Saving iCloud Drive files isn’t working in Affinity Designer 2

[AK21]

Hello!

I am not able to save a document I’ve opened from iCloud Drive back to it. As you can see in the attached video, when pressing Save in the document view it doesn’t update in iCloud Drive and the [M] badge also stays active.

I did the following steps:

1. Open Affinity Designer
2. Selected Open in the home view
3. Selected an .afdesign file from the Affinity Designer folder in my iCloud Drive
4. Opened the newly imported file (in Live Docs) and made some edits (changed font and a new artboard)
5. Pressed the Document menu button (☰) and selected Save
6. The Saving overlay appears shortly
7. After the saving is done neither the existing file is updated nor a new one appears in my iCloud Drive folder

I am running Affinity Designer for iPad v2.0.1.2 on iPadOS 16.1

[Lee D]

@AK21 Are you still having this issue after updating Designer 2 for iPad to 2.0.2.2 from the App Store?

[AK21]

@Lee D Yes, it does work with the latest update! 👌

Working with files in iCloud Drive is still quite cumbersome though. The iPad apps don’t sync back with the iCloud versions.
When doing this…

1. Open iCloud file on iPad app.
2. Edit & save back to iCloud.
3. Open iCloud file on Mac app.
4. Edit & save back to iCloud.

… I have to first delete the local file from my iPad and import it from iCloud again to get the latest changes. Neither simply opening the file nor importing the file from iCloud (without deleting it local first) shows up the changes.
This has such a high potential to confuse and lead to issues!

[DM1]

1 hour ago, AK21 said:

This has such a high potential to confuse and lead to issues!

I rarely use iCloud so others may correct this, but I think it has always been necessary to close the file on one machine before opening it on another. Tapping the x to Close the Home Screen icon doesn’t delete the (saved) file. It just clears the sandbox version.

[Paul Mudditt]

@DM1is correct, you cannot keep open a file on two systems at the same time without risking overwriting changes done on the other device.

Remember, documents open on the home screen on the iPad app is IDENTICAL to having a document open in a TAB on a desktop application such as Microsoft Word, Excel, Affinity Designer etc. 

Rule No 1: Always save then close an open app before attempting to open on another device, whether going from iPad to Desktop or Desktop to iPad.

[AK21]

3 hours ago, Paul Mudditt said:

Remember, documents open on the home screen on the iPad app is IDENTICAL to having a document open in a TAB on a desktop application

That is a good analogy! This makes sense the way it works.

Though, I’d still challenge this behavior and would suggest to improve it. First it’s hard to understand those two concepts as a user. And I think it’s even something the user shouldn’t have to care about. Why can’t the Affinity apps get the latest iCloud changes while being in the lice docs view of the app? The doc isn’t actively open anyway. Or at least show that there are changes and offer a button to manually sync or something.

I use the Mac and iPad apps interchangeable quite a lot, as the Mac app is just more powerful and on iPad I can use my pencil. Right now I always have to save → close → (later) reimport the files on iPad. Pretty cumbersome …

[Paul Mudditt]

5 hours ago, AK21 said:

That is a good analogy! This makes sense the way it works.

Though, I’d still challenge this behavior and would suggest to improve it. First it’s hard to understand those two concepts as a user. And I think it’s even something the user shouldn’t have to care about. Why can’t the Affinity apps get the latest iCloud changes while being in the lice docs view of the app? The doc isn’t actively open anyway. Or at least show that there are changes and offer a button to manually sync or something.

I use the Mac and iPad apps interchangeable quite a lot, as the Mac app is just more powerful and on iPad I can use my pencil. Right now I always have to save → close → (later) reimport the files on iPad. Pretty cumbersome …

I think there were expectations when V1 came about that the behaviour you describe was possible with IOS/iPadOS, hence the encouragement to create project folders etc on the home screen.

The file is linked to its save llocation, which is why when you press save for a second or more time you do not need to specify the files wherebouts, it saves over the top, in my software developent engineer eyes that means the file is still open, to prevent someone opening on another system and is no different from an file open in a tab which knows its way home when you save it.

However file management reality kicks in when you have users that use iPad, Mac and PC versions of the apps via iCloud (yes iCloud works on Windows as well), and the reality is just like 2 PC’s on a business network accessing a shared network drive, 2 users cannot access a file at the same time without causing a clash (held open on one system to prevent access by others)  at best and overwriting each others work at worst.

With the improvements made to IOS/iPadOS file handling changing the iPad to work just like a desktop works seems a sensible approach for today.

That may change as the new Apple ecosystem develops around the multiuser access apps like the Apple’s Freeform app just introduced in IPadOS 16 which allows collaboration of many users in the same open document.

[AK21]

On 11/24/2022 at 5:15 PM, Paul Mudditt said:

With the improvements made to IOS/iPadOS file handling changing the iPad to work just like a desktop works seems a sensible approach for today.

The things you’ve described make sense on a technical level. Still we can see other native apps handle this better. Not in a full collaborative way, but that is fine. I know very well that working with files in the cloud can be hard on a technical level with all the things that go wrong.

Though, take the iWork apps by Apple. They also work quite classic by default. Yet, when you save/close a file it automatically gets synced with the cloud and automatically fetches changes from the cloud when the document isn’t open. They even handle sync conflicts by letting the user choose the version they want to keep.

Seeing how much faster and simpler the flow can work with the same document based approach, I would like the Affinity developers to take on that as well. The current flow is too confusing and requires too many steps.

[Paul Mudditt]

1 hour ago, AK21 said:

The things you’ve described make sense on a technical level. Still we can see other native apps handle this better. Not in a full collaborative way, but that is fine. I know very well that working with files in the cloud can be hard on a technical level with all the things that go wrong.

Though, take the iWork apps by Apple. They also work quite classic by default. Yet, when you save/close a file it automatically gets synced with the cloud and automatically fetches changes from the cloud when the document isn’t open. They even handle sync conflicts by letting the user choose the version they want to keep.

Seeing how much faster and simpler the flow can work with the same document based approach, I would like the Affinity developers to take on that as well. The current flow is too confusing and requires too many steps.

I don’t think we are a million miles away from working exactly like Pages, Number,Keynote work and I agree, that is what the Serif development engineers should align the Affinity apps file handling with.

[RcAbdulkh]

This is really annoying. My afdesign stopped saving docs to iCloud again. I’m guessing you guys did some new update recently or something. Because it’s like the old version stops saving documents when some new Afdesign version is made.

[pruus]

@RcAbdulkh sorry for you. I have sometimes a delay with iCloud. In those situations I wait. A big project, more than 101MB works now fine in the latest beta on iOS17 beta.

[RcAbdulkh]

The only way to resolve the problem is to figure out how to save Affinity projects to iCloud manually and one At a time, then delete Affinity Designer, and re-download the app, pay for the new version and hope you can re-download your old affinity projects to the current Afdesign. If you don’t save your old projects correctly however, you lose all your work in the process. It’s crazy.