Cat Joke?

[MoonaticDestiny]

Is there like a cat joke going on in the affinity apps and the serif team that I'm not aware about? Because why is a cat silhouette the icon for performance under preferences and why is a cat a shape in the shape tools? Like, of all things cats. Its so weird and random. Whats going on? 

[ashf]

According to Serif, it's because they love cats.
Check "Start" and "End" shape of the stoke. you can see there's the Affinity icon.



 

[R C-R]

46 minutes ago, ashf said:

According to Serif, it's because they love cats.

 According to the Cat Tool help topic, it is because "Everyone loves cats..."

There is also a cat length unit:

For example, select a vector or shape object with the Move Tool & in Transform panel in the W or H field enter "0.5 cat" (without the quotes.

[v_kyr]

It's sort of an software based easter egg.

[Ali]

Newer Serif followers will not know that at the very beginning, the Serif PagePlus logo was a tiger. Their 'affinity' with cats, big and small, is long-lived. Did you see what I did there???

[Sam Neil]

I remember the tiger very well. I think for me it was 1997 when I first used PagePlus and was still using it until Publisher came along. 

[User_783649]

It's just a small thing if you think about it. But for me it shows that there are real and very kind people working in this company. People with hearts and souls.

Once I discovered a cat silhouette under the custom shapes menu I got a very warm feeling. And when I saw Andy's user profile picture on Twitter I was fully convinced: it is their "signature" style. I really love such a small but very cute things. They tell a lot.

[Ali]

3 minutes ago, Sam Neil said:

I remember the tiger very well. I think for me it was 1997 when I first used PagePlus and was still using it until Publisher came along. 

I'm still using it. Publisher is still missing some basic features (for me), so I'm not ready to move to it yet.

I've been with Serif since PP v.1.0, and was wearing a Serif T-shirt when I gave birth to my daughter - that's commitment for you!!!

[Alfred]

23 minutes ago, Ali said:

Newer Serif followers will not know that at the very beginning, the Serif PagePlus logo was a tiger.

 

14 minutes ago, Sam Neil said:

I remember the tiger very well.

For those who’ve never seen it or don’t remember it, here ’tis:

[kaffeeundsalz]

Thanks @Alfred, this is very interesting. I know there are many people around here coming from the legacy Plus range of Serif products. I'm not one of them, so I'm doomed to work my way backwards through Serif's history. 😉

[IanSG]

6 hours ago, R C-R said:

 According to the Cat Tool help topic, it is because "Everyone loves cats..."

I like Sandi Toksvig's take on domestic felines "So many cats, so few recipes!".

 

[RM f/g]

When you option-click the Triangle Tool in Designer or the Rectangle Tool in Publisher you will see there's a Cat Tool as well...

[PaulEC]

25 minutes ago, RM f/g said:

When you option-click the Triangle Tool in Designer or the Rectangle Tool in Publisher you will see there's a Cat Tool as well...

On Windows you can Shift and Right Click to get the Cat Tool to show in the list of shapes! 🙂

(I think I'm right in saying that the cat also appears on Halloween and on any Friday 13th!)

[Alfred]

5 hours ago, RM f/g said:

When you option-click the Triangle Tool in Designer or the Rectangle Tool in Publisher you will see there's a Cat Tool as well...

 

4 hours ago, PaulEC said:

On Windows you can Shift and Right Click to get the Cat Tool to show in the list of shapes! 🙂

(I think I'm right in saying that the cat also appears on Halloween and on any Friday 13th!)

Sadly, the Cat Tool doesn’t seem to have found its way into the iPad apps. The cat appears in the Styles panel on Friday 13th (but again, only on the desktop versions of the apps).

[R C-R]

4 hours ago, PaulEC said:

(I think I'm right in saying that the cat also appears on Halloween and on any Friday 13th!)

I do not know about Halloween (is it the same day of the year in the US, UK, & other countries that have that holiday?) but on every Friday the 13th it appears in the Styles studio panel in place of the gear shape icons. Every Friday the 13th, a few users will post something about this, worrying that it is a bug or an indication there is something wrong with their copy of the app.

Replies to those topics are how some users discover that it is an easter egg, that there is a Cat Tool, & a cat length unit.

[PaulEC]

10 minutes ago, R C-R said:

I do not know about Halloween (is it the same day of the year in the US, UK, & other countries that have that holiday?)

The actual date is always 31st October, although some people seem to spread it out a bit now-a-days!

[R C-R]

37 minutes ago, PaulEC said:

The actual date is always 31st October, although some people seem to spread it out a bit now-a-days!

No kidding! One of my neighbors put a 10' tall skeleton in their front yard around the beginning of October. It is still there, now decorated with strands of Christmas lights, so I suppose it will be there until around the end of the year. 😀

[Alfred]

25 minutes ago, R C-R said:

No kidding! One of my neighbors put a 10' tall skeleton in their front yard around the beginning of October. It is still there, now decorated with strands of Christmas lights, so I suppose it will be there until around the end of the year. 😀

I wonder whether they’ll remove it on Twelfth Night, or simply take off the lights.

[iconoclast]

21 minutes ago, R C-R said:

No kidding! One of my neighbors put a 10' tall skeleton in their front yard around the beginning of October. It is still there, now decorated with strands of Christmas lights, so I suppose it will be there until around the end of the year. 😀

A family in the village I lived in until lately decorates it's whole garden and house front every year with bedsheet-ghosts, skeletons, gravestones, huge spider webs and other stuff like that. And they have a large canvas they are showing movies like "Nightmare before Christmas", Tim Burton's "Vincent", "Mad Monster Party" etc. during their Halloween-Party. All Neighbours are invited. Crazy funny people!

According to the cat-splean of the Serif people (I'm a cat-maniac too): I would like to have a menu in the toolbar with all the cat shapes they ever offered in their apps in the past and maybe in the future. That would be a nice little gimmick, I think.

[Old Bruce]

One neighbour here does Halloween decorations up on October 1st and down on November 1st. Christmas lights start going up December 1st and come down January 1st (or 2nd depending on the party's duration). Various house cats wander about year round, dependant only on the number of bears out and about. Deer are stalked and that looks really, really weird.

[walt.farrell]

1 hour ago, iconoclast said:

I would like to have a menu in the toolbar with all the cat shapes they ever offered in their apps in the past and maybe in the future.

It's not a menu, but the 3 shapes they've provided so far are available here:

 

[v_kyr]

There is also another older thread which deals with this cat topic:

• The Cat Tool has changed!

[Pšenda]

19 hours ago, R C-R said:

it is because "Everyone loves cats..."

It is also the only one allowed out of topic thema :-)

[Sam Neil]

On 12/2/2021 at 9:55 AM, Alfred said:

 

For those who’ve never seen it or don’t remember it, here ’tis:

Thanks Alfred. Yes! I came to PagePlus not by choice as Hendon college in London at times was using this software and it was part of the curriculum and thanks to Serif I developed a hate for Microsoft Word which to this day I have! 😀 I went to produce 3 books with PP and now Publisher is my most frequently used tool from the trio but my favourite is the Designer. Although one amazing feature is the Personas which have proved a very valuable tool when designing a book with loads of images. So hats off to Serif for this feature. 

[Old Bruce]

When someone says cat I think of the scene in "Apocalypse Now" when Willard and Chef go looking for mangos.