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Is Affinity Designer even developed anymore?


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1 minute ago, wonderings said:

That is your personal opinion and not based on any factual statistics. People did not have to sign up for CC, they could have been working in CS6 to this day as long as they did not upgrade their OS. You can have ideas and fantasies, but they are purely hypothetical and it does not work that way. Photoshop used to be bundled for free with scanners, they have come a long way and are the standard. Standards themselves are nothing to push aside lightly, they make life so much easier for the industry that has them. If everyone were to jump to Affinity today you would see the headaches come after a few versions when people did not pay to upgrade to the latest version. 

People were pirating Adobe and anything and everything else because they do not want to pay. If you can't afford the price of pro software then again it is not made for you. Stealing it because it is too expensive does not prove anything but that people will steal anything they can get their hands on. 

File versions definitely do matter if you want consistency, if everyone is using different software and swiping files around you are in for some massive headaches and unhappy clients. 

Not sure why the animosity towards Adobe, they are just a software company, not an evil corp trying to dominate the world. They make software, good software for all sorts of creative things. If you don't like it you don't have to use it. 

Adobe used to sell perpetual student licenses: I paid $600 for the student version of the design bundle CS4, and that was acceptable for commercial work. But I noticed something odd: the new versions from then on didn't add much new features. Maybe one good new feature in Photoshop per year, and that's fine because most of it is backwards compatible. But InDesign would totally break compatibility. Illustrator too, if you actually use one of the major features every release.

Fact is if you made something in InDesign years ago and your business switched to a continual license, you will no longer be able to use the perpetual software anymore. Something you totally got incorrect, Adobe is forcing people into subscribing to software that used to be sold for a one-time fee. And do the programs work better? No. 90% of what I use in Photoshop and Illustrator I can get in Affinity, and most of the stuff I love about Affinity, Photoshop and Illustrator were never and will never be able to do. Adobe is grandfathered in from decades of being an industry leader, but at this very moment they aren't leading. I updated Photoshop and lost features, how are they still in the lead? Only because everyone uses them. Only because InDesign files totally break compatibility with older versions, even within the CC suite. Adobe was a leader with perpetual software for years without issue, now all of a sudden you're telling me there will be issues with perpetual software. WOW. FYI, I purchased Affinity a year ago, the whole suite for $75, and I'm still getting free updates without issue. Adobe would never.

The problem is everyone considers Adobe the default, and it shouldn't be that way. CS6 brought content aware fill nearly a decade ago: that was the last major improvement to Photoshop. A free plugin for GIMP. Now their best new feature is neural filters, inferior to Affinity in every way. The only other changes beyond that were decrements, some of which brought the program to a screeching halt. Adobe plateaued in an industry that is continuing to tower over their shoulders. Respect should be given to those who earn it, and Adobe 100% totally lost mine. If Affinity gets support for actions, plugins, and fixes a few of the workflow issues, they absolutely will destroy Adobe. Like I said, professionally, I don't really need much. Professionals need Adobe mainly because other professionals use Adobe. Not because the program is totally superior. The Adobe house is falling. Once Affinity's few issues are fixed, designers will realize they need to get out of the sinking house and get a new one. I wouldn't mind paying $200 per program if it can totally replace Adobe. It does 90% what we need it to do. But that remaining 10% is the problem. Affinity is not there yet, but I really want them to be. My side business is 100% Affinity and it's been a really good experience.

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27 minutes ago, Sotalo said:

…InDesign would totally break compatibility. Illustrator too, if you actually use one of the major features every release.

Just thought it might be worth pointing out that every release of all Affinity apps break compatibility with older versions. Once you work with a file in a newer version of the app(s) you will no longer be able to open that file in older versions of any Affinity apps. So far it works out that we're all still on the 1.x release cycle so everyone has access to all updates for free. When we reach the (paid) 2.x release cycle we'll likely begin to see similar complaints with regards to backwards compatibility with folks still using 1.x versions of the apps. We're just not there yet.

