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Has V2 fixed Affinity's biggest issues?


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Exciting times. With precious little in the way of recent updates, some users wondered if Affinity was dead—but no, we were promptly told that they were just focused on the next major version. And four months later, here it is!

A common expression amongst users has been 'hopefully in version 2', so here's my list of hoped for changes. I'm about to fire up my new V2 apps for the first time and see if all the hopeful waiting has been rewarded. I've divided my list into two main categories: 'UI frustrations' and 'Missing or broken features'.

 

UI frustrations

Window management (Separated Mode)

Ever since MultiFinder appeared on the Mac in 1987, we've been able to run multiple apps and see their document windows side by side. Over the years came other improvements like drag and drop between apps and documents. You lose some of those benefits when an app takes up the whole screen with a solid background. For this reason, many of us preferred a separated workspace (turning off Application Frame in Adobe apps), but after switching to Affinity, quickly discovered that Affinity's Separated Mode was pretty broken, with document windows and Studio panels seemingly having no knowledge of each other's existence.

After much criticism, Affinity finally responded in June 2020 with a help article titled 'Increase your efficiency with Affinity’s Separated Mode'. There was no admission of any issues though, and I parodied the unhelpful article in this forum comment.

Changes in V2

Affinity seems to have finally acknowledged the issues with Separated Mode. Their solution? Remove it altogether! The new 'Float View to Window' command kind of gives us the worst of both worlds… separate windows that still aren't aware of your Studio panels, and a big old solid-grey app window obscuring every other background app. It looks like Affinity might have just put this one in the too hard basket.

Panel management

Resizing Studio panels in V1 is somewhere between painful and impossible. To be fair, this was never a perfect experience with Adobe either, but Affinity takes the pain to a new level. Can't see most of your Paragraph panel? Hover your cursor very carefully over that one-pixel hairline between panels… Nope, there's the 'no entry' cursor telling you the panel can't be resized (for some unknown reason). Double-click to minimise a panel or two to make more space… only to find that it added several inches of completely empty space to a different panel instead. Try to resize that one. Nope, there's the 'no entry' cursor again. Start double-clicking ALL the panels until you can finally see the one you want. Utter frustration.

Changes in V2

After playing around with panels for just a few minutes, the results are mixed. Firstly, I can resize panels (without seeing the 'no entry' icon all the time)—great! Secondly, the hover-zone seems to have expanded from one pixel to around two—I'll take it! Beyond that, things are still quite unpredictable. For example, I currently have a massive Swatches panel full of mostly empty space, and a tiny Text Styles panel below it which is showing me only two lines. I can resize the Text Styles panel to my liking, but if I then minimise and reopen it, it's right back to the way it was—tiny and useless. Whatever algorithm is determining these panel sizes is clearly not fit for purpose.

On a positive note, on the Mac the Studio panels are now listed under the Window menu—exactly where they should have been all along!

Oh one other thing… I lost the Swatches panel in Designer. As in, it just totally vanished. 😳 I can hide it and unhide it again from the menu, but it does not reappear. Restarting the app doesn't bring it back either. This could be a bit of a problem!! (Edit: Found!)

Working with guides

Creating a simple guide the normal way, by dragging out from the ruler, works fine. Unfortunately though, Affinity apps lack the power and flexibility of other drawing apps like Illustrator, which let you select and manipulate guides like normal objects—positioning them numerically for example, or hitting delete to remove then. Illustrator even lets you convert normal vector objects into guides.

With Affinity apps, you have to drag a guide off the edge of a page to remove it. The issues with this approach are (1) you have to be zoomed out so that you can see the edge of the page, and (2) it's inconsistent with the behaviour of other objects, which can be safely dragged and positioned beyond the edge of the page. This creates confusion for users as discussed on threads like this one.

Instead, Affinity gives us the Guides Manager. It's a useful tool, but it would be less necessary if guides were more flexible in the first place.

Changes in V2

There appears to be no changes to the way guides work in V2.

