Constant Beach Ball on M1 Pro Macbook

[danidh]

Hi, I've seen this happen to multiple people on found discussions on multiple websites. But couldn't find something up to date that actually addresses the issue.

As far as I know it's been known to Affinity for a few months now that automatic brightness on Macs with the new M1 chips cause slowdowns in the Affinity app with alsmost every interaction. Having to wait 2-5 seconds for the beach ball every time gets annoying really quickly.

As someone that uses their Macbook in day to day usage having automatic brightness turned on is preferred, and having to turn off a system feature that's enabled by default to make software work is silly.

So when can we expect a fix for this? I've seen discussions dating back 3-4 months, I think it's time this is addressed. 

[Lee_T]

Our developers are aware of the issue and are working on a fix, though i have no timescale I can give you I'm afraid.

Lee

[Robin gotha]

I love version 2. But inexplicable beachballs, close, reopen… I love yoir initiatives but I wish v. 2 had contained a fix. Almost wish I hadn’t got an M1 imac when all Affinity works on my old 2011 imac!  Please fix and fast. I was jealous of Danidh having only a few seconds: I have to restart the app every four or five minutes so it’s quite useless as it stands. Back to my old mac…

[MikeTO]

7 minutes ago, Robin gotha said:

I love version 2. But inexplicable beachballs, close, reopen… I love yoir initiatives but I wish v. 2 had contained a fix. Almost wish I hadn’t got an M1 imac when all Affinity works on my old 2011 imac!  Please fix and fast. I was jealous of Danidh having only a few seconds: I have to restart the app every four or five minutes so it’s quite useless as it stands. Back to my old mac…

The spinning beachball due to the Automatic Brightness setting is likely not the cause of your issue f you have to restart the app every four or five minutes. The Automatic Brightness setting issue just constantly gives you the beachball when doing certain things like interacting with the menus while the clouds behind you shift. I work in a room with lots of windows so this can be very annoying - I work with Automatic Brightness off now.

What issue are you having? Is the app completely locking up and never gives you back control? Or is it locking up for long periods but eventually giving you back control? More information would be useful in understanding your problem.

I use Affinity on an M1 Pro all day and it works fine.

[Robin VG]

Thanks MikeTO! I'm on 2021 M1 iMac 16GB Monterey 12.6. The longest I've waited to regain control is, as an unsuccessful experiment, 28 minutes. And never regained control. Hearing that you're having no such problems is both encouraging - and depressing of course. Today, still longing AP2 to be the wonderful thing I know it to be, I've had the following experience of beach ball and locking up:

Try 1: move a dialogue box.

Try 2: 'Save as"

Try 3: Move type box

Try 4: 'Save'

Try 5: Choose different page

Try 6: 'Save' Give up for the day...

Not one session has lasted longer than two minutes. In total I think I've had more than a hundred BBDs with AP 1&2. None on the old mac High Sierra. And none with the iPad pro version! It's something to do with Monterey or M1 or Apple or  the hand of fate and it's driving me bonkers. Nobody else has a similar complaint which makes it worse!

Thank you for picking up my case and I hope you might think of something I may have done/not done.

[MikeTO]

That really sounds like the automatic brightness issue. Have you turned that off? Go to System Preferences (aka settings in Ventura) and from Displays turn off Automatically Adjust Brightness and keep it off until this issue is fixed. This issue is specific to the M1 and M2 processors.

[Robin VG]

I turned off auto brightness a fortnight ago. No change. My latest try lasted less than a minute; I left the beachball at 6.52, came back at 8.44. It was still merrily spinning. It must be the mac. Do you mind if I add the problem report? I can't see why this behaviour is so stubborn. I also turned off Metal, turned off Assistant and switched to OpenGL.

[Robin VG]

Strike a light as Dick van Dyke would say, MikeTO! I take back every rude word I've used in this correspondence. Blaming Apple, Serif, M1, Monterey etc. The one I failed to blame was me. This is my final book, a graphic novel (serious comic) intended to be my masterpiece, but it was hampered by tech I thought. Not so.

I went down all the pages, each same size file, in resource manager. Three criminal pages; one 69MB instead of around 29MB, one jpg instead of tif, another incomprehensibly wrong. Just 3 things. H'm. I say this in depth because others may be getting beach balls that Serif never came across, silly things like mine. Thank you resource manager. I guess for others like me, just a bit of carelessness can be big trouble. Once established the only choice I had was to reconstruct the entire 64 pages. But miraculously I could copy the French dialogues (balloons) over to the new doc, one by one. Not a BB!!! Spent less time than the previous weeks of them. Thanks for your good thoughts MikeTO. Thought you might be mildly pleased for me!

[Jon McCallon]

I am running Publisher 2.03 on Monterey, on a 14 inch m1 Pro 16 gigs of ram and a 1T of storage (with plenty left) I have turned off both true tone and auto brightness. I still get the beach ball for saves, save as, and opening new documents every time. 

[MikeTO]

2 hours ago, Jon McCallon said:

I am running Publisher 2.03 on Monterey, on a 14 inch m1 Pro 16 gigs of ram and a 1T of storage (with plenty left) I have turned off both true tone and auto brightness. I still get the beach ball for saves, save as, and opening new documents every time. 

Hmm. I'm running 2.0.4 on Ventura on an identically configured MBP. I have True Tone on and Auto Brightness off. I never get the beachball for opening and saving files, or really for anything else either. 

Where are you saving your files to? I'm saving my my documents folder which is on iCloud. I know using iCloud comes with some compatibility issues with Affinity but I'm able to deal with those and I value the convenience.

Cheers

[Jon McCallon]

19 hours ago, MikeTO said:

Hmm. I'm running 2.0.4 on Ventura on an identically configured MBP. I have True Tone on and Auto Brightness off. I never get the beachball for opening and saving files, or really for anything else either. 

Where are you saving your files to? I'm saving my my documents folder which is on iCloud. I know using iCloud comes with some compatibility issues with Affinity but I'm able to deal with those and I value the convenience.

Cheers

So I needed to quit and restart the program after making the changes. Bummed that with a 2.0 release this known issue still hasn't been resolved, but glad there is a simple fix.