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Affinity Designer v2 Issues that slows down my workflow


Tanya Mau

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Hello, just want to share my thoughts about issues in v2 that very much slow down my specific workflow :( I'm kind of dissapointed, but not because of money and purchase itself, I believe Affinity deserves every penny, I'm a big fan of this software, it completely changes the speed and how I work, I love it with all my heart, and I always force and advertise it to everyone on social media, anyways

I work with huge amount of vector assets (like a library) , it's thousands of vector drawn layered graphic elements, with perfect naming and layering, what I do most part of the day is expanding this library, to work with this I basically need few main things except the drawing - quickly show/hide layers, rename it, and change colors via Global Colors, 

unfortunately with v2 it became slow and hard to do :( i'm wasting my time for several things now, which I didn't had to in v1

 

image.jpeg.2312606f45e8d881e1bba10fbe0ef33e.jpeg
1) The UI of the visibility in the layers, the position of show/hide icon is extremely close to the border, this spacing could've been bigger, I need to click that thing more then 600 times a day, can you guess how many times I actually hit it, and not the scroll ? %)) not many.. This icon is now minimalistic, in comparison to checkbox  icon in v1, but it's now smaller, and not considered any spacing around, very annoying

 

 

image.gif.b75ae230e532c80f00d0ba685b24f85a.gifimage.gif.520a175510e2ed0b4be5830d493c2542.gif

2) the delay when changing global colors. In v1 you can see instant live change of global color, in v2 you see nothing unless you click outside the colorpicker box.
This is really annoying, the whole point of global colors is that you can instantly see the affect of colors, but it's not happening now.

 

 

image.jpeg.5b24e13f1e0f4a56924f4c446474ed79.jpeg

3) Basically I could've forget about that and silently go back to v1 to continue my fast workflow that I used to, BUT it's impossible because once document saved in V2 it's impossible to reopen in v1, EVEN THOUGH IT'S NOT REALLY USING ANY FEATURES FROM NEVER VERSION, if you just open, do nothing and save, it will be unrecognizable for v1 anyways, I feel like this moment was not thought through, it's like "should we do compatible cross-version *.afdesign" files?"  "Nah....that's too much of a work, let's just not make it happen, we want to forget all about v1 so don't let the customers use it too"

 

4) The fourth thing I hate with all my guts, it's in v1 also, I have written an email about it but got ignored, the annoying Rotating Canvas then you hold CMD(on mac) key and scroll the mouse, the problem is when you want to zoom in you need to hold the option key (which is next to the CMD) and scroll the mousewheel to zoom in, often I accidentaly hit the cmd button instead of option, and what I see is that my canvas is rotating like crazy carousel on my screen, and you can't undo it with cmd+z, you need specific hotkey to bring it back together, which Is waste of valueable time. I haven't found how to turn it off completely, it's really annoying this rotating canvas, I never used it once, I don't really understand who uses it in Vector Software, it's understandable in iPad tablet and Affinity Photo, when you draw something and you need rotate the canvas to make your hand movements to be comfortable, but why the heck would you need it in Vector drawing software and why can't I turn it off. 

I understand that maybe my workflow is very different from most of the users, most of buyers are drawing some illustrations and stuff, not care if show/hide button is too close to the border, or global colors not very responsive, but it's a gamechanger to me, I'm a loyal customer and I started to use Affinity many years ago, not because it was cheaper then Adobe, or something like that, but because it's better then Adobe for me, it's faster, comfortable, and it fullfill my daily worktasks completely, but if this issues in v2 would be fixed, I will be happy :)

 

 

 

Edited by Tanya Mau
deleted some unneeded screenshots
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Hello, @Tanya Mau, and welcome to the forum.

Thank you for your message.

I also work with a lot of vectors. I use Windows 10 and 11.
First of all, but I think it’s already done because of the quality of your remarks, check first the colour rendering of your screen, and remember that there is a big difference in duration between two computers, one running hardware acceleration, the other not. I also work with a lot of vectors. I use Windows 10 and 11.

  1. Visibility in the layers. The inactive colour should in my humble opinion be redesigned in both light and dark UI style to be more visible.
  2. Global colours. I also find this problem of non-instantaneousness on the global colour.
  3. V2 to v1. I don’t follow you there. Being able to export from v2 to v1 is a source of problems. We see it with Word when the client provides us with DOC instead of DOCX. So I always warn my customers. In fact, it is better to use a computer specially dedicated to version 1 in these cases.
  4. Rotating Canvas. The mistake is human. This has happened to all of us, but this feature is still very useful. I see two solutions: the bad one is to change the keyboard shortcut personally. Not good. The second would be to have a reset button for the rotation.

6 cœurs, 12 processus - Windows 11 pro - 4K - DirectX 12 - Suite universelle Affinity (Affinity  Publisher, Affinity Designer, Affinity Photo).