Working with colour swatches

In my opinion, Affinity seriously dropped the ball in V1 with the way colour swatches are handled. Here are some of the features that are missing or broken:

  1. There's no obvious place to put your custom colours. You have to find the 'Add Document Palette' command first, which then creates something called 'Unnamed'. Other actions may trigger the app to add a second palette named 'Document'.
  2. Once a swatch is created, you can't convert it to or from a global or spot colour.
  3. You can't select more than one swatch at a time.
  4. You can't drag and drop colour swatches between palettes or between different parts of the UI.
  5. There's no obvious way to add a Pantone swatch to an existing document palette. (You need to apply the colour to an object on the canvas, select the object, switch back to your document palette and click on one of the two 'Add…' buttons.)
  6. New global colours are given generic names (Global Colour 1, etc). Pantone colour names are not preserved when added as global colours (the most common requirement!) and need to be typed in manually.
  7. Global colours are not transferred between documents when copying and pasting objects. (You need to explicitly export a palette from the first document and then import it into the second document.)
  8. Global spot colours are not added to a Publisher document palette when placing a Designer file (unlike InDesign and Illustrator).
  9. There's no search field in the 'Add Global Color' panel or edit colour pop-up, making it almost impossible to select the one you want from a large list of swatches. (They aren't displayed as a list, even if you set the panel appearance to 'Show as List'.)
  10. There's no command to find and delete unused swatches from a document palette.
  11. There's no option to merge two global colours.
  12. When deleting a used swatch, you're not asked what to replace it with. (If you delete a global colour, all instances just get replaced with a non-global version.)

Yes, colour swatch management in Affinity V1 is bad—really bad. In one forum comment I wrote, 'That's one thing Adobe got right, and something the Affinity devs would have done well to replicate, rather than trying to get clever and do their own thing. Gosh I hope version 2 starts to take this seriously.' Well let's check out V2 and see…

Changes in V2

(1) The 'Add Document Palette' command now displays a pop-up which asks, 'Please enter a name for the new palette.' It still defaults to 'Unnamed', but it's a small improvement over the previous behaviour.

(9) Both the 'Add Global Color' panel and the edit colour pop-up now feature a search field, making it much easier to select from a large list of swatches. (They also now respect the 'Show as List' setting.)

Aside from those two improvements, very little seems to have changed with colour swatches across the Affinity suite. That's a big disappointment, and seems to communicates that the Affinity team don't share the view of many users, that this really needed an overhaul.

Undo/Redo

In Affinity apps, the action of selecting or deselecting an object gets added to the undo/redo stack. This is counterintuitive, goes against years of established practice, and (if the user is not familiar with it) can lead to data loss. Only an action that alters the artwork in some way should be added to the undo/redo stack, as discussed here.

Changes in V2

Nothing has changed.

 

Missing or broken features

1-bit black and white artwork (line art)

Graphics applications have, since the beginning of time, supported true 1-bit black and white artwork, so many professional users were understandably shocked to discover that Affinity V1 apps offered no support at all for 1-bit files. The only workaround is to work with grayscale and manually compress your lightness levels. This is anything but reliable, as compression algorithms at export time will not recognise the difference between a faux B&W image and a grayscale one, downsampling line art to an unacceptably low resolution and adding unwanted antialiasing.

Changes in V2

Incredibly, there's still no support for 1-bit black and white artwork.

Turning off antialiasing

The ability to turn off antialiasing of exported graphics is an essential feature for any professional graphics application. Affinity V1 apps lacked this feature entirely in the beginning, but in response to a forum post in 2015, one of Affinity's developers added highly-customisable, per-object control of antialiasing. Then, in 2020, it got better, with a simple on or off option, which you can apply to multiple objects at once.

This is a huge improvement already, but some of us would still like to see a simple on/off checkbox at export for outputting something like a raster print versions of a logo. As I explained in the same discussion: 'it's about tailoring the artwork to different output media. That should be an export function, not something I have to hard-code into the design file.'

Changes in V2

Turning off antialiasing cannot be done globally at export—it must still be hard-coded into each object of the file.

Reliably exporting for print

Affinity Publisher's default PDF export settings for print-ready artwork ('PDF (press-ready)') turns black (K:100) to a CMYK mix (e.g. C:71, M:66, Y:66, K:76), which would be a disaster if not detected before your job goes to print (something which is difficult when there are no pre-press tools provided). There are other issues too, like line art being downsampled and antialiased (related to the previous two issues).

