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I have Deleted V2 and Gone Back to V1


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1 hour ago, Gary.JONES said:

It looks to me that the beautifully-designed v1 app originally developed for the Mac Platform has been dumbed down and mangled into an ugly compromise, to make it compatible with Windows and to meet a marketing deadline.

I can appreciate your affinity for MacOS, but the Affinity v1 apps were compatible with Windows. I wonder if the v2 UI decisions were influenced more by the design team’s style judgments / preferences rather than to accommodate Windows OS.

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44 minutes ago, Gary.JONES said:

Hopefully 'fall' is a reference to the season, rather than to the Biblical transition from a state of innocent obedience to awareness and disobedience ...

Or perhaps both :)

...and of Affinity's UI degredation.

Hence the three sided shape in the background ;)

 

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17 hours ago, Brian_J said:

I can appreciate your affinity for MacOS, but the Affinity v1 apps were compatible with Windows. I wonder if the v2 UI decisions were influenced more by the design team’s style judgments / preferences rather than to accommodate Windows OS.

Yes - in fact Affinity started off as Windows app, but Designer (successor to DrawPlus for Windows) was written from scratch for MacOS in 2014, followed by Affinity Photo (successor to PhotoPlus) the following year - which subsequently won the Apple Design Award in 2015 - largely because they followed the Apple User Interface Guidelines.

Designer and Photo for Windows weren't released until 2016.

So - the Affinity suite started off as MacOS apps, then were 'reconstructed' for Windows.

IMHO - the only value in making the Mac and Windows versions exactly the same is to reduce coding effort.

I doubt whether many creatives regularly use both platforms for production work ...
Providing the files are cross-platform, the app doesn't need to be - because by definition it will be a compromise for each platform.

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44 minutes ago, Gary.JONES said:

I doubt whether many creatives regularly use both platforms for production work ..

In motion works, both linear and non-linear, a lot of creatives do use both platforms daily, because some of the best software for this kind of work exists only on one platform. 3ds Max, for example, is far and away the best modeller and material mapping tool for games, and is only available on Windows. Being fast in 3ds Max can easily justify the cost of having a PC Workstation just for this app. But there's some other benefits to having that Workstation, like CorelDraw running natively, and very quickly and reliably. 

 

Also, if one must use Adobe products, they generally perform far faster on a like-for-like Windoze machine than they do on a Mac. This is especially true of Adobe Illustrator. 

Audio software is another area where it pays to have both, and use them both daily.

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Agree that.

I have a super-fast M1 Mac sitting under my monitor on my desk, and a super-fast AlienWare PC on the floor - because its too big to fit on my desk.

I regularly use both platforms - as you say, some apps run better on one platform than the other - VR on PC being a good example.

But I never need to use the same app on each platform - which is what we're talking about here.

Yes, I do use both platforms, but no, I never use Affinity on Windows, simply because I dont need to :-
- I have a fast Mac
- if I need to open an Affinity file from a client, I can do it on Mac
- none of my clients use Affinity on Windows.

IMHO - the best example of a cross-platform app that leverages the Mac GUI is Blender.

It does a lot of things very differently to most other Mac apps, but in a way that is better and more intuitive.
It did take a while to get used to a 
different way of doing things, but much more can be done using fewer keystrokes.

The guys at Affinity can learn a lot by looking at Blender as an example.

 

 

 

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8 minutes ago, Gary.JONES said:

The guys at Affinity can learn a lot by looking at Blender as an example.

Blender and Maya, Reaper and Logic, Premiere and Avid, these are the reasons there's still a need for well designed software, which none of these are.

Blender is an abomination. 

It was even worse... far worse, granted, so a lot of folks are somewhat relieved they can, in the last couple of years, load in a basic interaction system that's somewhat inspired by what we might call an "Autodesk way", but it's still an absolute abomination of fuddled, muddled and often downright hostile paradigms and processes. UVW mapping, for example, is worse than where Maya was at 20+ years ago. Which is really saying something.

For well designed software, that looks forward, and works on both platforms and is used by folks on both platforms at the same time, see something like Ableton Live. It's brought a new paradigm to music software, and due to the nature of plugins being somewhat asymmetrically favouring one or the other platform, many users have both a Mac and Windoze version to produce a song.

Photoshop is often needed and used on both platforms by game and motion creatives, all the time, to quickly create and/or modify content in whatever they're working on, without switching to another machine. As is After Effects for effects and composition, which is easily Adobe's best product, despite years of neglect and abuse, it's still pretty good.

But I think Illustrator is the one for which this is most true, as it's often splines that are quickly needed for all sorts of things, to be refined in one way or another, and time switching to another computer and then sending it across systems is worse than booting it up to do a quick edit. 

Unity and Unreal need to be used on both platforms to publish to their respective platforms, which is where this becomes a huge day to day grind of using the same software on different platforms, and amalgamating the resulting works, too. Which is no fun at all. This is my daily life.

 

 

 

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Hi Mr Deeds :)

I take your point, but (and I know this is off-topic ) I have to disagree with you about Blender.

Blender IMHO is a good example of taking the best from Windows and making it work on a Mac (eg up one level), and subtracting nothing from Mac to make it work on Windoze. The workflow is very different to vanilla Mac, but it embodies an efficiency completely missing in Affinity.

I use Blender a lot for astrophysics simulations - largely because it supports an embedded Python development environment, and a set of elegant tools that provide things like displacements maps and viewport tracing. It supports a huge array of great 3rd party plugins, including 3DP that converts broken STL files created by VectorWorks to fully manifold files that actually print.

Bearing in mind that its is open source and free, I give it a 9/10 compared to Affinity.