Mais je vous le demande, peut-on imaginer une police sans sérifs ?

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  • Staff

Hi Tanya,


The layer thing looks like a bug, the spacing should be same there in V1 and V2 (as attached). Is it like that whether the layer panel is docked or not?

Global colours is definitely a bug. Hopefully you'll see if you go to the colour panel and click on edit global colour then it does all update live there. For some reason when doing it directly in the swatches panel does not. Should be an easy fix.

cmd-rotate you can turn that off in preferences -> tools -> enable canvas rotation...
 

image.png

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MacBook Pro (16-inch, 2021) / Apple M1 Max / 64GB / macOS 12.0.1

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No thumbnails for the grouped objects are not helping too... 

image.png.a64a2f9534be3711954f837c7f720f3b.png

Also, I miss displaying the dimensions of the document without going to the document setup. That could be displayed on the document tab, on the status bar, or wherever, maybe even in the Transform tab, when clicking outside the document area.

image.png.251311642bdd8cd4836f048c76cfe819.png

And I don't like how Serif is forcing us to buy the new version. I just made a simple document in V2, wanted to compare the view in V1 and I could see the same as what @Tanya Mau saw - V1 won't open any document from V2. That means I will lose all the artwork made during the trial if I won't buy another licence...

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8 minutes ago, adamczewski said:

No thumbnails for the grouped objects are not helping too... 

@adamczewski

Welcome to the madhouse

In the hamburger menu for the Layers panel select...

Show Group Thumbnails

To save time I am currently using an automated AI to reply to some posts on this forum. If any of "my" posts are wrong or appear to be total b*ll*cks they are the ones generated by the AI. If correct they were probably mine. I apologise for any mistakes made by my AI - I'm sure it will improve with time.

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28 minutes ago, adamczewski said:

That means I will lose all the artwork made during the trial if I won't buy another licence...

Some users have reported that you can copy/paste the layers from a V2 document into a new V1 document (but it may strip out any V2 features)

I have not tested this

To save time I am currently using an automated AI to reply to some posts on this forum. If any of "my" posts are wrong or appear to be total b*ll*cks they are the ones generated by the AI. If correct they were probably mine. I apologise for any mistakes made by my AI - I'm sure it will improve with time.

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1 hour ago, carl123 said:

Some users have reported that you can copy/paste the layers from a V2 document into a new V1 document (but it may strip out any V2 features)

I have not tested this

It's true, you can copy back and forth, but sadly it doesn't copy-paste the whole artboard, only the graphics itself. it's still a solution not to loose your v2 files, yes, 
but for example in my case I worked on bunch of files already with tons of layers(hours of work), it would be painful for me to copy-paste everything, especially if i didn't use any new v2 features in saved file, it's like the same file that theoretically v1 could easily open, but it doesn't want to do it :)
but anyway at some point this will make the transition to v2 more made by force lol, no way back to v1 now at least for me, too much new files have been saved 

Edited by Tanya Mau
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1 hour ago, Ash said:

Hi Tanya,


The layer thing looks like a bug, the spacing should be same there in V1 and V2 (as attached). Is it like that whether the layer panel is docked or not?

 

It's when it's docked and when sticked, I don't have dedicated space for scroll bar like you have in your screenshot and like in v1, it appears and dissappears when you don't scroll in few seconds, but it's impossible to wait for me because when you turn off/on bunch of layers you always scroll.
I work on macOs Monterey if it helps

image.gif.c1da115c5998de004fd51498f8772d3c.gif

1 hour ago, Ash said:


cmd-rotate you can turn that off in preferences -> tools -> enable canvas rotation...

 Omg, I never realized there was the whole option dedicated to that in preferences, I always searched for that in "view" menu, assuming it's a small thing, my god finally, I feel so stupid now, thank you very much!!

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  • Staff

Thanks - we'll take a look at that. 

Having backward compatibility is a very big undertaking for us to do with files I'm afraid. Copy and paste is the best option (and just to mention it if you copy an artboard from V2 you should be able to do New File from Clipboard in V1. Realise all just workarounds but might help.

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Help make our apps better by joining our beta program!


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iPad Pro 11-inch 3rd Gen / iPadOS 16.2

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On 11/11/2022 at 3:34 PM, Ash said:

Having backward compatibility is a very big undertaking for us to do with files I'm afraid.

I do hope you reconsider your stance on that. Not because I personally want V1 compatibility all that much (would be nice and quite useful, sure!), but because I want to use quality Affinity software not just for the time being, but for the next decades, which requires you to keep being successful. However, this may (or may not - sure, noone knows) become quite a pivotal issue.

For reference:

 

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On 11/11/2022 at 8:34 AM, Ash said:

Thanks - we'll take a look at that. 

Having backward compatibility is a very big undertaking for us to do with files I'm afraid. Copy and paste is the best option (and just to mention it if you copy an artboard from V2 you should be able to do New File from Clipboard in V1. Realise all just workarounds but might help.