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On 9/3/2021 at 6:48 PM, wonderings said:

Photoshop used to be bundled for free with scanners,

Bonjour @wonderings

Photoshop elements oui. En France, s'entend.

Toujours pas !
Windows 10 Pro 21H2 - Intel Core i7-3630QM CPU @ 2.40GHz - 16 Gb Ram - GeForce GT 650M - Intel HD 4000
Affinity Photo | Affinity Designer | Affinity Publisher | 2

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40 minutes ago, Sotalo said:

Adobe used to sell perpetual student licenses: I paid $600 for the student version of the design bundle CS4, and that was acceptable for commercial work. But I noticed something odd: the new versions from then on didn't add much new features. Maybe one good new feature in Photoshop per year, and that's fine because most of it is backwards compatible. But InDesign would totally break compatibility. Illustrator too, if you actually use one of the major features every release.

Fact is if you made something in InDesign years ago and your business switched to a continual license, you will no longer be able to use the perpetual software anymore. Something you totally got incorrect, Adobe is forcing people into subscribing to software that used to be sold for a one-time fee. And do the programs work better? No. 90% of what I use in Photoshop and Illustrator I can get in Affinity, and most of the stuff I love about Affinity, Photoshop and Illustrator were never and will never be able to do. Adobe is grandfathered in from decades of being an industry leader, but at this very moment they aren't leading. I updated Photoshop and lost features, how are they still in the lead? Only because everyone uses them. Only because InDesign files totally break compatibility with older versions, even within the CC suite. Adobe was a leader with perpetual software for years without issue, now all of a sudden you're telling me there will be issues with perpetual software. WOW. FYI, I purchased Affinity a year ago, the whole suite for $75, and I'm still getting free updates without issue. Adobe would never.

The problem is everyone considers Adobe the default, and it shouldn't be that way. CS6 brought content aware fill nearly a decade ago: that was the last major improvement to Photoshop. A free plugin for GIMP. Now their best new feature is neural filters, inferior to Affinity in every way. The only other changes beyond that were decrements, some of which brought the program to a screeching halt. Adobe plateaued in an industry that is continuing to tower over their shoulders. Respect should be given to those who earn it, and Adobe 100% totally lost mine. If Affinity gets support for actions, plugins, and fixes a few of the workflow issues, they absolutely will destroy Adobe. Like I said, professionally, I don't really need much. Professionals need Adobe mainly because other professionals use Adobe. Not because the program is totally superior. The Adobe house is falling. Once Affinity's few issues are fixed, designers will realize they need to get out of the sinking house and get a new one. I wouldn't mind paying $200 per program if it can totally replace Adobe. It does 90% what we need it to do. But that remaining 10% is the problem. Affinity is not there yet, but I really want them to be. My side business is 100% Affinity and it's been a really good experience.

Your perpetual licenses are still good on top of CC, they are perpetual, not dependant on a subscription. The price is actually a little cheaper for CC if you were to upgrade a perpetual license every 2 years. I can still install CS6 from my perpetual license with no issue (as long as the OS supports it), same goes for CS5. The only reason I have ever gone back to an older version of the software was because of a plugin that was not out for the latest version. This is not a common thing needing to go back to old software to open old files as the new files will open fine in the vast majority of cases in the latest version. 

If you don't see the value then it is not for you obviously, and there is nothing wrong with that. It is Adobe's job to make software to bring people in, and they are doing that as their increase in users continues to rise. 

Everyone considers Adobe the default because it is an industry standard which again I think you minimize the important of. Knowing I am using the exact same software as the design house, print shop or anyone else is a HUGE breath of fresh air from the days of everyone on different versions and updates. Affinity will have this issue when they get beyond V1.  The adobe house is far from falling and again bringing in the money for Adobe, there is no decline at the moment for Adobe, it seems to be your strange emotional anger against the company as you call for a "fall" like it is some tyrannical government. I bought all 3 apps from Affinity to see what they were doing, and I like what they have done so far but it is not something I am going to replace Adobe for and it will take a very long time for that to happen to make them anything like Adobe, being the standard they are. You can make your sky is falling predictions all you want, but the numbers do not lie and professionals do not balk at the price of the software that makes them their money and plays well with virtually everyone else. It is the outsides, the corel users, quark users, affinity users that make things difficult (when they have not setup their files properly, lots of good files come from all these apps). 

