Is Affinity Designer a modern and innovative software?

[DC9V]

It surprises me that the warp feature hasn't been available in version one yet. Was it really that difficult to implement? I feel like it should have been a basic feature from the start.  

[deeds]

Wait till you find out there's no Blend tool.

 

 

[iuli]

I don’t know how difficult is to implement, but the vector warp tool is behaving more fluid and more precise than everything else I’ve been working with so far. Same for the knife tool or the shape builder, I think they’re at the higher standards possible.

However, a vector eraser or real artistic vector brushes are still missing, and being missed, especially the later, but I imagine that none of them are easy to implement. For a vector software they’re strange omissions though, I think.

[bayustudio]

It's not the most feature-complete app (there are common features that surprisingly still missing)
but in other areas, there are a lot of things Affinity Designer feels modern & innovative.
eg: vector+pixel hybrid, performant engine, studio links, etc
The foundation looks solid, they just need to keep adding features...

[deeds]

Fireworks, at the time it came out, and through much of its life, was a forward looking, innovative and modern piece of design tooling. It was also one of the first things Adobe shuttered when they bought Macromedia. 

 

Much of what it was and could be and do has not been progressed upon by any vector/bitmap design software, leaving much of the industry using Photoshop for UI design, which led to the opportunities to create a Figma to fill that void, which led to another massive spend by Adobe. 

 

Affinity's apps ape Adobe oldest products poorly rather than learning from things like Firworks and Lightroom. both of which show a better way to do things. Lightroom, of course, being another app that Adobe had little choice but to purchase because it was ahead of its time in terms of curation, photo editing and batch processing. And still is, despite little improvement in a decade.

 

By way of example, Affinity have managed to regress from the appalling manner in which Adobe's apps handle layers and artboards. That's really something. 

Both KeyNote and CorelDraw have shown how a layer and document pages/artboards system can simply work better than the Adobe model, for decades.

Even Indesign has a superior page/layout/layers operational model to the older Adobe apps despite its clunky history and generally appalling performance.

And After Effects demonstrates how to combine the nesting iterative abilities of symbols with documents as precomps etc.

 

Are we still holding down the space bar to hide the object handles and frame?

Do artboards still have that horrific edge aliasing?

Seamless objects still not appearing seamless at various zooms?

Does scaling and zooming performance with effects still lag like a slide show? 

Yes, yes, yes and yes.

 

 

 

[Designer1234]

AD is extremely poor piece of software in terms of vector tools...

[dcr]

8 hours ago, deeds said:

Fireworks, at the time it came out, and through much of its life, was a forward looking, innovative and modern piece of design tooling. It was also one of the first things Adobe shuttered when they bought Macromedia. 

Are you thinking of FreeHand?  Because FreeHand was one of the first Macromedia products that Adobe killed off.  Fireworks lasted seven years after Adobe bought Macromedia.

[deeds]

5 hours ago, dcr said:

Are you thinking of FreeHand?  Because FreeHand was one of the first Macromedia products that Adobe killed off.  Fireworks lasted seven years after Adobe bought Macromedia.

No, I mean shuttered, "one of" and Fireworks.

[dcr]

5 minutes ago, deeds said:

No, I mean shuttered, "one of" and Fireworks.

Adobe released five updated versions of Fireworks.  After Macromedia Fireworks 8, Adobe released Adobe Fireworks CS3, CS4, CS5, CS5.1 and CS6.  It was discontinued in 2013, 8 years after Adobe bought Macromedia.  IMHO, that's a rather slow shuttering.

[deeds]

4 hours ago, dcr said:

Adobe released five updated versions of Fireworks.  After Macromedia Fireworks 8, Adobe released Adobe Fireworks CS3, CS4, CS5, CS5.1 and CS6.  It was discontinued in 2013, 8 years after Adobe bought Macromedia.  IMHO, that's a rather slow shuttering.

Could be, for you.

 

I remember what was in those updates. 

 

Either I've got an excellent memory, or they'd shuttered the doors on innovation, evolvement and development and were, like the movie Tron:Legacy jokes about, not doing much more than changing the number on the box each year.

 

By comparison, Flash was getting some significant attention, even it is was all in the wrongheaded directions.