Agreed. Although, this doesn't specify whether the feature is intended to be added or not. The question here should be, is this high enough on the priority list Serif intends their format to be an open one or will it remain locked for each version?

The issue with this workaround being the final solution is that for copy & paste to work, both versions would have already been installed on the machine. This defeats the point in many scenarios.

Ideally, if someone creates a template anywhere for distribution online in a shop or asset marketplace, for example, this means they now have to provides files to output for both versions. There's also no way to tell by file extension which version the software supports without the person who saved the file specifying.

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On 11/12/2022 at 9:27 AM, eoaaeo said:

Rigth in all of them. And I dunnow why but V2 it's slower than V1 and make my PC less fast

I found, on the Mac, that the old workaround of duplicating the Affinity app, deleting the original, and then opening the first time to verify, speeds up opening the app by quite a bit. (And maybe the app overall, but that might be psychosomatic.)

Things were taking forever, but now it's fine.

(It had to do something with permissions. Sorry if this doesn't help on Windows.)

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On 11/11/2022 at 5:26 AM, adamczewski said:

No thumbnails for the grouped objects are not helping too... 

image.png.a64a2f9534be3711954f837c7f720f3b.png

 

I agree that this was a poor design decision. It makes it extremely difficult to find and select the intended group in the layers panel when all groups appear identical.

EDIT: I read other comments saying this can be changed in the preferences.

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On 11/11/2022 at 7:04 AM, Tanya Mau said:

It's when it's docked and when sticked, I don't have dedicated space for scroll bar like you have in your screenshot and like in v1, it appears and dissappears when you don't scroll in few seconds, but it's impossible to wait for me because when you turn off/on bunch of layers you always scroll.
I work on macOs Monterey if it helps

image.gif.c1da115c5998de004fd51498f8772d3c.gif

 

I've struggled with this issue in v1 of the app as well. It's incredibly annoying to accidentally click on the scrollbar. When the scrollbar appears for me in v1, it literally covers a portion of the layer visibility checkboxes.

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2 hours ago, jeffreydevey said:

I agree that this was a poor design decision. It makes it extremely difficult to find and select the intended group in the layers panel when all groups appear identical.

EDIT: I read other comments saying this can be changed in the preferences.

Choose Show Group Thumbnails from the Layers menu.

image.png.c7d187167ccac73c2bc80eba0632404c.png

Download a free manual for Publisher 2.4 from this forum - expanded 300-page PDF

My system: Affinity 2.4.0 for macOS Sonoma 14.4, MacBook Pro 14" (M1 Pro)

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Slower, UI is worse (i use dark theme and the touch of blue on icons was nice, ex stroke menu..) - layer panel is hard to see (spacing is off?), the dots are annoying AF, +1 for checkmarks, whenever I open CMYK document color picker menu switches to CMYK instead of what I want.. I can change it, but it will revert back once I re open a CMYK file, V2 files won't open in V1 even if you have just 2 shapes, selecting objects and text is buggy, and so on and so on.. Back to V1 because I work slower in V2. Not to mention that If I get annoyed by the bugs, I can't continue to work in V1.. Copied some objects over and they were also off..

Man has this transformed into a shitty app.. I had hopes that it gets better with time, like Procreate, that app just keeps giving and giving, but nope!! This became less functional with time. And the most annoying part is, support is absolute garbage. I would still pay to get V2 knowing in January it will be fully ironed out, but after all the bugs going on for MONTHS in V1, lack of response and interest to fix those, I don't believe in this app anymore.

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  • 3 weeks later...

Hi Everyone,

I've also noticed that v2 is significantly slower and less responsive than v1. Operations like bucket fill take forever and seem to have artifacts, also vector operations (moving vertices around) quite often won't refresh the picture (I need to scroll down taking my curve out of the canvas and up agin for changes to refresh), and finally, filling a curve with a gradient, if you modify the curve vertices aftwerwards, the gradient won't keep up with the changes, remaining in the same position as before the curve modification, you'll need to apply a fill color and then redo the gradient in order for it to update... All this in a document with very little amount of vertices and using hardware acceleration in windows 11 (nvidia RTX2070). I'm quite new to affinity designer, but all in all I've been struggling quite a bit with v2. Hope it gets better soon,

 

Regards

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5 hours ago, DiegoBM said:

All this in a document with very little amount of vertices and using hardware acceleration in windows 11

Have you tried without Hardware Acceleration switched on?

Sometimes, if not working correctly, it can slow things down rather than speed them up?

To save time I am currently using an automated AI to reply to some posts on this forum. If any of "my" posts are wrong or appear to be total b*ll*cks they are the ones generated by the AI. If correct they were probably mine. I apologise for any mistakes made by my AI - I'm sure it will improve with time.

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