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20 minutes ago, Bryan Rieger said:

Just thought it might be worth pointing out that every release of all Affinity apps break compatibility with older versions. Once you work with a file in a newer version of the app(s) you will no longer be able to open that file in older versions of any Affinity apps. So far it works out that we're all still on the 1.x release cycle so everyone has access to all updates for free. When we reach the (paid) 2.x release cycle we'll likely begin to see similar complaints with regards to backwards compatibility with folks still using 1.x versions of the apps. We're just not there yet.

If people get 2 years of updates for free and the program stays affordable, that's literally not a problem. I paid $75 for the suite and I'm set for two years. Adobe's tactics were to force people off of perpetual licenses and turned them into subscriptions. And the subscription fee for their suite is $53 a month. I don't mind paying $150 every 2 years to stay current with Affinity. When Adobe updated their software before, it used to cost $1,500 for the master collection which had marginal updates every year. Corel Draw is similarly expensive. Anyone starting now really needs to get on Affinity pronto.

When the last 10 years of updates to Photoshop have been a free plugin and stuff a $55 program does better, there will come a day when the other programs take over. We just need a few pros on Serif's team to recommend things like game-dev-centric workflows, and now you've just captured an entire rapidly growing field. Not just hobby artists.

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6 minutes ago, Sotalo said:

If people get 2 years of updates for free and the program stays affordable, that's literally not a problem. I paid $75 for the suite and I'm set for two years. Adobe's tactics were to force people off of perpetual licenses and turned them into subscriptions. And the subscription fee for their suite is $53 a month. I don't mind paying $150 every 2 years to stay current with Affinity. When Adobe updated their software before, it used to cost $1,500 for the master collection which had marginal updates every year. Corel Draw is similarly expensive. Anyone starting now really needs to get on Affinity pronto.

When the last 10 years of updates to Photoshop have been a free plugin and stuff a $55 program does better, there will come a day when the other programs take over. We just need a few pros on Serif's team to recommend things like game-dev-centric workflows, and now you've just captured an entire rapidly growing field. Not just hobby artists.

You are still going to have fragmentation when you pay for every update because many people are just not going to do it. Not everyone stays up to date on what is out and what is new, they have something that works and they just keep plugging along. This works fine when you are isolated to yourself but can be a mess when you need to play with others and share files. 

As you mentioned it was $1500 for the master collection. If you update every 2 years it is cheaper to be on the subscription plan then it is to buy out right. Anyone starting now really needs to stick with the standard if they intend to work with other people in the industry because they will quickly find it is not so easy collaborating in an Adobe dominated world with something other than Adobe. 

Adobe made a business decision to go this route, as did many others. There are many positives for the end user with a monthly subscription and I think they are far outweighs the negatives. 

Again not for everyone, if you are not making enough from the software to pay for $55 a month that it is obviously not geared towards you. You thankfully have options, and a great suite of options that has not been there before Affinity. It is very cheap and feature rich and hopefully one day will do everything you need it to do!

 

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2 minutes ago, wonderings said:

Your perpetual licenses are still good on top of CC, they are perpetual, not dependant on a subscription. The price is actually a little cheaper for CC if you were to upgrade a perpetual license every 2 years. I can still install CS6 from my perpetual license with no issue (as long as the OS supports it), same goes for CS5. The only reason I have ever gone back to an older version of the software was because of a plugin that was not out for the latest version. This is not a common thing needing to go back to old software to open old files as the new files will open fine in the vast majority of cases in the latest version. 

