Is AFFINITY dead?

[PaoloT]

4 hours ago, v_kyr said:

So without NeXT's software technologies no Apple MacOS nowadays and no WWW

Avie Tevanian, the main developer of Mach OS, is now investing (with NextEquity) in interesting technologies. He should massively invest in the Affinity apps!

Paolo

 

[PaoloT]

2 hours ago, N.P.M. said:

 

An invention of John Lasseter, the other genius that allowed Steve Jobs to become a great producer. I know, now that he is canceled, this post will disappear in a few minutes, and the lamp with be switched off.

Paolo

 

[v_kyr]

18 hours ago, PaoloT said:

Avie Tevanian, the main developer of Mach OS ...

Yes at NeXT he was responsible for the Mach kernel and thus the heart of the BSD Unix based NeXTstep/OpenStep system. So the main force of the Mach kernel (...like Linus Torvalds is  for the Linux kernel). - Though software wise there were also other genious guys involved at NeXT and later at Apple, like Jean-Marie Hullot (...he sadly died three years ago) who was reponsible for the dev tools (ProjectBuilder, InterfaceBuilder, Obj-C, APIs etc.). Prof. Richard E Crandall the chief scientist (who died too early too).  - And not to forget, the nice guy who introduced and demoed the first time a NeXT computer to me, Mr. Bud Tribble. Which happened long time ago during a CeBit event, at an Adobe booth. Since Adobe were the only ones who had unofficially, first time in germany, a NeXTcube there. They were showing their Display Postscript implementation for NeXT on that one.

Update: forgotten to name Keith Ohlfs as the main graphics wizzard & UI L&F specialist those days at NeXT!

[Granddaddy]

Interesting how this thread has evolved from speculation about the future of Affinity products to the history of the NeXT computer.

My experience with NeXT is that the machine was dead on arrival.

Decades ago, our university Computing Center was thrashing wildly in search of a way to maintain control as we abandoned their IBM mainframe in favor of decentralized desktop computing. Thinking to get ahead of us, the Computing Center declared NeXT was the future and brought in a sales group to sell the idea to the rest of us.

Sadly, the presenters emphasized that NeXT would be sold only to the education market, not to businesses. Yes, they had an odd idea of computing virtue and purity.

I told my colleagues that any product deliberately restricting its own sales was surely dead. And that's how it turned out. The Computing Center purchased numerous NeXT computers, seeded them around campus, where they totally failed to take hold. After a year or so the Computing Center moved on to other passions and NeXT was quickly forgotten. None of the Computing Center's attempts at control prevented the rest of us on campus from developing our own desktop solutions suited to furthering our own work rather than locking us down to the control agenda of the Computing Center gurus. 

[thomaso]

15 hours ago, v_kyr said:

long time ago during a CeBit event, at an Adobe booth. Since Adobe were the only ones who had unofficially, first time in germany, a NeXTcube there.

16 minutes ago, Granddaddy said:

My experience with NeXT is that the machine was dead on arrival.

What year were your two experiences? I wonder because mine was quite different: ~ 1989/1990 I wavered between buying a Macintosh or a NeXT. At that time we had a NeXT shop but none for Apple in town (~1/2 mio inhabitants). Though NeXT felt "closer" this way I chose a used mac IIcx from a friend of a friend, as far I remember it was not the price only but also that there was less graphic design software for NeXT available.

About 5 years later I yearned for a Silicon Graphics because the specs of my mac were frustrating and very limiting for visual design jobs, especially images. I was observing the Silicon Graphics product range and new releases for some months, noticing that every "next" model release appeared to be a lot more useful, as if "really" useful compared to the current … which finally let me stick to Apple, which became easier accessible and relatively cheaper.

[v_kyr]

40 minutes ago, Granddaddy said:

Decades ago, our university Computing Center was thrashing wildly in search of a way to maintain control as we abandoned their IBM mainframe in favor of decentralized desktop computing. Thinking to get ahead of us, the Computing Center declared NeXT was the future and brought in a sales group to sell the idea to the rest of us.

We had no next computers (not even one) in those times at the main university computer science department, instead it was there more of a Sun Workstation Solaris/Sunos domain. When I worked for Next, I once brought a NeXtcube to a military university, which went to a research assistant there. He got a one day briefing in the use and some help to integrate the machine into their specific network there.

The general overall problem those times was, that the black hardware was way too expensive, even for students and acedemic research workers. Since for that money you could also have bought a new VW Golf then. - Later when NeXT realized that and went software only, it was pretty much to late!

The groundbreaking on NeXT was more of the operating system (NeXTstep/OpenStep) and its software and not necessarily the hardware, which, as I said before, was too expensive anyway! - The whole evolution of that can be seen nowadays in MacOS!