Changes in V2

This has not been fixed. The 'PDF (press-ready)' export preset still has an all-or nothing 'Embed profiles' option ticked by default, and still causes black artwork (like text) to get converted to a CMYK mix.

Previewing colour separations

Affinity has no alternative to Acrobat Pro. For print professionals, this means no way of previewing and checking colour separations before going to print. When combined with the issues mentioned above, the chances of poor quality artwork and printing are high.

Changes in V2

There are no new apps or built-in tools for checking colour separations.

 

Summary

V2 may have brought some cool new features, but it has only brought modest improvements to a few of the features which matter to me the most, while other issues have been overlooked completely. Having waited so many years for the first major update, I have to say, I'm pretty disappointed.

I'll still purchase all the apps, and I'll still recommend them to family and friends. They do a lot of great things, and you certainly can't beat the price.

Of course, this is not an exhaustive list of the issues I have with the Affinity apps—just a few that frustrate me the most. If I've left out some of your biggest issues, feel free to add them below with a note on whether V2 fixed them for you.

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33 minutes ago, Kal said:

Of course, this is not an exhaustive list of the issues I have with the Affinity apps—just a few that frustrate me the most. If I've left out some of your biggest issues, feel free to add them below with a note on whether V2 fixed them for you.

Don't do that.

Each feature request should be a separate thread, and most of these things already have one, so any additional comments should be added to those, not proliferated into numerous threads on the same topic.

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1 hour ago, fde101 said:

Each feature request should be a separate thread, and most of these things already have one

Sigh. I thought it would be obvious that this wasn’t a new ‘feature request’. It was a one-off review off the first major upgrade to Affinity‘s ‘pro’ apps, pulling together a bunch of missing features that I happen to think are most important. 

Yes, these features have been requested more than once already, over many years. (I’ve linked to some of those discussions). That’s kind of the point—they were things we might have expected to be in V2, and their omission is a signal to me that Affinity’s software designers don’t rate the importance of these things highly.

If this isn’t the place for an overall review and discussion of V2 and its most glaring missing features, how about being a little constructive and telling me where the right place is? I did look at all the options, and the ‘Feedback for the Affinity V2 suite of products’ certainly seemed like the best fit.

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2 hours ago, Kal said:

Oh one other thing… I lost the Swatches panel in Designer. As in, it just totally vanished. 😳 I can hide it and unhide it again from the menu, but it does not reappear. Restarting the app doesn't bring it back either. This could be a bit of a problem!! (On a positive note, on the Mac the Studio panels are now listed under the Window menu—exactly where they should have been all along!)

So this is something I'm experiencing a lot. Windows will just disappear and toggling them on and off via the Window menu does nothing. It's happened with the character and paragraph windows, brushes, and generally anything that isn't placed in a 'studio' panel. The only way I've found to restore them when I lose them is to close the app and restart it (repeatedly if necessary) until the windows are visible again. Please fix ASAP.

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1 hour ago, Bryan Rieger said:

So this is something I'm experiencing a lot. Windows will just disappear and toggling them on and off via the Window menu does nothing. It's happened with the character and paragraph windows, brushes, and generally anything that isn't placed in a 'studio' panel. The only way I've found to restore them when I lose them is to close the app and restart it (repeatedly if necessary) until the windows are visible again. Please fix ASAP.

So these are all undocked panels?

Do you ever use multiple monitors?

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

    Laptop:  Windows 11 Pro, version 23H2, 32GB memory, Intel Core i7-10750H @ 2.60GHz, Intel UHD Graphics Comet Lake GT2 and NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070 Laptop GPU.
iPad:  iPad Pro M1, 12.9": iPadOS 17.4.1, Apple Pencil 2, Magic Keyboard 
Mac:  2023 M2 MacBook Air 15", 16GB memory, macOS Sonoma 14.4.1

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2 minutes ago, walt.farrell said:

So these are all undocked panels?

Do you ever use multiple monitors?

Yes, these are all undocked panels.

Yes, I use multiple monitors. I did check to see if the panels had simply displayed on the other monitor but they had not. They just weren't there, despite the checkmark beside them in the Window menu indicating that they were visible.

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Did you have the same monitor configuration as when you last used the panels? 