If you don't see the value then it is not for you obviously, and there is nothing wrong with that. It is Adobe's job to make software to bring people in, and they are doing that as their increase in users continues to rise. 

Everyone considers Adobe the default because it is an industry standard which again I think you minimize the important of. Knowing I am using the exact same software as the design house, print shop or anyone else is a HUGE breath of fresh air from the days of everyone on different versions and updates. Affinity will have this issue when they get beyond V1.  The adobe house is far from falling and again bringing in the money for Adobe, there is no decline at the moment for Adobe, it seems to be your strange emotional anger against the company as you call for a "fall" like it is some tyrannical government. I bought all 3 apps from Affinity to see what they were doing, and I like what they have done so far but it is not something I am going to replace Adobe for and it will take a very long time for that to happen to make them anything like Adobe, being the standard they are. You can make your sky is falling predictions all you want, but the numbers do not lie and professionals do not balk at the price of the software that makes them their money and plays well with virtually everyone else. It is the outsides, the corel users, quark users, affinity users that make things difficult (when they have not setup their files properly, lots of good files come from all these apps). 

Really? How long do you think professionals are going to put up with not having vector and raster together? How long will they put up with performance decrements and stagnating features? How long will everyone continue to stay behind the times?

Sure, there's no doubt in my mind many professionals will pay the Adobe tax and buy into the idea that a print shop doesn't know how to print a PDF. They might also believe the best photo editing experience is Photoshop and the best vector experience is Illustrator because that's all they know. They can continue to believe that. But they're wrong. I edited all my photos for my blog in Affinity Photo with better results much faster than I could in Photoshop. I handled all my scans in Photo and some image tracing in Inkscape, and the results are better than I could hope for attempting to do the same thing between Photoshop and Illustrator. I do all my vectors in Designer, and layouts in Publisher, and everything links beautifully. Everything I do personally is 100% Affinity or free software, and I'm getting better results faster than I ever could with Adobe. Despite decades of experience in Adobe, my training in Adobe, my whole life in Adobe, a year with Affinity made me turn another leaf. I will never draw in Photoshop ever again, I will never vector in Illustrator ever again, I will never do any layouts in InDesign ever again. Professionals can continue to be stubborn, My work will be better and easier.

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1 minute ago, wonderings said:

You are still going to have fragmentation when you pay for every update because many people are just not going to do it. Not everyone stays up to date on what is out and what is new, they have something that works and they just keep plugging along. This works fine when you are isolated to yourself but can be a mess when you need to play with others and share files. 

As you mentioned it was $1500 for the master collection. If you update every 2 years it is cheaper to be on the subscription plan then it is to buy out right. Anyone starting now really needs to stick with the standard if they intend to work with other people in the industry because they will quickly find it is not so easy collaborating in an Adobe dominated world with something other than Adobe. 

Adobe made a business decision to go this route, as did many others. There are many positives for the end user with a monthly subscription and I think they are far outweighs the negatives. 

Again not for everyone, if you are not making enough from the software to pay for $55 a month that it is obviously not geared towards you. You thankfully have options, and a great suite of options that has not been there before Affinity. It is very cheap and feature rich and hopefully one day will do everything you need it to do!

 

Once again if you pay once for the Affinity suite you get free updates for 2 years. The program notifies you when an update is available, it downloads and installs very quickly. Not a problem. No issues. Same thing as CC's updates. What you're doing right now is trying to justify $636 a year for an inferior desktop publishing experience. Designer and Photo worked flawlessly while the new update a couple years back broke Illustrator, and the latest PS update practically broke our workflow. I've printed RAW photos in Adobe RGB on a Canon Image Prograf straight from Photo without export, so good luck trying to justify Adobe's worth in a world that would be, for the most part, better off without them. Call me old-fashioned, but I like to own my software, and my car, and my house, not rent it.

