A Growing Lack of Confidence

[LCamachoDesign]

I've made topics on these lines over the years, and nothing changed so far. 🤷‍♂️

I see people comparing with Adobe, but you need to remember that there's no such thing as one Adobe. This type of corporations can be thought as many different businesses that happen to have the exact same name, and some teams are good, others are terrible.

The InDesign "team" (is there even a team for this application any longer?) for example is terrible, InDesign is essentially abandonware at this point. It wasn't changed significantly in almost a decade, many pain points are the same as CS6. There's even the story about a specific panel that no one fixes, because the person who wrote it left long ago, and no one know how it works anymore. 😃

I do however think, and I've made this point before, that Serif ought to look at a specific team of Adobe. That team is Adobe XD. It's probably the best team they have at the moment. Save for a few exceptions, there's a new version of Adobe XD every month, normally between the 10th and 15th. Like clockwork. The new version might just be bug fixes, but it's always there. It rose from a barebones app to a top contender for UI/UX, surpassing (IMHO) Sketch and being neck to neck with Figma. And I'm positive this fast release cadence is what helped them get there.

Another team worth looking, for another reason, at is Adobe Fresco. They don't release as often, but their strength lies on the team leader. It's They are headed by Kyle Webster. This is the guy that made one of the most popular brush sets for Photoshop, ever. Even Disney was purchasing and using his brushes instead of doing their own. He's that good. He knows what it takes to do a good drawing app, he was a top brushes creator, he knows all that's really needed by people working on this, and it shows. Fresco went from 0 to neck-to-neck with Procreate in a jiffy.

Both these teams highlight, with practical examples, what Serif is missing. A fast, reliable, consistent release cadence. A focus on what actual real users need and want.

[Old Bruce]

10 hours ago, LCamachoDesign said:

Both these teams highlight, with practical examples, what Serif is missing. A fast, reliable, consistent release cadence. A focus on what actual real users need and want.

It would be interesting to get some idea of the sizes of the teams and the budgets for them as well. 

[LCamachoDesign]

19 hours ago, Old Bruce said:

It would be interesting to get some idea of the sizes of the teams and the budgets for them as well. 

My guess is that XD team size might be the same as Serif, or just a touch larger. Fresco is almost certainly a smaller team. Budget is of course order of magnitude larger.

But none of these suggestions need big teams or large budgets. For release cadence, plenty of miniscule teams do Agile instead of Waterfall. For real users needs, even easier, just set up a UserVoice and direct feedback to there.

[Boldlinedesign]

To give a little more perspective, vectorstyler is literally a one man team and updates come out nearly weekly and all the major missing tools in affinity can be found in vectorstyler already. Ideas are heard and implementation is quick. It's still a work in progress like any other app, but the bugs do not sit around like in InDesign.

 

[Dazmondo77]

14 minutes ago, Boldlinedesign said:

To give a little more perspective, vectorstyler is literally a one man team and updates come out nearly weekly and all the major missing tools in affinity can be found in vectorstyler already. Ideas are heard and implementation is quick. It's still a work in progress like any other app, but the bugs do not sit around like in InDesign.

 

I was about to say the same ---- I'm on the same page as Boldlinedesign👍

[Pšenda]

9 hours ago, Boldlinedesign said:

and updates come out nearly weekly

And do you consider this a sign of application and development quality? Arrange with the developers to send you each build, and it will have an update several times a day.

[CM0]

1 hour ago, Pšenda said:

And do you consider this a sign of application and development quality? Arrange with the developers to send you each build, and it will have an update several times a day.

Modern application development that follows the Agile development principles organizes development such that you can essentially ship at any time.  It is a process that throws away the long design, develop and test cycles with short iterations.  It produces higher quality deliverables by having responsive feedback with the stake holders as well as test driven development and automation allowing for continuous high quality and stability of the product.

[Boldlinedesign]

1 hour ago, Pšenda said:

And do you consider this a sign of application and development quality? Arrange with the developers to send you each build, and it will have an update several times a day.

In this case, yes indeed. With vectorstyler being built on newer architecture with a massive number of features and tools and developed by a single person, the need for weekly testing and feedback is critical. It's much better to see weekly improvements than a decade with few improvements and basic tools still lacking

[Old Bruce]

35 minutes ago, LondonSquirrel said:

A single point of failure.

The fellow will never be allowed to take a day off let alone have a vacation.

[Boldlinedesign]

10 hours ago, LondonSquirrel said:

I can tell that as an end user I would NOT want to be continually installing updates and releases

I'm not sure I'm following your thinking - as each update contains a massive number of bug fixes and improvements, I'd welcome as many updates as possible. I get the sense those chipping in with their criticisms here have not spent much time if any using Vectorstyler or contributing to the betterment of the program in the Vectorstyler forum. if they did, they would be posting on the VS forum their concerns and issues with the program and praising it for the many things it does right. Vectorstler is not perfect by any means, but it's actively improved weekly. Why not chip in and help make it better? Especially with a developer eager for input and quick to improve the program.

