selection.

[Patrick Connor]

Please can users of this beta also test the new registration process and look at the My Account feature (top right), where Product registration and store content streaming into the application have been added, 

We have now added the ability to link your Affinity app to your Affinity account through a new app registration process. This will have the advantages of you being able to stream any content you have purchased (or received for free from the Affinity store) directly to all your apps without having to manually install them. This is of particular use to customers who have more than one of our apps, or run our apps on different devices and operating systems as all your content will automatically be available across all of them.

If you register the beta app you will initially receive a free brush kit (the luminance brush kit) for testing purposes. This might be a kit you already have, but if you don’t you will get it for free. Over the next few weeks this will be expanded to include all of the store content you may already own.

Please report anything you find IN THAT THREAD rather than in this announcement

[Artsketch]

Unbelievable! Thank you, thank you very much!!!😀👍

No blobs any more, after two years drawing is possible now!

 

[Jhonatan S]

16 hours ago, MattP said:

I'm happy to consider requests for extra options, so if you have a favourite, just say...

Thanks for all the great work @MattP!
as you asked in this post, I will be totally in love if we add the option to access the custom tools in shortcut, one year ago I did a post explaining about the benefits about this ux feature,

and how this can helps to reach menu / tools quicker by a  simple radial menu around the finger, 
well I hope that this helps to understand.
Even on desktop I guess would be a game changing like 3d apps does.

cheers!
 

 

[DM1]

On 12/18/2020 at 8:15 AM, MattP said:

I'm happy to consider requests for extra options, so if you have a favourite, just say...

Would love to have 'Import Palette' option. Now off to play with this beta😬

[iuli]

Please add “import color palette” option if possible... I think it’s something hugely missing from the mobile apps

[LCamachoDesign]

On 12/17/2020 at 9:15 PM, MattP said:

I'm happy to consider requests for extra options, so if you have a favourite, just say...

That's a good start to select all objects with the same colour and apply a global colour for example. A global colour that needs a UI so we can work with them. For example, a suggestion such as this: [1.9] Global Colours editor UI is missing - Designer Beta on iPad - Affinity | Forum (serif.com)

[ronnyb]

The app icon is missing the BETA tag, it's identical to the App store version; would be good to include the BETA tag like the Photo Beta to distinguish when launching. I was testing for 20 minutes and nothing had changed until I realized I was using the App store version

[ronnyb]

New Document ALWAYS defaults to iPad 9.7" which is not helpful in most use cases. How about defaulting to the last document settings used? Seems this would be most useful for most people in most use cases....

thanks for all you do.

[Filo63]

As for the “same selection” it is not so intuitive but I don't know what to suggest.

Perhaps highlighted on the menu, instead of selecting below and inside, without moving with the arrows ... but this is because I personally do not use these options so it is a purely subjective fact.

Ciao
Fabio

[LCamachoDesign]

On 12/21/2020 at 4:42 PM, LCamachoDesign said:

That's a good start to select all objects with the same colour and apply a global colour for example. A global colour that needs a UI so we can work with them. For example, a suggestion such as this: [1.9] Global Colours editor UI is missing - Designer Beta on iPad - Affinity | Forum (serif.com)

Actually, scratch that. I’ve downloaded the beta to fiddle with the contour tool (works fine for the use I’d give it), and since you haven’t mentioned anything, I didn’t bother to look for anything in the swatches panel... I just did that now. You’ve actually added the global colour swatches creating and editing! Why not mention it in the changelog? Maybe I’m in the minority, but I think global colours are the very best think that could happen to the iPad version! It will definitely be my favourite new function!

On the feature itself, I have some feedback.

Bugs:

• Only saw one, and I can’t trigger it again. When I first started fiddling with it, creating and editing swatches, I often triggered some soft of bug where I couldn’t interact with the sliders or even dismiss the creation/editing window. I’d instead resize or move shapes in the page, it’s as if my touches were passing through the window. It caused the app to crash at least once, and to regain control I had to back out to the iPadOS Home Screen. Maybe I’ll come across it again and fill you in with more details.

Improvements:

1. As I’ve mentioned in point 3. of my post it would be great if we could apply global swatches to layer effects. It’s particularly useful for the Colour Overlay effect. This already exists on the desktop, and I’ve suggested a UI if that helps.
2. There’s no indicator showing a global swatch is applied to the selected shape, as I mentioned in point 2. of my post. This would be nice to have, but it’s also true that this feature is present on the desktop, and it doesn’t work very well there (I’ve already filled a bug report on that). If you can make this work reliably on the iPad and the desktop, it would be awesome. Otherwise it’s fine as it is.

And that’s it for feedback. The addition of global colour swatches creation and editing is a wonderful, and much needed feature!

Thank you very much indeed! 😁

 

[Powerhorse]

When I click on "Add Global Color" in the "Name of Global Collorider" window, Designer crashes.

[Filo63]

I have done several tests with global colors and have never crashed. 

The most obvious problem is that often the color cannot be selected. With HSL it is always possible to act on the cursors, even with the LAB and RGB. 
With the others the object placed under the window often moves and only after using HSL or LAB you can use CMYK. 

Less often this happens even if you want to change the global color.

 

Ciao
Fabio

[Powerhorse]

[Filo63]

[Powerhorse]

One observation

 

When I change the color in this window, Designer does not crash when adding.

But if the color comes from the active recent Color, Designer crashes when adding.

[Filo63]

I have noticed that there is a certain instability and it does not always recur in the same way.  
To me the system does not crash but I often find it difficult to select the color.  
 

There is also no reference window for the color to be created.

 

Ciao

[Sean P]

On 12/30/2020 at 11:15 AM, Powerhorse said:

When I click on "Add Global Color" in the "Name of Global Collorider" window, Designer crashes.

Thanks for letting us know - this is something we're aware of and with development to be fixed.

[DM1]

I have noticed that when pasting into a text box, the Apple Pencil is unable to bring up the pop up menu (unable to recognise long press) to allow pasting. Pressing with finger still works. This is the same behaviour as rel version so may be by design or a limitation of the pencil?

[DM1]

Latest beta:  Copying a symbol and pasting into another document still results in app crashing.