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New features are great, but as software matures there's A LOT of boring maintenance and testing required to support new hardware (CPUs, GPUs), firmware, drivers, and OS releases/patches. Also, 'technical debt' tends to add up as decisions made in the past are often incompatible with future development plans and goals (the Affinity 1.10 release focused on performance likely falls into this category, as M1 support did previously). Add to all of this an ever growing list of bug fixes (no software is ever bug free) and there's a massive amount of effort required for companies just to ensure that their existing apps continue to run on new hardware and software/os versions.

If your business relies on Photoshop, Illustrator, and/or InDesign (often with extensive custom workflows based around these tools) the ongoing cost to ensure your investment continues to work (generally) flawlessly as your business evolves is largely a rounding error in your overall annual expenses. As the Affinity Suite matures and business (and individuals) invest significant time and resources into establishing similar workflows we'll likely continue to see Serif prioritize stability and performance in their applications, only adding features when they're confident the solution they have is optimal, and the base on which it's deployed on is stable.

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If Affinity is willing to expand into video encoding and editing programs, add scripts, and just get a couple things necessary for my full time job, I can recommend our business switches to Affinity. It's not there yet, but it's close. VERY close.

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2 minutes ago, Sotalo said:

Once again if you pay once for the Affinity suite you get free updates for 2 years. 

For the record Affinity Designer 1.0 was release on 1 October 2014. There has not been a paid update to the software to date.

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10 minutes ago, Sotalo said:

If Affinity is willing to expand into video encoding and editing programs, add scripts, and just get a couple things necessary for my full time job, I can recommend our business switches to Affinity. It's not there yet, but it's close. VERY close.

None of those things you describe are small, or trivial to implement. Given there are many excellent video editors/encoders on the market today it would be a difficult business decision for Serif to justify the significant investment required. 

Personally, I would love to see Serif provide scripting and additional automation features for their software. 

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Just now, Bryan Rieger said:

For the record Affinity Designer 1.0 was release on 1 October 2014. There has not been a paid update to the software to date.

AMAZING. Their marketing says free updates for 2 years, but the company decides everyone deserves free updates just paying for the software once. Even if you got it on COVID discount. And it does most things faster and better than Adobe ever could.

The world really would be a lot better off without Adobe right now...

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6 minutes ago, Bryan Rieger said:

None of those things you describe are small, or trivial to implement. Given there are many excellent video editors/encoders on the market today it would be a difficult business decision for Serif to justify the significant investment required. 

Personally, I would love to see Serif provide scripting and additional automation features to their software. 

Of course not, a video editor is a huge investment, especially considering how advanced they've become. But I'm willing to spend more money if it means getting out of Adobe's ecosystem altogether. Unfortunately, we have technical reasons to stick with Media Encoder... it permits things like resolutions not exact to buffer size which we need for some of our older hardware. That stuff will go by the wayside eventually, hopefully. This is why Adobe really sucks, you can't get everything in one program, you always need another to go with it, and they only charge rental for the suite, nothing is perpetual. And they've been grandfathered in. Some workflows still require their actions, their scripts, their technical output, plugins for their programs, etc. etc.

Oh, and regarding GPU support, this has to be baked into the cost. If the programs can't develop ever because the team is too busy maintaining GPU support, they need to add capacity. Yes, it does need to be more expensive. They really should go after pros... or offer the pro option somehow.

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1 hour ago, Sotalo said:

Everything I do personally is 100% Affinity or free software, and I'm getting better results faster than I ever could with Adobe. Despite decades of experience in Adobe, my training in Adobe, my whole life in Adobe, a year with Affinity made me turn another leaf. I will never draw in Photoshop ever again, I will never vector in Illustrator ever again, I will never do any layouts in InDesign ever again.

Thank you for these words @Sotalo

That is exactly my experience with Affinity suite as well.
After more than a decade spent in Adobe suite for me it’s like entirely new wonderful world full of new possibilities.
Lots of things I get used to previously and thought that it’s normal now feel stupid and simply weird.

