Unresponsive Expand/Collapse buttons in the Layers panel (Affinity Designer, Windows 10)

[P.O.]

Hello,

I am reposting this (originally posted in the regular support section) as I now realize that this is definitely a bug.

- - - -

I seem completely unable to operate the Expand/Collabse buttons in Affinity Designer (v1.10.5.1342. Win10 pro x64). I've noticed this before when running the application on an earlier workstation running Win7 pro x64 but I brushed it off as a possible incompatibility with the older OS. However with a completely rebuilt machine (with the only common component with the previous one being the video card) the same thing is happening again. The right click access to this function works as expected, which means that it is purely a UI behavior issue ... which greatly reduces the usability of the software.

Some footage showing the unresponsive clicks :

 

Video card is a GTX 1070 running driver 516.94.

Attempts made so far : swapping the rendering engine to Wrap, disabling Cuda, and disabling secondary monitors. None seem to change anything.

 

[P.O.]

Following up on this : after a lot of playing around I've found out that performing a double right click followed by a double left click allows me to expand and close things. This is extremely odd (and annoying !)

Would appreciate some input from the dev team on this.

[Dan C]

Hi @P.O.,

Welcome to the Affinity Forums

This isn't an issue I've seen previously and from my preliminary search, I can't find any other users reporting this issue - so I'd like to request some further information from you regarding this.

I can see you've also posted in Questions but as this does appear to be a bug, our team will continue to support you here, rather than in the Questions thread.

Can you please confirm for me:

• Does this occur in any document, or only the one shown in your recording?
• What are you using as an input device? (ie mouse, drawing tablet stylus, both?)
• What are the make and model of your mouse / other input devices?
• Do you have any applications installed that affect these input devices?
• Do you have any of the following apps installed?

Many thanks in advance!

[P.O.]

Hello and thank you for the follow-up on this, I hope we'll be able to narrow this down. Here's all I know :

- The common hardware between the two setups I have experienced this bug with is as follows : video card (GTX 1070), mouse (MX518 without any proprietary drivers), keyboard (Unicomp Model M USB), displays (Dell U2412M main display + Cintiq 21UX secondary + Cintiq12WX tertiary, and also a HTC Vive that only shows up when active). The CPU, motherboard and ram are all different as this is a fully rebuilt machine.

- No thirdparty software from the list is installed, although I do have AutoHotkey scripts running in the background (that I obviously deactivated when testing of course)

- Input devices : aforementioned mouse, kb, and Cintiq 21UX. The Cintiq 12WX is only used as a side display, not as an input. There's also a Intuos 4 Medium plugged in intermittently. The Wacom driver is set to not use Windows Ink.

- - - - -

Two more pieces of info :

- If I set a keyboard key to act as left click (through AutoHotkey), I still can't expand/collapse/hide/unhide elements from the Layers panel but the "double right click, double left click" workaround still works. So I believe this rules out anything mouse-related.

- The "double right click, double left click" workaround is not requiring the actions to be as fast as regular double clicks. I can input "right click, right click, left click, left click" as slowly as I want, and the last left click will operate. As a matter of fact "right click, left click, left click" works too so I suppose there might be other button combos that can get these UI elements unstuck.

So for now my only workaround is this AHK script :

#IfWinActive, ahk_exe Designer.exe
RWin::
send {RButton}
Sleep 100
send {LButton}
Sleep 100
send {LButton}

 

Edited August 30, 2022 by P.O.

[Dan C]

Thanks for confirming that for me! There's certainly nothing obvious from the information provided that should be causing this, so I'd like to try a few different steps to see if the behaviour changes.

Can you please try the following and let me know the results: 

• Click and drag the 'Layers' tab away from this group of Studios, so that it is a 'floating' panel over the canvas, then try the expand/collapse arrows
• Select one of your layers, then drag and drop this to a different part of the layers stack - does this move the layer order as expected?
• Restart your PC in Safe Mode, then try again.

Finally, do your Dell monitors have a 'Display Scaling' value set in Windows OS, or is this at the default 100%?

Many thanks once again

[P.O.]

Hello,

- The Layers tab was already undocked/standalone and floating in most of my tests done after the initial video which showed it docked initially. 

- I can certainly move things around the stack, but there does seam to be an issue here too (although I don't have a firm point of reference to compare to). The visual representation of the target location (between two layers, or as child of a layer) is slightly odd, showing a horizontal bar in both cases (of varying length) as opposed to what I would expect (showing a bar when dropping in between two layers, and highlighting a layer fully when dropped onto it). So something might be off here too, see attached.

- I cannot try safe mode just yet as this would require having the luxury to reboot my workstation, which is something I can't really do during ongoing projects

[Dan C]

Thank you for trying that for me and I'm sorry to hear it hasn't helped!

On 9/1/2022 at 1:18 AM, P.O. said:

there does seam to be an issue here too (although I don't have a firm point of reference to compare to). The visual representation of the target location (between two layers, or as child of a layer) is slightly odd, showing a horizontal bar in both cases (of varying length) as opposed to what I would expect (showing a bar when dropping in between two layers, and highlighting a layer fully when dropped onto it). So something might be off here too, see attached.

