General Feedback

[meh]

so a while ago I tried out the Affinity Trial (1.3.2) and I wrote down what I was doing and thinking, and then the trial ran out and I kinda forgot about it, but I came across the txt file just now and thought I might share in case it is of any use to anyone. I don't know if the bugs I found have already been fixed, and seems since you only get one trial I can't find out. Here it is:

 

Running commentary while I was opening the Affinity Design trial and messing about in it for the first time:

 

Looks great, like the colourful tool icons. I dislike this trend where all icons become grey and normed to the point where it is harder to tell them apart.

 

Niiiice standard shortcuts, space/cmd/alt panning/zooming! P for pen, T for text, V for move, M toggles through the shapes, thank you, thank you thankyouuuu.

 

Ok, let's make some shapes. Clipping masks? .. oh.. you just drag one shape under another? That's nice.. but.. what if you just wanted to drag a to be below or above another and not create a mask? OH. I see, it depends if you position the layer to the left or right a bit.

 

I love the corner tool, and even more so if it worked on rectangles. Ok, go to Affinity design and make a square. try to apply rounded corners to it.. the px radius number just flickers and nothing happens.

 

when I click and drag with the direct selection-- er, excuse me, the Node Tool / white arrow -- over some paths.. I expect those nodes that are within the area that I dragged over to be selected, unless they're in a locked layer.*

This doesn't not happen. In fact, nothing happens!.. only.. sometimes it does work? depending on if you already had that curve selected? I couldn't figure out the rules behind this. Why can't the Node tool just always select the nodes it's dragged over? What is the benefit to doing it this way? In fact, sometimes it doesn't even show a box when you're dragging, and sometimes the blue box that is created when you click and drag just disappears mid-drag. This feels buggy.

 

*in fact.. how do I lock a layer... ? oh I see it. Funny how you can unlock a layer by clicking on the lock, but not lock it by clicking on where the lock was.

 

In illustrator, when you click with the path tool on a path.. it gets a little + icon and adds a point to the existing path. Affinity design instead creates a new path. Okay, that has an advantage too, it didn't take long to figure out that you hold command to get the path tool to add a node to the existing path.

 

However, the node tool does the same thing- you wanna drag or adjust a path or part of a contour, and instead you find yourself creating extra nodes. I don't like that at all.

 

The align functions are alright.. but.. is there a way to access them without clicking on the dropdown menu, and then on the alignment you want? also.. where is align to artboard?

 

It took me forever to figure out that in order to modify the nodes of an ellipse, I had to "convert to curves" first. Okay, maybe there's a benefit doing it this way but then how about when people try to use the node tool to select parts of a ellipse or indeed another standard shape, have a little text or notification or something to let the user know where to convert the shape to curves so that they can edit this.

It's kind of like when you click the brush tool into a smart layer in photoshop, it doesn't just do NOTHING while the user becomes frustrated and unsure, instead it tells you hey, would you like to rasterise this thing? That is a much better flow.

 

 

SHORTCUT CONFLICT

when dragging a curve handle, it can snap into alignment towards another node. Now when you hold alt, it ignores snapping.. but it creates a cusp (broken node handles). You should use something else for "ignoring snapping".. like say, control?

I do lovelovelovelove how the relevant shortcuts are displayed along the bottom.

 

Holding shift to constrain a path along it's existing angle is nice. However, what if i want to get it back to a 90° angle? How about a function where if I drag roughly along the existing angle, it constrains to that angle, but I can also get it to constrain to vertical/horizontal/45° angle in addition? I suppose if the existing angle is very close to the standard angles it might be confusing.. but.. there must we a way to do this.

 

Um..also, SLOW. Just playing around with simple paths, the frame rate was atrocious. Not remotely as fast as an illustrator file with way more complex shapes in it.

 

––––––––

 

well, I was going to write more but then my demo ran out. But, maybe this feedback helps some. I do hope one day you can actually compete with illustrator. At the moment though, close but no cigar. Keep going!

[Chris_K]

Thanks for the feedback Meh. Always good to hear what people think of the app :)