Seamless transition between personas and apps, whole non-interruptive workflow is one of the reasons I switched comlpetely.
Everything seems better for me in Affinity suite overall. Not completely bug-free, but overall experience much, much better. I'll never come back.

I’m also with you in regards of subscriptions. For last years Adobe products have been stagnating. Whole forums full of bugs, rants, hopeless requests. Lots of unsolved core problems, including legacy code, performance issues and more. Lots of small bugs being introduced and reintroduced with every minor update. Again, again and again. Sometimes I feel like there’s no QA at Adobe at all. I could literally feel the pain that all these people were experiencing because company was totally ignoring them for a long period of time.

I remember how people were asking for artboards in Photoshop. For five years or more. And then Sketch appeared on the stage. Only after this they started doing something in this direction. They made XD. But it is a joke app. There are important feature requests that are four or five years old as well. No one cares at Adobe. But they made 3d transforms, voice control and other fancy stuff. Because it's cool, right?

There are lots of similar examples. I’m just tired of all this nonsense.

I just don’t understand why I should continue paying monthly for software that progressively becomes worse and worse, slower and slower. Just let me use the version I'm okay with forever and stop charging me at all once you fix all your issues. No, you can't stop paying us. You loose all access.

This whole last year of Photoshop updates, for example. It’s a complete disaster. They finally started to change their GPU code because suddenly they realised that OpenGL is being deprecated. Apple warned about this many years ago. Guys, there’s Metal you know. Hurry up.

Adobe definitely had time and resources to carefully plan and implement all the changes in separate internal beta branch without breaking core releases every month. Lots of people were affected by this and many other issues.

And now they’re removing 3d completely because it became too hard for them to support it in modern operating systems as they say. I believe they just want all you to purchase a couple of another subscriptions to Substance. More subscriptions, more money!

There were times Adobe was focused on professionals. But they are gone now. Now they turned to younger audience who’s just starting out. With all these fancy features being added all around like replacement skies and neural filters. One-button quick solutions. Don't think, it's already here. Just press this and that. Cool, right?

It’s not surprising to see there’s no more focus on performance or other important things.

And I can understand this. There are way more beginners than professionals. Beginners are easier to handle. They’re not demanding anything serious like pros, they’re easier to manipulate. It’s easier to explain them, that something is done “by design”. They're less sceptical and easier to impress.

And maybe that’s fine and good for Adobe we know today. As we all see they doing incredibly great in terms of revenue.
But seems like they just don’t care about pros anymore.

That's why some of us switching and looking for alternatives. And I'm very happy that companies like Serif exist.

Edited by Alex M
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52 minutes ago, Alex M said:

Thank you for these words @Sotalo

That is exactly my experience with Affinity suite as well.
After more than a decade spent in Adobe suite for me it’s like entirely new wonderful world full of new possibilities.
Lots of things I get used to previously and thought that it’s normal now feel stupid and simply weird.

Seamless transition between personas and apps, whole non-interruptive workflow is one of the reasons I switched comlpetely.
Everything seems better for me in Affinity suite overall. Not completely bug-free, but overall experience much, much better. I'll never come back.

I’m also with you in regards of subscriptions. For last years Adobe products have been stagnating. Whole forums full of bugs, rants, hopeless requests. Lots of unsolved core problems, including legacy code, performance issues and more. Lots of small bugs being introduced and reintroduced with every minor update. Again, again and again. Sometimes I feel like there’s no QA at Adobe at all. I could literally feel the pain that all these people were experiencing because company was totally ignoring them for a long period of time.

I remember how people were asking for artboards in Photoshop. For five years or more. And then Sketch appeared on the stage. Only after this they started doing something in this direction. They made XD. But it is a joke app. There are important feature requests that are four or five years old as well. No one cares at Adobe. But they made 3d transforms, voice control and other fancy stuff. Because it's cool, right?

There are lots of similar examples. I’m just tired of all this nonsense.

