Official Affinity Designer (V2) Tutorials

[David in Mississippi]

On 11/9/2022 at 5:49 AM, James Ritson said:

Interface Overview (New: 22/03/24)

Just a suggestion so as to be more viewer-friendly: When specifying dates as in your quoted line above, recognize that people in different areas of the world use varying sequences of year, month and day, so what is clear to you may be totally confusing to another when all you use are 2-digit numbers.

One way to avoid all ambiguity would be to use the three-letter month abbreviation, AND the 4-digit year.

In the 22/03/24 example above, you could mean 22 Mar 2024 ... OR you could mean 24 Mar 2022. It unclear.

How you do this is up to you, but my suggestion would eliminate all ambiguity from date references.

[David in Mississippi]

I have two more suggestions for you for your future tutorials.

First, Affinity's default DARK MODE is horribly difficult for us viewers to make out anything on a video, especially those viwers watching on a mobile device. My suggestion is to ALWAYS USE LIGHT MODE when creating a tutorial screen recording. Here's an example of the difference:

Light Mode:

Hoefully, even in this posting, you can see how much easier it is to make things out in the light mode. Yes, I have heard over and over again from the programmers of these things that "Well *I* have no problem seeing it in dark mode!" which is fine for them. For some reason, they refuse to recognize that some people have a very difficult time making out low-contrast displays, such as Affinity's (frustrating) default of medium-grey on black.

===========================

The second suggestion is that you make more use of ZOOMING IN to focus on the areas of the screen you're talking about.

For example, here (n the BASICS video) you talk about the PEN tool:

And here's my screen, zoomed in, showing the same thing:

Altering your future tutorials to accommodate these two changes will certainly make them more understandable to your viewers, regardless of how old they are.

[Alfred]

2 hours ago, David in Mississippi said:

In the 22/03/24 example above, you could mean 22 Mar 2024 ... OR you could mean 24 Mar 2022.

03/04/22 can mean either 03 April 2022 or 04 March 2022, but I’ve never encountered a scenario where 24 Mar 2022 is expressed as 22/03/24: it would always be 24/03/22 or 03/24/22 (or 24/03/2022 or 03/24/2022). 2022–03-24 is clear and unambiguous, following the pattern YYYY-MM-DD where the largest unit comes first (cf. times expressed in the format hh:mm:ss).

[David in Mississippi]

On 6/30/2024 at 4:03 PM, Alfred said:

03/04/22 can mean either...

Thanks, Alfred, but you missed the point.  The point was that people citing dates in any online listing or post need to do so unambiguously.

One way to do this is to use the 3-letter month abbreviation and the 4-digit year. It's only 3 keystrokes more than the way I cited above, and it would make communication every so much more clear.

Thanks for responding.

[Circulus]

On 6/30/2024 at 11:03 PM, Alfred said:

but I’ve never encountered a scenario where 24 Mar 2022 is expressed as 22/03/24

Very common in the Netherlands to have dd/mm/yy(yy) 
Where the year could/may be shortened to 2 digits in nonofficial notation.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calendar_date

[Alfred]

48 minutes ago, David in Mississippi said:

Thanks, Alfred, but you missed the point.  The point was that people citing dates in any online listing or post need to do so unambiguously.

Thanks, David, but you missed my point that 22/03/24 always means a date in 2024, not 2022 (and because it’s 22/03 in this particular example, it can only refer to the third month rather the twenty-second month of the year).

22 minutes ago, Return said:

Very common in the Netherlands to have dd/mm/yy(yy)

Very common in the UK, too, unlike the US where it would be mm/dd/yy(yy). But it’s never yy(yy)/mm/dd.

[walt.farrell]

9 minutes ago, Alfred said:

but you missed my point that 22/03/24 always means a date in 2024, not 2022

For what it's worth, Wikipedia disagrees with you (and it is a source of confusion in my experience over the past 40 years or so, so I suspect it may be more common than you think): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calendar_date#Gregorian,_year–month–day_(YMD)

[David in Mississippi]

4 hours ago, Alfred said:

But it’s never yy(yy)/mm/dd.

...and that is very curious to me, because that is the most logical way to name files so they always sort in date order (when you put the date in the file name). Any rational system of organization (would that be "organisation" in the UK? 😄) always starts with the superordinate (largest) category at the top, and the finest (smallest) organization level at the bottom of the stack.

For example, when renaming my photographs, I usually start with yyyy-mm-dd then add person and/or location, just to keep the pics in good date order.

Oh, well, there will always be differences, different folks have different ways, and that's fine. It's only NOT fine when it interferes with communication.

[Alfred]

46 minutes ago, David in Mississippi said:

organization (would that be "organisation" in the UK? 😄)

The latter for most of us, but -iz- is preferred by Oxford Dictionaries. Go figure! 

46 minutes ago, David in Mississippi said:

I usually start with yyyy-mm-dd then add person and/or location

Yes, I like that date format, too. With or without the hyphens, it means that (as you observed) your files will be in chronological order if you do an alphanumeric sort.

46 minutes ago, David in Mississippi said:

Oh, well, there will always be differences, different folks have different ways, and that's fine. It's only NOT fine when it interferes with communication.

👍

[William Overington]

1 hour ago, David in Mississippi said:

... organization (would that be "organisation" in the UK? 😄) ...

In what spell checkers often term as "British English" it is 'organisation'.

However, the -ize ending that American English uses is a retention of the earlier English form that people took with them when moved from England centuries ago, before in England it was influenced by French.

The Oxford English Dictionary tends to use the -ize ending for many (ise/ize) words, but it is not a simple matter. It tends to be influenced by how the word came to be in the English language.

There is something about whether it came from classical Greek.

However, the Oxford English Dictionary reports usage by people, not prescribing nor proscribing usage.

William

 

[Alfred]

1 hour ago, William Overington said:

The Oxford English Dictionary tends to use the -ize ending for many (ise/ize) words, but it is not a simple matter. It tends to be influenced by how the word came to be in the English language.

There is something about whether it came from classical Greek.

However, the Oxford English Dictionary reports usage by people, not prescribing nor proscribing usage.

Any dictionary worth its salt should be descriptive rather than prescriptive.

[foxleybob]

this is brilliant, thank you.

Ive not long had Affinity Pho 2, and trying to climb the learning curve