I stopped using Adobe after they killed CS6 and started charging an arm and a leg for an annual license. On the increasingly rare occasions when I do need Photoshop, I just fire up an old machine that I keep for 32-bit apps like CS6, and the greatly missed iView MediaPro that was killed by Microsoft.

I'm afraid I dont know a lot about the other apps you mention, but defer to your expertise on those :)
 

 

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2 hours ago, Gary.JONES said:

argely because it supports an embedded Python development environment

argh... I see where our views diverge... I'm a Lua lad ;)

Most things we probably see eye to eye on, to paraphrase another reference from The Good Book.

Here's one you might get a chuckle from:

 

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3 hours ago, deeds said:

argh... I see where our views diverge... I'm a Lua lad ;)

Most things we probably see eye to eye on, to paraphrase another reference from The Good Book.

Here's one you might get a chuckle from:

 

Ha - that's a good one :)
A case of mutually-exclusive radio buttons in sets that should also be mutually exclusive, but aren't !

I could use a good equation editor - I've previously resorted to writing equations in Grapher, then copy and paste into Publisher.

I was kind of hoping v2 might include something like this (disappointed emoji) ... I've searched each of the v2 Apps and Affinity online help but can't find any reference to the 'Equations' function ... where is it ??

/:o

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46 minutes ago, Gary.JONES said:

Ha - that's a good one :)
A case of mutually-exclusive radio buttons in sets that should also be mutually exclusive, but aren't !

I could use a good equation editor - I've previously resorted to writing equations in Grapher, then copy and paste into Publisher.

I was kind of hoping v2 might include something like this (disappointed emoji) ... I've searched each of the v2 Apps and Affinity online help but can't find any reference to the 'Equations' function ... where is it ??

/:o

Silly me - I just realised that this screen is from the Equations Filter ...
as opposed to being something like a basic equations editor, which would be very handy in a suite of products developed for design, Illustration and publishing.

Oh well - another v2 disappointment - looks like I'll have to continue using Grapher, or placing equation elements by hand.

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  • 1 year later...

Let me first say I havent read the other 123 comments.

A good UI should be designed to be intuitive, not necessitating going to the manual to do simple things.

The controls on the left hand side of the right handed setup are terrible. Why must a user click multiple times to determine what parameters the brush is set to. This is one of the most commonly used and therefore irritating aspects of v2 UI.

1. Opacity, accumulation, hardness, feather parameters should be always displayed in status area consistent with other controls.

2. When applying a feather in V1 the apply button is adjacent the parameters. V2 moved feather to a menu item. Being used to V1 after adjusting and applying the feather and clicking away the feather was applied. Recently in V2 I adjusted the feather from the menu, didn but forgot about apply, no checkbox adjacent to parameter, couldnt figure out why not applied, duh.. the apply is a checkbox at top of the screen. No hint of what was going on, If you want to disassociate a parameter from its apply box (poor design), why  not highlight the apply box in red when the parameter is changed to direct user attention to it.

Its a small thing but when dev redesign the UI that users are accustomed to, it is irritating to users have to start searching are relearning, when things no longer seem behave as they previously did. I dont need the benefits of V2 and after seeing how the UI is far worse in V2 I probably wont be interested in V3. 

Repeat customers are the best customers, especially ones that attempt to point out what they perceive to be significant discomfort features, attempting to aid the development of a better product, which is my sole intent.

 

 

 

 

 

 

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On 11/16/2022 at 7:19 PM, deeds said:

Blender is an abomination. 

I'm going to have to disagree on this one.  It is partly a matter of perspective.

Blender does not conform to the user interface guidelines of practically anything - it is off in its own little world - so from that perspective, yes, it is a "foreign" piece of software no matter where you run it, with its own distinct learning curve and not quite fitting in with anything else.

However, people did experiments in the past (before some of the sweeping improvements that have been made to the UI in more recent versions), and found that if they took someone experienced in Blender, and someone experienced in one of the commercial 3D apps, and had the Blender user and the other app user do the same thing (this was for modeling if I recall correctly), the Blender user could generally do it much faster.

Blender's interface is not optimized for new users or to make it easier to learn (again, this has improved in the more recent versions, but it still is not the main focus).  Rather, it is optimized for speed of working after you learn it.  Someone who spends a lot of time working with Blender can become very fast in what they are doing - this is one of its primary benefits.

Blender is an example of a true professional interface for people who heavily use the same app frequently.  It is not a good UI for people who use it sporadically or for people who want to walk up and just start using it (again, this is improving with the current versions, but is still not the main focus).

When you look at it from that perspective, Blender is a program that people try to conform to a different mold than the one it is primarily intended for, them come away from it disappointed that it is not what they expected.  When you approach it for what it actually is, the interface is quite good.

Of course, it is not completely perfect even within that category, as evidenced by the fact that they chose to base their scripting on the Python language.  Sad.

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I agree and disagree ...

MacOS didn't conform to the user interface guidelines of anything else when it was first released - but it *established* the guidelines for a new generation of GUI-based user interfaces - which just goes to prove that doing things in a new way is the only means by which things progress.

I agree that Blender does many things in an unusual way, but in my experience, *most* things are much more efficient and intuitive - provided one is prepared to 'let go' of the old way of doing things. I found it pretty easy to learn with limited reference to the user guide, and I agree that users need to adjust their expectations when using Blender, because in most ways it is actually *better* than other products.

I cannot say the same about Affinity.

I hold to the comments I made in my original post - the product does its job very well, but the UX has gone backwards, mainly due to bad design choices when it comes to the GUI and basic usability.

I still overwhelmingly prefer v1 to v2 - its just simpler and more elegant.

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