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Has V2 fixed Affinity's biggest issues?


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5 minutes ago, debraspicher said:

a vintage mac

I also have a Macintosh LC475. As long as it has a fresh buffer battery inside, it still works. The battery doesn't last very long though and likely needs replacement again by now. It runs Mac OS (note the whitespace!) 7.5.3. Among others, it has QuarkXPress 3.32, Freehand 5.5, Illustrator 5, Photoshop 2.5 and Streamline 4 (hey, TRACING!). In late 1990s I got it used from a buddy in a swap for one of my used turntables.

In fact, my most recent Mac is not only "vintage", officially it's already "obsolete"! A MacBook Pro 15" mid-2012. It sits on my lap as I type this, and I have no plans to change that anytime soon. As long as Serif supports MacOS Catalina, that is. :) 

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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3 minutes ago, Aongus Collins said:

it was the first major drawing app to be ported from the classic Mac OS to OS X

Yeah, but I never bought the Freehand 10 upgrade because it was just that: a port without any significant improvement worth the cash. And at that time I also switched to InDesign 2 (not CS2!) which ran just great on Mac OS 9, so there was no reason to fully migrate to OS X yet. For a few years I had OS X installed – since the public beta – but booted the Mac from OS 9 for any serious work. I didn't fully switch to OS X before Apple finally re-added labels to Finder. Tagging files and folders with labels always was a key part of my workflow, and it still is.

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 remember running early versions of OS X (I was working closely with Apple at the time on interactive/streaming QuickTime stuff) and it made me switch to Windows XP for a few years as my main driver until they figured things out. Early OS X was such as mess. A very pretty mess, but a friggin' mess none the less.

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9 hours ago, Distill7 said:

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...

@Distill7 No worries. I can't speak for specific platforms (you'd want to check their required artwork specs), but the take-home for me from that discussion about bad colour seps was this:

Quote

TL;DR: Choose the 'PDF (press-ready)' export preset and uncheck 'Embed profiles'. 🙂

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5 hours ago, Bryan Rieger said:

Early OS X was such as mess. A very pretty mess, but a friggin' mess none the less.

My memories of early OS X are actually pretty positive. (There were plenty of issues, but I think they did an amazing job of making it more-or-less Mac-like.) I know we look at OS 9 and earlier with rose-coloured glasses, but let us never forget…

image.png.c52bc09553a4ba1da0b099aefad43074.png

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@Kal

1 Bit image support (png with 1 bit) is in, the preview for now shows wrong colours when transparent background is not activated but the exported file seems to be correct.Photo_crBw3ptbQy.png.5b156eda3d2da7765978d3424e097643.pngexplorer_l8CNNi9EYJ.png.2647c62c13b41612a53c36fd517c1707.png

 

Example with dithering for the gradient and a red colour shape with a blur on it.

mspaint_FsCS4szUZY.png.e291cb8762012955fc669e160625ab29.png

Sketchbook (with Affinity Suite usage) | timurariman.com | gumroad.com/myclay
Windows 11 Pro - 22H2 | Ryzen 5800X3D | RTX 3090 - 24GB | 128GB |
Main SSD with 1TB | SSD 4TB | PCIe SSD 256GB (configured as Scratch disk) |

 

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56 minutes ago, myclay said:

1 Bit image support (png with 1 bit) is in

That was already in v1 as well.

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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24 minutes ago, loukash said:

That was already in v1 as well.

ouch, I genuinely missed that and thought it was new, my apologies and thanks for correcting me. :)

Sketchbook (with Affinity Suite usage) | timurariman.com | gumroad.com/myclay
Windows 11 Pro - 22H2 | Ryzen 5800X3D | RTX 3090 - 24GB | 128GB |
Main SSD with 1TB | SSD 4TB | PCIe SSD 256GB (configured as Scratch disk) |

 

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@PaoloT, Aldus PageMaker 3 was my first experience with the mysterious new world of DTP around 1989-1990, after some good soul installed it on a Macintosh SE/30 in the public library of University Bern, Switzerland. It was about a year after I have finished the art school where we were still learning everything by hand, no computers. At the library, there was no one to teach me how to use it, so I had to figure it all out by myself. In fact, the first time I came there to do some DTP work, the person in charge asked me if I've worked with desktop computers before. I said no, so she said that I should try the Macintosh first, not the IBM, it should be easier to figure it out. She was right… :D I still have some of the documents archived that I created there.

