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Posted

Hello!

I faced the same issue on my Windows 10.

The fact is that Affinity Suite v2 is not installed as before in the C:\Program Files\Affinity\ folder.

Now Affinity applications are each in their own folder in user data. And there is no way to change the target folder for installing apps.

For example, I have this:

C:\Users\Maksimus\AppData\Local\Microsoft\WindowsApps\SerifEuropeLtd.AffinityPhoto2_3cqzy0nppv2rt\

And when I find them there and send them as shortcuts to the desktop, their icons are not displayed now.

They are not displayed because the system cannot now access the icons there. What he writes about.

How to solve this - I still do not understand.

Let someone from Serif support staff write.

Posted
21 minutes ago, stokerg said:

Hi @Troebaland Welcome to the Forums,

If you and @Maksimushave a read of this FAQ it explains how to create a desktop shortcut for version 2 :) 

Thanks for the tip.

But this has not completely solved the problem yet.

The resulting icons do not look standard and complete.

image.png.211e8e9eab947a1be8afa3760d450969.png

How to make it so that the icon of the icon is completely on the entire label?

Oh, and if I try to move these icons to my RocketDock for Windows, the Affinity apps icon doesn't display correctly either.

image.png.72cc843ee9cab15bf5022af2cbadffa1.png

Posted (edited)

@Maksimus

Do you drag & drop the icon from the Application folder?

For me on Windows 11 it works fine.

And Rocket Dock is already quite outdated. The last and most recent version is from 2017.

explorer_e4Z5so6WPV.thumb.gif.74c1b79d947bfe76c7989616786a95dd.gif

Edited by Komatös
Add infos for Rocket Dock

MAC mini M4 | MacOS Sequoia 15.2 | 16 GB RAM | 256 GB SSD 
AMD Ryzen 7 5700X | INTEL Arc A770 LE 16 GB  | 32 GB DDR4 3200MHz | Windows 11 Pro 24H2 (26100.2605)

Affinity Suite V 2.5.7 & Beta 2.6 (latest)
Interested in a free (selfhosted) PDF Solution? Have a look at Stirling PDF

Ferengi Acquisition Rule No. 49: “A deal is a deal is a deal.”

Posted

In general, why they complicated everything and made the installation not in the .exe format, but in some other format - I have no idea.

Now it is not clear how to access applications in the user folder.

Even the "Resource Hacker" program cannot open the Affinity application files and extract the icons from there separately.

Posted
4 hours ago, Maksimus said:

In general, why they complicated everything and made the installation not in the .exe format, but in some other format - I have no idea.

For one, when updates are released you will have much smaller update files, which will download/install faster as they will include only what has changed for your system.

For another, Windows will handle the updating automatically once you agree to install the update. No need to manually download/install.

-- Walt
Designer, Photo, and Publisher V1 and V2 at latest retail and beta releases
PC:
    Desktop:  Windows 11 Pro 23H2, 64GB memory, AMD Ryzen 9 5900 12-Core @ 3.00 GHz, NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3090 

    Laptop:  Windows 11 Pro 23H2, 32GB memory, Intel Core i7-10750H @ 2.60GHz, Intel UHD Graphics Comet Lake GT2 and NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070 Laptop GPU.
    Laptop 2: Windows 11 Pro 24H2,  16GB memory, Snapdragon(R) X Elite - X1E80100 - Qualcomm(R) Oryon(TM) 12 Core CPU 4.01 GHz, Qualcomm(R) Adreno(TM) X1-85 GPU
iPad:  iPad Pro M1, 12.9": iPadOS 18.3, Apple Pencil 2, Magic Keyboard 
Mac:  2023 M2 MacBook Air 15", 16GB memory, macOS Sequoia 15.0.1

Posted
2 hours ago, walt.farrell said:

For one, when updates are released you will have much smaller update files, which will download/install faster as they will include only what has changed for your system.

For another, Windows will handle the updating automatically once you agree to install the update. No need to manually download/install.

Good.  I understood the motivation behind using the new setup format.  I just didn’t understand how I can now make full-fledged icons on my Windows 10 desktop. And then I need to transfer them to my dock.  I even tried extracting icons from Affinity apps separately.

But it says that the system does not have access rights to the folders where Affinity applications are now installed. I think that for the same reason, full-fledged icons are not displayed.  How to solve it?