If they were on another monitor, which is no longer connected, you may need to connect it, or switch to a studio Preset setup for your current monitor configuration, or Reset the Studio.

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

    Laptop:  Windows 11 Pro, version 23H2, 32GB memory, Intel Core i7-10750H @ 2.60GHz, Intel UHD Graphics Comet Lake GT2 and NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070 Laptop GPU.
iPad:  iPad Pro M1, 12.9": iPadOS 17.4.1, Apple Pencil 2, Magic Keyboard 
Mac:  2023 M2 MacBook Air 15", 16GB memory, macOS Sonoma 14.4.1

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1 minute ago, walt.farrell said:

Did you have the same monitor configuration as when you last used the panels? 

Yes. The exact same. I haven't even unplugged the monitor or moved my mac.

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While I am all with Serif for the huge undertaking they have been carrying on since years, I have to share Kal's frustration. What I can start to see with V2 is this:

- Photo and Designer are strong competitors to the Adobe equivalents. They still miss things, but do so many things well. AI features don't compel me. All considered, I was already mostly happy with the first version.

- Integration with the Mac's UI is even worse than before. This may seem a little thing for our fellows using Windows, but it is extremely important for us Mac users. We chose the difficult way of living out of the crowd because we love the comfort and elegance of that UI. Programs interfering with our lifelong meditation can't find good reception.

- While adding some extraordinary features, like side notes, and continuing to have the older, like live preview of changes, Publisher is very far from being an InDesign replacement. It can already be fine for someone working in isolation, but not for people working in a team or with collaborators, due to the lack of any way to be integrated in a production flux. It still lacks some fundamental things for long projects, like cross-references. It can't deal with RTL and CJK languages, that are all part of my everyday job. And then, there is the same issue of the application frame breaking the usefulness of the clean, multi-window Mac environment.

I was sincerely hoping to be able to finally trash InDesign in the next few months. But at this point I fear it will be several years away from now. The only two solutions, in the meantime, are to either keep a machine (real or virtual) with a current Mac OS just to use InDesign CS6, or to switch to InDesign CC. This latter solution repels me, since it would mean making all the forthcoming documents hostage of Adobe and its aleatory price and plan policies.

Not a great situation, in the freelance/small shops publishing world.

How bad I feel? I'm considering alternatives to using page layout software, entirely.

Paolo

 

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3 hours ago, walt.farrell said:

So these are all undocked panels?

Do you ever use multiple monitors?

All my panels were docked (unless I accidentally undocked them), and I’m only using the one monitor.

Anyway, if this is affecting others, it would be better made into a separate bug report and discussed there. I’m happy to do that if it hasn’t been done already.

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6 hours ago, Bryan Rieger said:

So this is something I'm experiencing a lot. Windows will just disappear and toggling them on and off via the Window menu does nothing. It's happened with the character and paragraph windows, brushes, and generally anything that isn't placed in a 'studio' panel. The only way I've found to restore them when I lose them is to close the app and restart it (repeatedly if necessary) until the windows are visible again. Please fix ASAP.

Bryan, I started writing up a bug report for this one, then I found my lost panel! Can you see it…?

image.png.46cb6ba1bc9c341752a73afb321b0dfd.png

I've gone ahead and submitted the bug report anyway, because I didn't knowingly undock it and drag it down there, and macOS apps are supposed to recover off-screen windows when an app UI is redrawn (i.e. hidden/unhidden or restarted). But for now, you might want to check those corners of your screen!

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32 minutes ago, Designer1234 said:

Biggest issues? I hoped that with AD v2 I'll get true competitor for Corel Draw 9, but... no, still 70% of its tools are missing, not mentioning Corel DRAW X3 (the latest version I known as a child) :D I don't understand who use AD and consider it as a competitor for AI :D

Corel Draw… Gosh, I used that once or twice back in the 1800s I think. Macromedia Freehand too. But AI was always my favourite, and it's the one I'd probably still be using if not for Adobe's subscribe-or-goodbye policy.

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3 hours ago, Kal said:

Corel Draw… Gosh, I used that once or twice back in the 1800s I think. Macromedia Freehand too. But AI was always my favourite, and it's the one I'd probably still be using if not for Adobe's subscribe-or-goodbye policy.