I just don’t understand why I should continue paying monthly for software that progressively becomes worse and worse, slower and slower. Just let me use the version I'm okay with forever and stop charging me at all once you fix all your issues. No, you can't stop paying us. You loose all access.

This whole last year of Photoshop updates, for example. It’s a complete disaster. They finally started to change their GPU code because suddenly they realised that OpenGL is being deprecated. Apple warned about this many years ago. Guys, there’s Metal you know. Hurry up.

Adobe definitely had time and resources to carefully plan and implement all the changes in separate internal beta branch without braking core releases every month. Lots of people were affected by this and many other issues.

And now they’re removing 3d completely because it became too hard for them to support it in modern operating systems as they say. I believe they just want all you to purchase a couple of another subscriptions to Substance. More subscriptions, more money!

There were times Adobe was focused on professionals. But they are gone now. Now they turned to younger audience who’s just starting out. With all these fancy features being added all around like replacement skies and neural filters. One-button quick solutions. Don't think, it's already here. Just press this and that. Cool, right?

It’s not surprising to see there’s no more focus on performance or other important things.

And I can understand this. There are way more beginners than professionals. Beginners are easier to handle. They’re not demanding anything serious like pros, they’re easier to manipulate. It’s easier to explain them, that something is done “by design”.

And maybe that’s fine and good for Adobe we know today. As we all see they doing incredibly great in terms of revenue.
But seems like they just don’t care about pros anymore.

That's why some of us switching and looking for alternatives. And I'm very happy that companies like Serif exist.

All this, and more. My main process to make certain overlays required simplifying curves, but they completely broke the tool so anything you wish to simplify produces awful geo and removes way more points than necessary, even more points than what's required for the shape. Stuff like that really turns me off. The feature was fine, no one asked to change it, and instead of making the program better they just made everything worse.

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And to the question of this whole topic. Is Affinity Designer even developed anymore?
My answer is yes. It definitely is.

And honestly, for the last years they’ve done inifinitely better job than Adobe.
With far less resources and marketing but with way more passion and dedication.

I see it and I feel it in their apps.

Serif took courage and had rewritten their apps from the ground up in order to make them better and faster.
I believe in this company. I believe in their team.

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Photoshop is the WORST program to paint a 3D model. It paints right through to pieces on the other side. Not to mention the whole 3D thing is a horrible UI experience. They tried, they failed. But the normal generator is amazing. If Affinity Designer had a way to paint normal maps like nDo, that would be really cool!

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41 minutes ago, Sotalo said:

Photoshop is the WORST program to paint a 3D model. It paints right through to pieces on the other side. Not to mention the whole 3D thing is a horrible UI experience. They tried, they failed. But the normal generator is amazing. If Affinity Designer had a way to paint normal maps like nDo, that would be really cool!

You're asking for more than what they should be working on now.

If MS Word did all the things you mention, it'd be amazing, but Microsoft doesn't need to be working on that now.

Serif — which makes a great product in my opinion — just need to fix the things that are broke, then add new features for the 2.0 release.

If they make us pay for fixing the broken shortcut keys on the iPad, we'd be pissed.

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1 hour ago, Sotalo said:

If Affinity Designer had a way to paint normal maps like nDo, that would be really cool!

An attempt in the Designer. Normal Map + Vector Brush Normal_Map_Vector_Brush.afdesign
 

 

Read more here:

 

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On 9/3/2021 at 6:35 PM, telemax said:

An attempt in the Designer. Normal Map + Vector Brush Normal_Map_Vector_Brush.afdesign
 

 

 

Read more here:

 

Really cool! But softer brushes mess up the effect... We'd need grayscale conversion to normals, or something more solid, like nDo... which seems to have been discontinued.