Posted
24 minutes ago, gideonX said:

Fast is open run command and write this shell:AppsFolder you will see Affinity programs and right click have it Create shortcut.

Hi! If you look at one of my answers above, you can see in a small screencast how I go through shell:AppsFolder to the application folder and try to drag the icon to the desktop. And there you can see that it is not possible to create a shortcut with a full-fledged application icon.

If done through the context menu, right-clicking and creating a shortcut on the desktop, you get exactly the same result as when dragging and dropping.

I think that the problem here is some kind of access rights, because when I tried to create a shortcut on the desktop myself from the found Affinity Suite v2 exe files, and then load their icons, the system gave me the following error message:

      image.png.23ba4cebe7767dbab50fea10ed2149d4.png

Posted

The icon/blue border issue has nothing to do with Windows 10 vs. Windows 11, but icon sizes.

Click anywhere on your desktop and hit Ctrl+Shift+1 (or Ctrl+Shift+2) to switch to large/medium icons and you'll see the outline.

Hit Ctrl+Shift+3 to get back to the default (32x32) icons with no outline.

I'm not really sure why the icons behave this way, considering the biggest icon shows a higher resolution icon in the middle. But that seems to be a Windows thing, not Serif/Affinity (but I might be wrong here).

Posted
16 minutes ago, Smaxx said:

The icon/blue border issue has nothing to do with Windows 10 vs. Windows 11, but icon sizes.

Click anywhere on your desktop and hit Ctrl+Shift+1 (or Ctrl+Shift+2) to switch to large/medium icons and you'll see the outline.

Hit Ctrl+Shift+3 to get back to the default (32x32) icons with no outline.

I'm not really sure why the icons behave this way, considering the biggest icon shows a higher resolution icon in the middle. But that seems to be a Windows thing, not Serif/Affinity (but I might be wrong here).

All my other icons are perfectly normal size on my desktop. The problem I described above has nothing to do with desktop icon sizes.

To make it clearer, here is a screenshot where you can see the usual normal application icons and what happens when you create a shortcut from the applications folder (via shell:AppsFolder)

image.png.b6b002c6d27171e6cfb3cfecccdefb52.png

Posted

Friends! Big request to you!

Can you save the application icons of Affinty Suite Version 2 in .ico format and attach them here?

I would then just change the icons in the shortcuts to those that you send me.

And that will be the solution to the problem. At least for the next time. Thank you!

Posted
1 hour ago, Maksimus said:

All my other icons are perfectly normal size on my desktop. The problem I described above has nothing to do with desktop icon sizes.

Woah, okay, that's really strange. I definitely get the regular size icons when using the normal icon size (on WIndows 11).

Posted
4 hours ago, Maksimus said:

Hi! If you look at one of my answers above, you can see in a small screencast how I go through shell:AppsFolder to the application folder and try to drag the icon to the desktop. And there you can see that it is not possible to create a shortcut with a full-fledged application icon.

If done through the context menu, right-clicking and creating a shortcut on the desktop, you get exactly the same result as when dragging and dropping.

I think that the problem here is some kind of access rights, because when I tried to create a shortcut on the desktop myself from the found Affinity Suite v2 exe files, and then load their icons, the system gave me the following error message:

      image.png.23ba4cebe7767dbab50fea10ed2149d4.png

See in att file is gif animation.

Animation.gif

Posted

I think you don't read the previous posts in this thread carefully.

I already read it in the FAQ and did. And there is even a screencast in which I show the above result.

Pay attention to the animations that this is the "Applications" window, like yours, which is called through "shell:AppsFolder"

And it doesn't matter if you drag them or create a shortcut through the context menu - the result is the same.

image.gif.70682d12357465a5db82e35208ca5c2f.gif

Posted (edited)

I was able to drag and drop the app icons at max size from my fly out menu on my Windows 10 Pro (latest update). I put the version of the OS I am using in a screenshot. However, there is a blue corner spot that can be seen. The ico files don't have that. So, I am guessing there's some type of Z-level adjustment that's off or a bug in the windows packaging.