Macromedia Freehand was (and still is) the best vector app that has ever existed. There is one feature alone in that app that was better than anything I’ve ever seen in any other app. It was the Graphics Find & replace panel. Apparently, no one else ever used it but me, because no one is submitting feature requests for it to Adobe. You could use it to find anything in your Freehand doc and replace it with anything else. It was amazing. I will never forgive Adobe for buying Macromedia and killing that app. I have to use Adobe software at work, but I will never again install their apps on my home computer. 

I also cannot ever get used to having more than one arrow tool. It seems so dumb. The one arrow selection tool was able to do everything that multiple arrow selection tools do in all these other apps.

I also share in the frustration of the UI elements, especially the new poorly drawn icons compared to V1. The UI was fine in V1. What we needed were things like a blend tool. Hopefully, those other things that have already been requested before will be added in a future free update and not 5 years from now.

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5 hours ago, chirpy said:

Macromedia Freehand was (and still is) the best vector app that has ever existed.

I learnt Illustrator first (it's what they taught us at uni), which is probably why I preferred it. I never quite adjusted to Freehand's drawing tools. But whichever one you happened to prefer, the competition between the two apps was good for everyone.

 

5 hours ago, chirpy said:

I will never forgive Adobe for buying Macromedia and killing that app.

Yes, a truly anti-competitive move—one that benefited no one but Adobe and its shareholders. At the time I was naively enjoying the promised integration of Macromedia's web tools (Fireworks, Dreamweaver and Flash) with the classic Adobe apps, and didn't realise that Adobe was becoming too big and too powerful. Within six years of killing Freehand, they killed perpetual licenses too—another big middle-finger to customers like us. Since then, I've come to believe that we all suffer when we give too much power to big companies—one of the reasons why I'm very happy to give my money to Affinity instead of Adobe (even if Affinity's apps still have a way to go).

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15 hours ago, Designer1234 said:

I don't understand who use AD and consider it as a competitor for AI :D

I agree. AD has slices that AI doesn't have and that is a game changer for making newspaper ads.

11 hours ago, Aongus Collins said:

Yes, Freehand is sadly missed.

agreed. in the prepress side, I much preferred FH over IL when files came in. FH had the multiple size pages (artboards) long before anything else did and it was intuitive. You would have entire business packages in one file - Letterhead, business cards, envelopes. AD is much closer and that is what attracted to me it 5 years ago to start trying Affinity.

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It's astounding that the last release of Freehand was almost 20 years ago (2003), yet there are still so many people (myself included) lamenting over what a fabulous tool it was, and how it was way ahead of its time. Same with Fireworks with it's unique vector and bitmap capabilities which was EOL'd 10 years ago (2012).

Perhaps we should start a support group. 😉

@Artsketch and yes, Amadine and Vectornator (awful name) are both underrated (albeit the latter has some 'quality issues'). For me it's the ability to blend vector and bitmap elements within Designer (and all Affinity apps) that really sets them apart from pure vector illustration apps.

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An option to convert Spot colors to CMYK or RGB would be awesome.

Thanks for the info about the "press ready" black conversion, which profile do you recommend for exporting to Print On Demand platforms like KDP, lulu, IngramSpark...

And lastly, Serif should prioritize features that make the apps work for large teams in professional environments like RTL and CJK languages support, print, installation files and collaboration. This is the fastest way to make more money selling multiple licenses.

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13 hours ago, chirpy said:

Macromedia Freehand was (and still is) the best vector app that has ever existed.

Mmmm… Freehand… :) 

Freehand9onPanther.thumb.png.77acb828a833aaf7535bdd67067b42da.png

Still there in my office on my "vintage" PowerMac G4.

MacBookAir 15": MacOS Ventura > Affinity v1, v2, v2 beta // MacBookPro 15" mid-2012: MacOS El Capitan > Affinity v1 / MacOS Catalina > Affinity v1, v2, v2 beta // iPad 8th: iPadOS 16 > Affinity v2

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I'm a very superficial user, but identified one large drawback of Affinity Photo V1 compared to its predecessor PhotoPlus X8, namely, an inefficient print dialog.  Announcement of V2 offered a glimmer of hope that this would be "fixed."  I downloaded the 30-day trial of V2, but no such luck.  Still very awkward.  No reason for me to buy V2.

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