I can confirm this is expected behaviour, the indicator bar will be 'full width' when moving between layers, and will be the reduced width when nesting one layer, within another. Our developers are looking at ways to improve this indicator, as we understand it may not always be clear when moving layers - but from your GIF above this function is working correctly at least

On 9/1/2022 at 1:18 AM, P.O. said:

- I cannot try safe mode just yet as this would require having the luxury to reboot my workstation, which is something I can't really do during ongoing projects

I certainly understand - the reason I have asked for this is to check for conflicts with other applications, as I have been discussing this issue internally with our team and we cannot recall other reports of this issue or replicate it internally and therefore we are currently under the assumption of a third party application or utility affecting this function within Affinity.

[P.O.]

Hello,

- Regarding the layer stack indicator : well, unless I am missing some understanding of other features (which is very possible since I don't used Designer that often), the current representation for "dropping inside another layer" (short bar as opposed to full bar for "inbetween") really makes zero sense visually  And it is aggravated by the fact that actually dragging the mouse right over the desired layer does nothing. In short : the "dropping into" should work when the mouse is actually over the layer ; and the visual representation should be a full highlight of the target layer, perhaps with an oriented gradient indicating that the target position could be either the top or the bottom of the contents of said layer.

(There are many odd UX oddities like that in Designer that I'd be more than happy to report on. But that's minor and less important than the bug being investigated here)

- Will get back to you guys once I have the ability to try safe mode. But an earlier test on my end will likely consist of installing the app on a different workstation altogether.

If anything one other thing that could help would be to get access to a download of an installer of a much earlier version of the application. 1.0/RC perhaps ?

[Dan C]

19 hours ago, P.O. said:

- Regarding the layer stack indicator : well, unless I am missing some understanding of other features (which is very possible since I don't used Designer that often), the current representation for "dropping inside another layer" (short bar as opposed to full bar for "inbetween") really makes zero sense visually  And it is aggravated by the fact that actually dragging the mouse right over the desired layer does nothing. In short : the "dropping into" should work when the mouse is actually over the layer ; and the visual representation should be a full highlight of the target layer, perhaps with an oriented gradient indicating that the target position could be either the top or the bottom of the contents of said layer.

(There are many odd UX oddities like that in Designer that I'd be more than happy to report on. But that's minor and less important than the bug being investigated here)

We appreciate your feedback here and I'll be sure to pass this through to our UI team! If you have further feedback regarding the UI, or features of the Affinity apps then please feel free to post in the following section of the Forums:

Feature Requests & Suggestions

19 hours ago, P.O. said:

- Will get back to you guys once I have the ability to try safe mode. But an earlier test on my end will likely consist of installing the app on a different workstation altogether.

No problem at all, please do let us know when possible

19 hours ago, P.O. said:

If anything one other thing that could help would be to get access to a download of an installer of a much earlier version of the application. 1.0/RC perhaps ?

We offer previous versions of Affinity to download from the below link, but please note in order to install a previous version, you will need to uninstall your current version.

Also please note that Affinity documents are not 'backwards compatible', so a 1.10 document will not open in 1.8 or 1.9, for example.

https://store.serif.com/update/windows/designer/1/

[P.O.]

Hello,

I am following up this (2 years later !), since I'd love to get a functional Designer 1.10.6 before considering v2 and/or any other Affinity product.

I've tried running Designer in safe mode, as well as trying out the oldest version available (1.6.5), but in both case the issue persists. What are the next options/steps from there ? And, has this bug been experienced by any other user ?

[GarryP]

25 minutes ago, P.O. said:

I'd love to get a functional Designer 1.10.6

The V1 applications are no longer getting updates, except for maybe some updates which help to keep the applications running due to operating system changes.

Because of this, I think it is unlikely that this problem will be fixed in the V1 applications.

Someone might be able to come up with a ‘work-around’, but if Serif couldn’t come up with an answer above then there might be nothing that you can do about it.

(The last update to the V1 applications was, as far as I know, in November 2023 for some macOS start-up problems. I don’t know when the last update to the Windows versions was but I’m pretty sure it was before November 2023 because of the latest V1 application version numbers.)

Edited June 4 by GarryP
Added note.

[P.O.]

Hello !

Absolutely - I am of course not expecting an update or bugfix for V1 ; but I am hoping to at least find some way to identify what could possibly cause the issue.

Also, I'd love to know if anyone ran into this issue in V2 and then got it fixed by some later update.

[GarryP]

From what I can understand of what has been said above, the problem seems to be one which could be unique to your machine/set-up/configuration (I can’t remember hearing about it happening for anyone else, with V1 or V2).

If that is the case then I think it might be difficult for anyone else to replicate it and, as such, it might be difficult for anyone to be able to come up with a ‘fix’ for it beyond making a lot of guesses and hoping that something ‘sticks’.

I wish you luck in finding a fix, not being able to use the software as expected must be frustrating, but, in my experience, very few people in the forums seem to be interested in finding fixes for software which is no longer supported by Serif.