I have Deleted V2 and Gone Back to V1

[Brian_J]

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.

[deeds]

53 minutes ago, Gary.JONES said:

Created in Affinity Photo VERSION 1 (because I've deleted v2).

 

100% Made in Affinity Designer VERSON 1 (because v2 doesn't support Mac OS versions prior to 10.15)

 

 

[Didge]

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

[deeds]

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

 

[Didge]

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.

[Didge]

10 minutes ago, deeds said:

...and of Affinity's UI degredation.

Hence the three sided shape in the background

 

Ah - that is very creative !

[deeds]

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.

[Didge]

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.

 

 

 

[deeds]

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.

 

 

 

[Didge]

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 
 

 

[deeds]

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:

 

[Oasin]

On 11/12/2022 at 6:55 AM, Gary.JONES said:

What is the point of redesigning icons at the expense of fixing bugs ?

I totally agree.

[Didge]

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

[Didge]

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.