Workflow is worse without separate mode - macos is not an iPad

[thomasp]

4 hours ago, velarde said:

 

1) Separate Mode in MacOS was always a little "wonky" but it worked... For some reason they didn't  want to mess with it in all these years.

New windows were opening behind the floating tools, windows not resizing to  the new images zoom size... and such.. So in V2 I guess the "easy" solution was to just kill it... Hopefully they'll reconsider, improve their floating windows in MacOS and bring it back...  Actually this was the first thing I wanted to test with the 30 day demo... 🙂

I would never have expected they would take the decisions to remove it...

 

 

 

My take from all I'm reading here in the forums is that the Affinity applications have probably been refactored to some extent. Sounds like they are now using a new windowing toolkit or the like that may not even support the basic concepts used in separated mode. If so it was probably done to make cross-platform development easier. Affinity started out very Mac-centric, it may be that this lead to difficulties in porting to Windows and the iPad.

This is just my guess btw - I haven't tried out V2 yet. But the framework not supporting separated mode would make the most sense to me as an explanation as to why the feature went away and got replaced by something that feels like an iPad-'app'-concept and the FAQ just states something along the lines of "its gone, deal with it".

 

[BartonFink]

On 11/12/2022 at 1:29 AM, walt.farrell said:

• Almost no one in the forums was admitting using it, let alone saying how much they liked it and how much it helped them; and
• Almost every time someone asked a question where Separated Mode could be the answer, and we suggested it, they complained about it; and
• They had a different method on Windows which most people seemed to like.

I think it was simply a matter of course that the separate mode existed and that it was more than useful for professional users. Why praise something that Mac users take for granted? It was simply a big mistake to abolish it.

[spinhead]

I have finally created a solution to the problem in v1 where new documents open behind the tools. If you're interested in what I describe below, holler and I'll go into detail.

Installed a Mac automation tool called Hammerspoon. Solid, dependable, free, tiny. Then created a function [open/focus Photo, create a new document, and then move it to the correct monitor and adjust screen settings] and gave it a hotkey. A few little kinks to work out for edge cases, but overall, works as I hoped and solves this problem for me.

Now if I could just fix the broken tab order in the Transform dialog . . .

[spinhead]

Is there any possibility separated mode will ever return?

[PaoloT]

I find incredibly annoying having to continually displace windows to alternate between showing tools and showing the documents behind the foreground one. A really odd way of working.

Paolo

 

[PaoloT]

Now, we know that, for some reason, separate mode is not possible even on the Mac. But then, please someone explain me this:

 

[BartonFink]

As I see it's Publisher 2. How did you do this?

[loukash]

47 minutes ago, BartonFink said:

How did you do this?

For example:

1. Window → Float View To Window; repeat for all open tabs
2. Hide the now blank main window to the Dock by clicking the yellow button.

Note that you'll also "lose" the context toobar, however.

If you have the Dock placed on either side of the display (like I have, for example), you may also want to move the main window to the bottom so that only both toolbars remain visible.

[loukash]

4 minutes ago, loukash said:

If you have the Dock placed on either side of the display (like I have, for example), you may also want to move the main window to the bottom so that only both toolbars remain visible.

Like this:

Note, however, that the floating window hierarchy is still broken, and all dropdown menus from the toolbars will appear under the floating document windows.  

[PaoloT]

That is: if the context toolbar was free to float, as the other elements of the UI, we would have a standard Mac UI.

So, it's a mystery why it doesn't happen. It must be something on a personal level.

Paolo

 

[BartonFink]

Ok. Thank you very much. But not a probable way for me.

[loukash]

2 hours ago, BartonFink said:

not a probable way for me.

Neither for me, for that matter. I was only experimenting with it as a "proof of concept".