You can be a supporter of both programs. There's a certain irony to people criticizing a program that completely outpaces Affinity in features, code architecture, updates and bug fixes, despite being a one man team and starting development years after Affinity. People claim so many issues with Vectorstyler (many seem unfounded) but I have yet to see their views appear in the forum there. It's in everyone's best interest to see multiple programs develop and be viable options to replace Adobe and weaken their unfortunate monopoly. We should love Affinity enough to call them out on their lack of recent innovation, glacial speed of updates, glaring missing basic tools, their lack of communicating regularly with their customer base. Seeing one man continuously lap the entire Affinity Designer team with his own full featured vector program should reset our expectations of Affinity, not lead to trying to tear down the competition for being better. 

When Affinity releases another substantial beta, I will actively test it like I always do. I will provide feedback and ideas as I always do. Right now, nothing is happening that the public can be enlightened about. Affinity 1.10 came out a long time ago, the needs of the customer base have been shouted from the rooftops for literally years now. There's not much more we can do but sit and wait for the next release and hope they've listened to the clamoring of their base. Meanwhile, I'm active in a forum for a program that is evolving week after week - that's where the action is right now.

 

10 hours ago, LondonSquirrel said:

A single point of failure.

I don't know what his plan is longterm (I have not asked) but I do know he takes vacations and I would hope he takes the occasional day off. He runs a very efficient support service. I would like to think as Vectorstyler takes off in popularity and use, he'll have plenty of opportunities to expand the company. 
 

[CM0]

3 hours ago, LondonSquirrel said:

My criticisms are related to agile development. You wrote about 'weekly improvements'. Well you would only see those weekly improvements if you update your software weekly. That soon becomes very tiresome.

 

No one will force you to accept all the improvements.  If you are happy with the version you are using, just keep using it.  You can still update once a year or never if that is what you want.

[PaoloT]

12 hours ago, LondonSquirrel said:

You wrote about 'weekly improvements'.

I, too, would fear weekly improvements. It would mean there wouldn't have been any beta testing, and the beta tester is the user.

Paolo

 

[CM0]

1 hour ago, PaoloT said:

I, too, would fear weekly improvements. They would mean there wouldn't have been any beta testing, and the beta tester is the user.

Paolo

 

That is not how it works.  A mature development organization will have designed the application such that all features are capable of being tested through automation.

You will still have some user testing, but the large bulk of testing is accomplished through automation.  Weekly iterations done properly does not lower quality, it increases quality.  You don't have bugs that go for long cycles before being discovered which often makes them harder to fix.

[CM0]

1 hour ago, LondonSquirrel said:

That is simply not the case. I've developed software for over 20 years. No matter how many tests I can devise, there are always cases which I have not thought of and so are not tested. The more complex the software, the more tricky it is to devise tests. We're not talking about "hello world" here.

That is also incorrect. If a bug is not noticed or reported then it will not be fixed. Why do you think there are many long duration bugs in all kinds of software?

I've worked on the largest applications in the industry for 3 decades.  Enterprise solutions that have 7 figure licenses.  Many multi million lines of code across different languages, systems and platforms that are tightly integrated.
I've worked as solution architect for fortune 100 companies to improve their development processes.

This is how we did it.  At this scale of size and complexity, you don't have enough resources, man hours, to even conceivably make manual testing feasible.  Testing is part of a proper architectural design from the beginning.  Yes, the problems you describe are common because it is common that proper testing methodologies are not used in most organizations.  I've spent much of my life helping teams improve these issues.  It is not easy, and frankly, in a large application that never did the design properly from the beginning will not be fully fixable.

[CM0]

3 minutes ago, LondonSquirrel said:

Back to the point above: VectorStyler is maintained (apparently) by one person. If they devote all their time to writing tests they will not be working on their program.

Automated tests do not find all bugs. If that was the case there would be no bugs in Windows/macOS/etc. Automated tests are good at testing what the test designers want to test.

It would be normal in proper development to be a test for every API function.  When you do this at the unit test level, it is really not necessarily that much more work.  You should have 100% test coverage.  It is irrelevant whether you are a single person or a huge corporation.  Eventually, you can't manually test anymore.  Development cycles get longer and longer because of the testing burden until it takes you forever to get out the single new feature. 

Overtime, the application becomes more complex, new changes may introduce regressions.  When you add a new change, you should test all other features that have ever been developed since the beginning.  You can't scale this manually.  So if you are doing manual testing, you will only test a small portion.  What you think might be affected.  Often you will be wrong.

You don't decide what to test with automated tests.  At least at the unit level.  You test everything.  You should 100% test coverage.  That might not be possible at the integration test level.  The problem with OS's, is it is essentially just an integration platform because you allow software to be installed that is not part of your testing and that software can be written at low level which is a different problem at a different scale.

[CM0]

Just to level set expectations.  For anyone thinking that Affinity should just switch to Agile and all will be good.  It is not that simple.  There is no way to know how long it would take without direct consultation, but it wouldn't be unreasonable for such a transition to take a year or more for any decent sized development when that transition is being led by someone with experience in helping development process transformation.