[v_kyr]

1 hour ago, thomaso said:

... as far I remember it was not the price only but also that there was less graphic design software for NeXT available.

There was a buch of graphics software available, though some expensive too and hard to get in Europe. Take a look over ...

• Index of /NeXTfiles/Articles/NeXTWORLD (the magazine software reviews and ads)
• Index of /NeXTfiles/Software/NEXTSTEP/Apps

... we had them nearly all those days, in order to show customers specific software solutions.

My favorite apps those days (beside the dev tools & apps) were, Virtuoso, Appsoft Draw, FrameMaker, everything from Lighthouse Design & Stone Design,  Cub'X-Window, Sybase ... well too much to list them all here!

Beside all that a NeXT those days was the ideal machine for PS & EPS hacking (WYSIWYG), since everything was shown on screen in Display Postscript. Which in turn here also reminds me to some funny adverts of those times, which in retrospective were somehow very cool (like poor Bill) ... 😉

 

[debraspicher]

On 10/14/2022 at 10:05 AM, Twolane said:

This entire thread and the like will be redundant when V2 lands.

Yes, we're just killing time until V2. Not serious at all.

I like staff and some of the regulars here.

[thomaso]

55 minutes ago, v_kyr said:

My favorite apps those days (beside the dev tools & apps) were, Virtuoso, FrameMaker, everything from Lighthouse Design & Stone Design,  Cub'X-Window, Sybase ... well too much to list them all here!

What year was this? – And what year was your mentioned experience at the CeBit?

Nice link to the magazines! – Though I can't remember to have noticed in 1990 remarkable existence of graphic design apps for NeXT … it seems there have been various:

"Soon" – the magic keyword …

[thomaso]

1 hour ago, v_kyr said:

reminds me to some funny adverts of those times

... which reminds me of the Apple "Switch" campaign (2002 – 2003), especially the clip with expressive gestures / mimic and American slang of Ellen Face, the daughter of an Apple manager. "I w's ridinga paypa … on a pea sea … and then, half of my paypa was gohne …"

[thomaso]

1 hour ago, v_kyr said:

There was a buch of graphics software available, though some expensive too and hard to get in Europe. Take a look over ...

"The Bunch, The Book and The Expensive" …

[v_kyr]

48 minutes ago, thomaso said:

What year was this?

TopDraw I think probably 1991, since it's mentioned then very often in other NeXTworld magazins of that year. - Some cool software for NeXTstep appeared later on the scene, like Appsoft Draw, TIFFany ... etc.

48 minutes ago, thomaso said:

And what year was your mentioned experience at the CeBit?

Good question, let me recherche..., I've got the information documents in response from NeXT via AirMail (...as Bud Tribble has promised me) in May 1990, so it must have been during the march CeBit 1990 at the Adobe booth!

[thomaso]

Soon to the moon, too … https://www.ebay.com/p/2113406799

[v_kyr]

I really like old IT-software adverts, since they were somehow more funny in contrast to those of nowadays!

[Krustysimplex]

Aaaah Virtuoso. Remember when Altsys and Aldus jacked up the Freehand nameplate and rolled in a complete new Virtuoso engine around about V.3 or 4?

[v_kyr]

34 minutes ago, Krustysimplex said:

Aaaah Virtuoso. Remember when Altsys and Aldus jacked up the Freehand nameplate and rolled in a complete new Virtuoso engine around about V.3 or 4?

Yes, according to Wikipedia it was V4.

[PaulEC]

On 10/12/2022 at 6:41 PM, Boldlinedesign said:

is it twice as expensive if it offers 1000 more tools and features than affinity?

1: I very much doubt if there are actually "1000 more tools and features"!

2: If there are, it is probably quite difficult to find the one you want, and, personally, i doubt if I would ever want to use most of them!

So, yes, for me, VS would be much more expensive than AD!

[AphexSinn]

I signed up to the forum because I was in the mood to check out how things were going and I see this at the top. It's a classic for such threads to happen between software releases and I'm not the apologetic-on-behalf-of-companies type, but this time I'm not against Serif. At all.

My thoughts:

1. There's been an unusual radio silence on their part this year so far (just look at YouTube), and 1.10, which was a "under-the-hood" update all about performance, made me think it was the last big one. So far I don't stand corrected, and I think there will be news in the upcoming months.
2. The 1.0 Serif suite is currently entirely appropriate for private use, which is what it should be used for. There's still some work to do in terms of proprietary file formats and features to make it powerful enough to replace what's leading the industry right now, but given the circumstances Affinity has done great to satisfy most needs.