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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12 hours ago, Kal said:

My memories of early OS X are actually pretty positive. (There were plenty of issues, but I think they did an amazing job of making it more-or-less Mac-like.) I know we look at OS 9 and earlier with rose-coloured glasses, but let us never forget…

image.png.c52bc09553a4ba1da0b099aefad43074.png

All I see is a positive I haven't seen in a very long time... a tech company apologising to its users. Now those apologies are only reserved for "stake holders" and investors.

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On 11/14/2022 at 3:19 PM, Kal said:

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!

I've experienced this issue a few times as well. What a nightmare, especially the first time it happens and you have no idea what's going on.

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thanks!

great post.

On 11/14/2022 at 1:28 PM, Kal said:

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.

great post!

I miss:

support for 1-bit files,

a better guides management, as described (for more precise work)

mixed ink color and a beer swatch management as described

 

 

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23 hours ago, deeds said:

All I see is a positive I haven't seen in a very long time... a tech company apologising to its users. Now those apologies are only reserved for "stake holders" and investors.

Tru dat. But I’m doubting you’re old enough to have experienced those bombs in a work environment if you only see positive. You know why there’s only a Restart button on that alert right? In those days, any old misbehaving app could bring the whole system down quicker than you could say, ‘Oh sh*t, when did I last save?!’ It certainly kept you on your toes and encouraged you to hit 🍎-S regularly—a habit I’m still in today!

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26 minutes ago, Kal said:

Tru dat. But I’m doubting you’re old enough to have experienced those bombs in a work environment if you only see positive. You know why there’s only a Restart button on that alert right? In those days, any old misbehaving app could bring the whole system down quicker than you could say, ‘Oh sh*t, when did I last save?!’ It certainly kept you on your toes and encouraged you to hit 🍎-S regularly—a habit I’m still in today!

Probably older than you. And also have a long built up [Control/Command+S] muscle memory that twitches into action after every operation of significance to digital endeavours. This saves me daily, sometimes hourly, as I switch between operating systems and their various apps for digital creativity. There's still no fabled security, nor stability, when running many creative apps including game engines, whilst they all battle to get at video memory, main memory, GPU and CPU as greedily as possible.

It's also fascinating to see which apps have good inbuilt backup systems, as these are often the most stable. I don't think this is a negative coincidence. I think their care for the users is such that they offer auto backup facilities with archiving AND good stability because they care sufficiently to work and think in this manner.

The only was a lightly irreverent and facetious attempt at humour by way of referencing how shockingly strongly the "Sorry" stands out (to active, current users) as extremely unusual in this day and age, and harkens back to a time when we felt like there was a real concern for users and user experience, creativity and capability expressed through the manner in which the software attempted to get to somewhere like an empowerment of users.

 

 

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1 hour ago, Kal said:

when did I last save?!’ It certainly kept you on your toes and encouraged you to hit 🍎-S regularly—a habit I’m still in today!

Haha, me too! Sometimes — as I'm saving a file that I just saved 10 seconds ago — I think, I must hit Ctrl+S more than anybody on earth. But for the most part, Ctrl+S is in my muscle memory... I do it constantly without thinking about it. It's comforting to know there are still other old timers out there.

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On 11/15/2022 at 5:57 AM, chirpy said:

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.

Only used Freehand at school, but we were taught to use find & replace. InDesign’s links panel could do something like it but not seamlessly. To be honest, I preferred InDesign over Illustrator for basic vector work.
 

With this 2.0 update of Designer, I feel kind of homeless again, it’s such a letdown that they let all these UI issues slide. Maybe they got hit hard with covid or something, they haven’t said. Maybe this is just the way Serif is going to be. But there is no alternative really. Seems there is no money in going against Adobe, otherwise we would get actual competition. I’m just floored with how disappointing this is. 

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