For your convenience and possibly saving folks who have customized desktop apps...I have extracted the ico files from the source exe files. 
I am assuming folks will know what to do with icon files if they already have working shortcuts. Aka...be sure to save icon files to a central location before deploying them with the shortcuts. Window shortcut files may not have icon itself embeded into them, but is an actual link.

As always, these files are rightfully owned by the owners. This was done to provide a work around for your custom needs. I am by no means affiliated or endorsed by Serif or its affiliates.



Best Regards, Jeffrie

windows10pro-drag-n-drop.png

Affinity-Designer-2.ico Affinity-Photo-2.ico Affinity-Publisher-2.ico

Edited by Jeffrie
grammar, spelling, trying to be succinct.
Posted

Changing from real applications to the idiotic new Windows app format was incredibly stupid. Who cares how big update files are?

One more stupid decision by Serif. I hope that the new GUIs are more sensible than the V.1 GUIs, or these get deleted immediately.

I hate Adobe, but I know the GUIs like the palm of my hand. I'm not about to learn a totally different GUI: I wouldn't care if the Affinity apps were free, designing GUIs that are so radically different from almost every other similar app is just plain dumb.

Bet this post will not be approved by the moderator.

Posted
On 11/10/2022 at 9:51 AM, walt.farrell said:

For one, when updates are released you will have much smaller update files, which will download/install faster as they will include only what has changed for your system.

For another, Windows will handle the updating automatically once you agree to install the update. No need to manually download/install.

Who gives a rat's patoot about update file size? You can't download anything without a high-speed connection. This is a false pseudo-benefit/rationalization to justify a colossally bad design decision.

Posted
12 hours ago, Jeffrie said:

For your convenience and possibly saving folks who have customized desktop apps...I have extracted the ico files from the source exe files. 
I am assuming folks will know what to do with icon files if they already have working shortcuts. Aka...be sure to save icon files to a central location before deploying them with the shortcuts. Window shortcut files may not have icon itself embeded into them, but is an actual link.

As always, these files are rightfully owned by the owners. This was done to provide a work around for your custom needs. I am by no means affiliated or endorsed by Serif or its affiliates.

Jeffrie, thanks a lot!  

I downloaded app icons.  This is what is needed to solve the problem while the Serif team deals with the causes of these problems and fixes the bug.

 I also wanted to clarify about the advice with the central placement of icon files.  What did you mean?  Do they need to be placed in the root folder of drive C?  Or somewhere in the /Program Files folder?

Posted
9 hours ago, JP0 said:

Changing from real applications to the idiotic new Windows app format was incredibly stupid. Who cares how big update files are?

One more stupid decision by Serif. I hope that the new GUIs are more sensible than the V.1 GUIs, or these get deleted immediately.

I hate Adobe, but I know the GUIs like the palm of my hand. I'm not about to learn a totally different GUI: I wouldn't care if the Affinity apps were free, designing GUIs that are so radically different from almost every other similar app is just plain dumb.

Bet this post will not be approved by the moderator.

The idea to change the file installation format for Windows clearly belonged to a person who did not think about the possible difficulties and inconvenience for Affinity users.

I also think that they did it in vain. Now this has created a lot of problems for them and their entire support team is inundated with these problems.

Let's hope that they will hear feedback from their users and change the application installation format to the old and convenient one in the c://program files/affinity folder. 

Posted

After a lot of fiddling, I was able to create three desktop shortcuts that have full-size Affinity application icons and also launch applications.

image.png.7ff5757c8cc13d62f855d952598c3883.png

But as soon as I moved these launch shortcuts to my dock (the RocketDock application for Windows), the permissions problem arose again.

Now, when trying to launch Affinity applications from the dock, the following error pops up.

image.png.4f571e1ade41274b4e6635c232c4cb87.png

To sum up, Serif's decision to change the classic Windows distribution from installing applications in the C:/Program Files/Affinity/ directory to a new format and a new location was a big mistake. This has now made it very difficult to work with Affinity applications, as well as launch them from other applications. Constantly some kind of problem with access rights now. Let's just hope that the company realizes their mistake and corrects it in the near future.

At the moment what to do with it and how to solve it - I do not know.

Posted

Don't know if it is of any importance, but I'm on Windows 10 too, and I don't have any problems creating fullsized shortcuts on the desktop, simply dragging them from the Start Menu to the Desktop. But I can't test this Rocket Dock thing, because I don't use it.

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