Major Crash, Affinity Photo 2.0.0

[phillman5]

Affinity Photo 2.0.0, just started.  see attachment for Laptop/OS info.  Reboot this morning.  Imported from iPhone two photos, .heic, front and back of post card, cropped both, made both same pixels wide. Made one twice as high (canvas size), pasted other below. Corrected brightness/constrast on it, flattened, sent to save as, save dialog box came up and I gave new name, Save button not responsive, cancel button not responsive, no button responsive.  Switched to messages and sent a message.  Back to Photo 2.0.0 still unresponsive.  Went to Apple menu to force quit, menu froze open. Tried an app on Menu bar, icon selected, menu would not come down. Then mouse froze.  command/shift/option/ESC did not work (I see it should be command/option/ESC now to get dialog box,  command/shift/option/ESC force quits the app your in, no dialog box given).  No crash report(s) came up.

Screen Shot 2022-12-17 at 3.49.47 PM.pdf

[DWright]

Are you still having these issues with the 2.0.4 update installed.

[phillman5]

pretty hard to duplicate

[dean shultz]

Not to pile on, but.  As someone who's lost many hours to AP v2 crashes, in front of a client, all I can add is, I feel your pain and you're not alone.

I didn't post then, bc of deadlines.  I can add a bit now, but not as much as may be needed.

AP crashes for me in more than one file.

When it did, 'what i was doing', does not appear to have a common cause.  The crash behavior was initially, the app hung for about 30 seconds first.  Afterward, crashes were ~5 seconds on open.  Performing a quick save as sometimes gave me a usable again file, not always.

 

In one case, I did check into the resource manager and replaced quite a few embedded files.  Work seemed to be normal.

Another time, there were no embedded files but the file still crashed. 

Another time, i read the log and thought maybe a Calibri file was erroring.  The file wouldn't even export to PDF. I thought it was a Word imported style sheet, which I rebuilt the 11 styles from scratch, in a clean file.  It crashed.  No idea why.

 

From some forums, the idea seems to be user error.  That may be.  For me, I can say, AP 1.x did not crash nearly as often.  Not nearly.

 

I know Serif is a smaller developer.  Limited resources, I get that.  But, instead of sending me the 50% off marketing promotion today, I would like instead for all of the 3 titles to allow me to mark 'F4' as a Layers... shortcut key, an omission that has been know more than long enough to either fix or make comment.  Additionally, I would like AP to again be a tool in which I am not afraid to place client work.  And as a tiny aside, when I don't update to from 2.03 to version 2.04, don't do it for me.

 

Downvote, boo the post.  Everything I say here, I've read on other posts.  I don't care. There was a big rush to buy v2 before the discount expired, which I did.  I supported Serif.  Today, when I received the 50% marketing email, but still don't have a reliable piece of software, I feel more than a little burned in the transaction.

[phillman5]

On 2/20/2023 at 1:11 PM, dean shultz said:

As someone who's lost many hours to AP v2 crashes

Back in the day of SS 100 and SS 50 bus computers, with real floppy 8" and 5 1/4" drives*, 64K RAM, it was save often.  The systems often crashed more often than every hour.  There was not the memory to have built crash proofing where it could kind of catch itself. Crashes often involved both the app and the OS.   Memory had no validation bit.  Rare where you could go all day without a crash.  The rule again was save often.  I usually had the last digit in the filename be a version number, and that was giving up a lot with only 8 character filenames.

You have my sympathy for the first one, but not the later ones, you should have learned quickly that AP v2 was unstable, and to save often. How long does it take to press command-S (or whatever is the Windoze equivalent, control-S?)?  I think some pro apps will automagically increment a version number in the filename on every save, but it looks like AP does not.

Back in late '70's - early '80's with static memory, in my 64K computer (SouthWest Technical Products, and Flex OS, Motorola 6809), memory was not cleared or re-written on interrupting or rebooting the computer, only on power removed from the chips.  So rebooting, memory was basically like it was before the crash.  I wrote an app, were you could search memory for key words in your text, find the beginning, and end, then save that memory block as a text file. This bailed me, and co-workers, out many times.  Some other 'better?', defiantly cheaper, but not faster, computers based mostly on the Z80, used dynamic memory, where many times/second row and cas lines, generated off the cpu clock, swept through all the memory and did a refresh cycle.  So when the cpu went astray, and an interrupt had to be given (usually a button on the computer somewhere (Macs had them at least through the B&W G3)), but this often messed up the CPU clock signal lines, messing up row and cas counters, and wiping out, or clearing memory, or now completely random. So long all your work!

*I make a footnote here.  At an early Applequerque club meeting was a confused gal.  She correctly thought those 5 1/4" disks that had thin plastic sleeves and nothing protecting the disk through the head slots were floppies, but thought the 3 1/2" hard plastic ones with the metal shutters to protect the head access slot, found initially only on early Macs, were hard disks.