It's always okay to complain about anything; justifying it is another story. I understand some may be mad that only a handful of languages are supported or that Illustrator still has more features compared to Designer and so on, but this is a sorta fresh program selling for a little over sixty bucks a pop. Every competitor, from libre to embarassingly expensive software will also have an X feature that Y software does not – so who is being disrespectful to whom, according to this logic?
Serif is not Adobe by manpower, market share, nor market cap. The Affinity suite was 80€ for me during sales, that's less than a month and a half of Creative Cloud. The utilitarian price is surprising and welcome, but it also tells you that not every niche can be catered to.

I'm not in pain waiting for v2. The only remotely urgent thing right now is a new 1.10.x release maybe, because of the Windows KB* updates problem which crashes Affinity when changing fonts.

If it comes out this Christmas, great, if it comes out in 2023, I'm still good and I'll gladly pay up for the upgrade. That's all. I know when a company is being unfair or downright dishonoring of their EULA... see what happened with Celsys (Clip Studio) and Bitwig recently.

[Patrick Connor]

@AphexSinn

Welcome to the Serif Affinity forums

Cool username and thanks for your thoughts, hope you stick around 

[Granddaddy]

On 10/15/2022 at 11:53 AM, thomaso said:

What year were your two experiences?

As my mother used to say about the past, it was a long time ago. The NeXT was new at the time, so I have to guess 1989 or thereabouts. It's all mixed in with the vicious university computing wars of that decade: WordPerfect/Word, YTerm vs Kermit, Mac vs Windows,  and on and on. 

There were those who thought the users too dumb to evaluate and choose hardware and software that accomplished their jobs. Computer gurus thought it was their job to impose their preferences on others, to tell them they did not understand their jobs and point out to them they shouldn't even be doing what they were doing. It continues to this day in many areas.

I thought the users were the only people who should make those decisions, and that paid off tremendously when the users designed a computer system still in use nearly 30 years later at almost every major research library in America. But that's a story for another time and a different forum.

[thomaso]

31 minutes ago, Granddaddy said:

so I have to guess 1989 or thereabouts

Ah, like mine ('89/'90) or v_kyrs ('90). – It sounds confusing when you said:

On 10/15/2022 at 5:03 PM, Granddaddy said:

My experience with NeXT is that the machine was dead on arrival.

… because v_kyr's links above to the "NeXTWorld" magazine from '91 – '94 rather demonstrate NeXT as successful: Just imagine, it was a magazine with ca. 100 pgs and 4 issues per year and, at least in the scanned PDFs, just a few foreign adds. So I think there must have been a period after arrival where they have been not dead at all but quite lively.

[Ronald N. Tan]

As someone who is learning Hindi Devanagari (reading and writing), I will happily take the support of Indic LTR support in V2, which should also include suppose for Dravidian-based languages of South India: Telugu, Tamil, Kannada, Odia, Malayalam, etc. The Devanagari script is used by Hindi, Marathi, and Nepali.

I had a good chuckle perusing how much that thread was derailed and went off topic. It's entertainment to kill time until V2 is officially announced.

Maybe in V3, there will support for RTL for Farsi, Urdu, Arabic, Hebrew, and several scripts used in China.

[lphilpot]

Being a new Affinity user (Photo only at this point) I have no upgrade history so I'll ask: is there generally a discounted price for existing users? Or is there a time window in which it's available if, for example, one purchased version X right before X+1 was released?

Thanks.

[v_kyr]

53 minutes ago, Ronald N. Tan said:

I had a good chuckle perusing how much that thread was derailed and went off topic. It's entertainment to kill time until V2 is officially announced.

Yep something like that, because it's boring to always read about some strange conspiracy theories here.

 

2 hours ago, thomaso said:

So I think there must have been a period after arrival where they have been not dead at all but quite lively.

Basically the history and timeline of NeXT, Inc. (later NeXT Computer, Inc. and NeXT Software, Inc.) in this context can be seen and read on Wikipedia...

• NeXT (Wikipedia en)
• NeXT (Wikipedia de)

I recall that I worked from ~1991 till 1995 for a german NeXT dependance. - One year later 1996, Apple bought NeXT, which was also to Apple's rescue, since they didn't had any good for the future scalable modern OS & OO based dev software API technologies etc. And of course they finally also got Steve back. Due to the aquired NeXT software technologies and know how, Apple got again very inovative and profitable. Most things in nowadays MacOS, iOS, iPad OS etc. are mostly based on former NeXT software technologies! Also certain Apple apps are based on former times NeXT apps.

[thomaso]

19 minutes ago, v_kyr said:

And of course they finally also got Steve back. Due to the aquired NeXT software technologies and know how, Apple got again very inovative and profitable.

… respectively Steve got Apple back. – This positive influence of Steve on NeXT and of NeXT on Apple is also my impression. That is why I still wonder what you, @Granddaddy meant with "My experience with NeXT is that the machine was dead on arrival." – Or was it just literally: your purchased NeXT machine arrived broken?