Has V2 fixed Affinity's biggest issues?

[hinoki]

@iulian thnx for showing
was writing not to bash Serif
only to create some consciousness

as users
we received the V2 announcement

as supporter
you land on the temp offer

not a word about upgrade
or existing users
thanks to you we can grow

everything understandable
but patching this in a post after launch
which too few users will read…

[loukash]

3 hours ago, JaGold said:

an unintuitive workflow issue

I'd beg to differ. We've been indoctrinated and brainwashed with Adobe's "intuitive" (?) workflows for decades.
It's hard to free one's mind of old habits.  
I needed a whopping 5 years, counting from my APh purchase in 2015.

[JaGold]

1 hour ago, loukash said:

I'd beg to differ. We've been indoctrinated and brainwashed with Adobe's "intuitive" (?) workflows for decades.
It's hard to free one's mind of old habits.  
I needed a whopping 5 years, counting from my APh purchase in 2015.

Personally I don't view creative app usage as indoctrination. It's a tool to me, like a very good hammer. If I can do the job well with Affinity, if it serves my goals, then I use it. 

Theres been a lot of R&D and $$$ invested into Photoshop, and it's an excellent, industry-tested tool. I just don't like renting it. 

[loukash]

2 hours ago, JaGold said:

It's a tool to me, like a very good hammer.

I get your analogy. Except that bitmap editing apps are very, VERY complex hammers. 
So you're comparing apples with … well, hammers.

2 hours ago, JaGold said:

it's an excellent, industry-tested tool

No doubt. I've been using it since version 2.5 until v12.1 aka CS5.1.
I, for one, don't miss it since I finally understood the Affinity workflows.

[A_B_C]

Just for the record, as far as I am concerned, I’ve never said that I wanted a “Photoshop workflow” or something the like. I said I dearly wished that all the little annoyances that impede a true Affinity work-flow would finally be removed. I’ve been an Affinity user since the first version of Designer came out, and I can tell you, the annoyances I am talking about are not due to a lack of familiarising myself with “the way things are done in Affinity.” I think I can say that I know these tools from inside out, and I’ve completed countless projects with the apps over the last seven years. Nonetheless, it should still be possible to highlight aspects of the application that create needless friction, in particular, when they could be amended easily and are felt to be annoying by a great number of other users as well.

Just to repeat one of my examples, is there really a good reason for not making the buttons for the snapping options available in the toolbar of the Export Persona? In my workflow, I will regularly need specific snapping settings for slices that are different from my standard snapping settings for vector objects. Yet, I cannot change these options from the Export Persona toolbar, because snapping options are simply not available there. Don't tell me that the continued frustration I experience about this circumstance is due to a lack of familiarising myself with the Affinity way of doing things. 😉

[loukash]

4 hours ago, A_B_C said:

is there really a good reason for not making the buttons for the snapping options available in the toolbar of the Export Persona?

According to a staff reply I once got to exactly the same question, there was allegedly a major technical reason for that. No idea if that's still valid for V2 though.

[deeds]

23 minutes ago, loukash said:

According to a staff reply I once got to exactly the same question, there was allegedly a major technical reason for that. No idea if that's still valid for V2 though.

Sounds like it was unlikely to have been valid, ever.

 

[A_B_C]

I understand that snapping in the Export Persona will never be the same as snapping in the other ones. Slices must be follow the pixel grid, so it seems clear that you cannot simply use the snapping options from the other Personas there. Sometimes though, I wished there would be some more customization available, such as setting the number of snapping candidates or changing the way in which object (i.e. slice) snapping takes place. But anyway, the snapping example is probably not the the best example for what I wanted to say … basically, I just grabbed one from the bag, and certainly not the most significant one; which, admittedly, does not lend my argument the force I hope it has, considering some of the other examples … 😉

[Normando]

On 11/14/2022 at 9:05 PM, Aongus Collins said:

In Preferences > User Interface, you can change the icon style to mono. I much prefer this iteration.

THANK YOU FOR THAT!! I'm much happier with the Dark UI and the Mono Icon Style! Now if I can just memorize what they mean. To be honest, it took me constant use to memorize them in PS as well. Onward!

[walt.farrell]

22 minutes ago, Normando said:

Now if I can just memorize what they mean.

You can set the Tooltips to show sooner, via Preferences, which can help with the learning

[Ash]

Few things mentioned on this thread which are now available to try out in the 2.1 beta - you can sign up to the beta program here.

On 11/28/2022 at 11:40 PM, A_B_C said:

Alt+drag to copy objects in the Layers Panel

On 11/28/2022 at 11:40 PM, A_B_C said:

Alt+click on layer’s or group’s triangle in the Layers Panel to open or close the entire subtree structure, as it is the case in macOS Finder,

On 11/28/2022 at 11:40 PM, A_B_C said:

Shift+drag to constrain the aspect ratio of the Crop Tool rectangle in Photo

On 11/28/2022 at 11:40 PM, A_B_C said:

the option of having the Crop Tool remember its last-used state

(Ok shift-drag not in build today, but will be included very soon)

 

[A_B_C]

Ash, I am so very delighted to see these improvements added! Thank you so much everyone in the team, and sorry for the late reply to this announcement. 😀