move "user account" management to a separate app

[tariq]

This is a requires to move the "user account" management functions that appeared in recent Affinity suite products to a separate app.

There are 3 reasons for this:

1. Reduce the bloat on the core apps and keep them focussed on content creation. Currently the extra "weight" of this functionality is borne by all the apps, which is inefficient, especially if you have 2 or 3 running at the same time, and very especially if you don't want that functionality.
2. Logically a user account and product purchase management facility should be separate. We then have the choice whether to use it or not. 
3. It reduces the technical risk. We've been suffering from a disastrous 30 second startup time due to an embedded "web rendering component" in the apps. User account management should never be allowed to bring down the entire app, nor should it even be linked to content creation. That is separate from the very poor choice to "embed a browser" which is both lazy and a security risk.

 

( On that last point, how did the apps get past testing with a 30 second startup? If it was identified, those changes should have been reversed. )

 

[loukash]

1 hour ago, tariq said:

move the "user account" management functions that appeared in recent Affinity suite products to a separate app

I'm all for it.
I don't even use it because most of the time I'm working from an El Capitan partition, and this "feature" requires Sierra or higher.
But even after exploring it on another compatible partition, I see no use in this, as long as each app insists to download all of my online goodies again and again and again (yep, three times a few hundreds of megabytes!) for each app separately. WTF?

1 hour ago, tariq said:

how did the apps get past testing with a 30 second startup?

Read the FAQ. Serif staff is posting them for a reason.

 

[tariq]

@loukash - I didn't realise each app was downloading the content separately for itself.. that's a terrible design/bug if true. 

[loukash]

6 hours ago, tariq said:

that's a terrible design/bug if true. 

It's not a bug. I guess this method was chosen for the sake of consistency between platforms and download options. At the root of this issue is likely the mandatory "sandboxing" of apps distributed via Mac App Store: each app lives in its own sandbox, without having the immediate possibility to share resources with other apps. That's a system wide security measure. The Affinity versions from the Serif store wouldn't have these restrictions.

So a solution would be a shared Application Support folders for all Affinity apps combined, same as what Adobe does for their suite of apps since decades.

Search the forums, there have been a couple of threads on this topic recently.

[hy13]

I fully agree to that above request. That is why I still use 1.7.x for production and load the later versions only for test purpose. AP started in their first versions with the stress on efficiency and this was even an advantage over PS. Meanwhile that advantage faints piece by piece.