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On 9/3/2021 at 2:15 PM, Sotalo said:

Once again if you pay once for the Affinity suite you get free updates for 2 years. The program notifies you when an update is available, it downloads and installs very quickly. Not a problem. No issues. Same thing as CC's updates. What you're doing right now is trying to justify $636 a year for an inferior desktop publishing experience. Designer and Photo worked flawlessly while the new update a couple years back broke Illustrator, and the latest PS update practically broke our workflow. I've printed RAW photos in Adobe RGB on a Canon Image Prograf straight from Photo without export, so good luck trying to justify Adobe's worth in a world that would be, for the most part, better off without them. Call me old-fashioned, but I like to own my software, and my car, and my house, not rent it.

I would hope you get updates for the version you bought. If they stopped giving me free updates for V1 after 2 years when no new V2 has been released I would say that is pretty low for software development.

I don't need to justify $636 a year for the global standard in desktop publishing and a hardly inferior software package. The money made for a years software is easily covered in a days work.  

If a PS update broke your workflow you really need to do better testing before updating new software. Thankfully with Adobe CC you can install previous versions very simply with a few mouse clicks. 

Great that you can print RAW photos straight from Photo, we stopped worrying about print drivers years ago and rely on RIP's to run our wide form, digital and anything else we print from. Now all our wide form is 44", 54" and 64", maybe it is normal for the smaller desktop to run it direct through a printer drive, just seems very old fashion to me to still be going about it this way. 

Again you complete devalue a standard. If you are working by yourself then great that you have found a cheap solution that works for you. Most are not operating this way and knowing what I have is what is used by virtually everyone else on the planet in the same industry simplifies life. 

You technically do not own any of your software, you have a licensee agreement that you need to follow. You cannot rip your software apart, play with code, add to it however you want. You are locked down, though I do get your point. You are paying less by "renting" software from Adobe then you would be if you bought it flat out every 2 years. If you are not making enough for this to be financially viable then I would suggest either looking at your business model or you are in the hobbyist category. 

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On 9/3/2021 at 3:32 PM, Aftemplate said:

The development of affinity designers is still going on! Very very very slow.🐌🐌🐌🐢🐢🐢:D

I just hope that Affinity Designer is currently being developed and that the current development warrants a paid update in the near future. Considering the background of a far-sighted business policy, I would understand the apparent slow development. 

 

Ich hoffe, ich erlebe es noch, dass die deutschen Anführungszeichen in Affinity Publisher korrekt funktionieren.

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  • 7 months later...
On 9/4/2021 at 3:05 AM, Sotalo said:

That is your personal opinion and not based on any factual statistics. People did not have to sign up for CC, they could have been working in CS6 to this day as long as they did not upgrade their OS.

Actually, NOT QUITE.

I have CS5 and CS6 from my Masters in Fine Art days, and for the most part that was OK, however in the last few years if I wanted to update them with bug fixes et cetera, I was forced to join "The Cloud".  Why was never explained.  It was the last straw for me. I'm on a fixed income and cannot afford CC no matter how cheap it might seem to be. But I can save up, and Affinity is a once off cost and I've found the apps very easy to use (and fun).

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4 hours ago, Laura Ess said:

in the last few years if I wanted to update them with bug fixes et cetera, I was forced to join "The Cloud".

Don't know about CS6, but on the Mac, some CS5(.5) apps I could actually only update offline because the built-in Adobe online updater stopped working. That was literally a pain in the ass when reinstalling on a fresh drive a few years ago because e.g. some of the Illustrator CS5 update installers were meanwhile only available via archive.org.

See also my posts in this thread: community.adobe.com/t5/illustrator-discussions/adobe-illustrator-cs5-15-0-2-update-link-is-broken/m-p/11447464

Other than that, my decade old CS5/5.5 apps still work happily on El Capitan, with all their network connections to the mothership being blocked by Little Snitch anyway. Apart from Acrobat, I hardly ever need them.

MacBookAir 15": MacOS Ventura > Affinity v1, v2, v2 beta // MacBookPro 15" mid-2012: MacOS El Capitan > Affinity v1 / MacOS Catalina > Affinity v1, v2, v2 beta // iPad 8th: iPadOS 16 > Affinity v2

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