Also, we only have an outside view and it is just speculation as to what are their greatest challenges internally.

[Old Bruce]

1 hour ago, CM0 said:

7 figure licenses

vs 2 figure licenses.

Who has more resources to dedicate to your vision of automated testing?

1 hour ago, CM0 said:

frankly, in a large application that never did the design properly from the beginning will not be fully fixable.

This I agree with completely. I fear there may be persistent bugs in the Affinity suite that fall into this category of being not right from the start.

[AlainP]

3 minutes ago, Old Bruce said:

This I agree with completely. I fear there may be persistent bugs in the Affinity suite that fall into this category of being not right from the start.

I can't say I have problems with all three apps ( I don't use Publisher very much), but since the first versions of Photo and Designer I always felt that there is something wrong with the memory management and filesize. This is from day one, on Windows at least. 

I understand that implementing hardware graphics acceleration is not an easy task with all the different cards and configurations. I never had any problem so far with GA, but reading comments from so many users having problems with it.... there is something wrong there too. Maybe third party modules and libraries... I can't say.

But this being said.... I would never go back to Adobe. I much prefer Affinity apps. 

[CM0]

1 hour ago, LondonSquirrel said:

When will you understand that you cannot possibly test for everything? That is why practically all large software projects have bugs. 

No you don't. You only test what you can think of. Somebody else will think of something else you have not thought of.

This forum will not be sufficient for a proper in depth discussion.  I would recommend you start reading some material on TDD.

https://testdriven.io/test-driven-development/

For everyone else, what you are witnessing is exactly what happens internally within development teams when a new process is proposed.  There is resistance to change and acceptance that the new process will be beneficial.  It is more than just the technical element when improving processes.  There is the human element that is a fundamental step in convincing the organization that the process changes will be beneficial.  It is why you need an experienced advocate to lead the change.  An organization is unlikely to be able to navigate the process on their own without a lot of mistakes along the way.

 

[CM0]

32 minutes ago, Old Bruce said:

This I agree with completely. I fear there may be persistent bugs in the Affinity suite that fall into this category of being not right from the start.

In software development, there is a concept called "technical debt" that usually leads to slower development over time.  Almost all projects build up technical debt over time.  No project ever has all the foresight of what will be needed in the future and original designs can fall short of what is needed.  At some point, if technical debt is not addressed, development continues to be slower and slower.  It is painful to address, as it usually means you have to put new development on hold to go back and do refactoring and redesign.  The benefit is that development velocity can increase afterward.

The somewhat hopeful point of view is that it sounds like Affinity did address some technical debt last year with changes they were making to improve performance.

[Bwood]

As a new user of the Affinity Suite I would hope that upon an update, the list of fixes are listed on the Affinity website. Is this a true statement? 

[walt.farrell]

23 minutes ago, Bwood said:

As a new user of the Affinity Suite I would hope that upon an update, the list of fixes are listed on the Affinity website. Is this a true statement? 

A list of fixes is included in the Release Notes for the release, here in the forums (see, for example, the Latest Releases topic in News and Information).

It usually, I think, just includes major new items and fixes, not every tiny thing that may have been touched.

[Boldlinedesign]

@Frozen Death Knight Just an FYI. A new build of Vectorstyler was released today which included some fixes based on the insights you shared a couple weeks ago. I had passed along your comments to the developer to be sure they got noticed and applied as best they could. Meanwhile no serious news on the Affinity front. I hope you reconsider and play an active part in the VS development. Waiting around does not help anyone in either community as we wait for Affinity's next move. 

[Frozen Death Knight]

On 2/10/2022 at 4:15 AM, Boldlinedesign said:

@Frozen Death Knight Just an FYI. A new build of Vectorstyler was released today which included some fixes based on the insights you shared a couple weeks ago. I had passed along your comments to the developer to be sure they got noticed and applied as best they could. Meanwhile no serious news on the Affinity front. I hope you reconsider and play an active part in the VS development. Waiting around does not help anyone in either community as we wait for Affinity's next move. 

Which ones exactly? I downloaded the latest one and my first big critique of VectorStyler is still there; the window itself doesn't play nice with the rest of Windows. Still opens up all over my ultra-widescreen and it doesn't remember the size of the windows from when I last used it, among other things. I don't doubt that the developer is being serious and sincere about fixing the problems I mentioned, but I am not going to pay more than twice than what I bought Affinity Designer/Photo for a software that I think is in an Alpha stage at best.

As I said before, I will probably come back and try again it in a few years when it has become more mature, but until then I am going to continue using Designer and Inkscape until I find something better. For the type of work I'm currently using vectors for these are enough, and they are reliable at doing what I need them to do. While I do agree that Serif are a bit slow with announcing updates as of late, at least I know that I can reliably use their current softwares until they do. 

[Boldlinedesign]

@Frozen Death Knight Sounds like you are confusing Vectorstyler with another software. Your view of the app is worlds apart from reality. It already outperforms Affinity in almost every area. Keep using Designer though -