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Sorry Affinity but we have to break up


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I just resubscribed to creative cloud, I thought I could finish the project I'm working on with publisher but it's just impossible, too many bugs, too many inconsistencies, too many freezes and crashes, it drives me crazy. I'd rather start from scratch than continue with this software. I just hope there will be improvements in the future, maybe I'll give it a chance again, but for now, it's not a "professional" (as advertised) tool, definitely not.

I would be willing to trade features for stability. It could be the best software ever made if it is not stable it is useless.

SERIF : FIX YOUR SOFTWARE, STABILITY/RELIABILITY SHOULD BE THE #1 PRIORITY

And publisher is anything but stable. Its like an alpha.

I had a lot of hope and I thought it was great to finally have a real alternative to adobe. But I've been fooled by hype, reviews, forums and marketing.

Yes V2 universal licence is cheap, but even for free I don't want to work with.

I could easily pays like 500€ for stable suite, it would still be a fair price for a suite of professional tools

I think affinity has a positioning marketing problem, they want to target both amateurs and pros, we end up with the worst of both worlds.

now I'm going to spend the whole night redoing all my work in order not to be late :) Yes, I'm a bit angry. and I needed to vent my frustration.

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I know my message may seem harsh, but it was really my feeling after another freeze. And I think my criticism are legit

The most frustrating thing is that I like Publisher, I like doing my layout with it. I find it very pleasant to use (more than indesign)

Even if there are things I don't like and I find the software still too immature (color management/control, guide, color palettes, export...) however I could live with it the time that it gets better

When Publisher works as expected (10 minutes over an hour) it's really fluid, much more than Indesign - preview mode is horrible - (especially since Indesign does not support hardware acceleration on Windows)

Unfortunately this software is totally unusable when you have to face 50 slowdowns a day, 10 bugs and spending your time closing and opening it to find a functional tool back. Especially in a [pro]ductivity context.


I don't have the time nor the will to investigate and report bugs. It's not my job. We are not talking about a minor bug, but a problem that literally makes the software a pain in the ass to use.

What's the point of fixing/improving features if the software is unusable ? I think there are priorities, and this is one of them

I would like so much that Serif focus his efforts on reliability.

But I already explained that.

I just hope that the voice of a "pro" user will be heard

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5 minutes ago, entropy said:

I just hope that the voice of a "pro" user will be heard

Thanks for your feedback, sorry for your experience, and yes your voice has been heard.

Patrick Connor
Serif Europe Ltd

"There is nothing noble in being superior to your fellow man. True nobility lies in being superior to your previous self."  W. L. Sheldon

 

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3 hours ago, Patrick Connor said:

your voice has been heard

I wish my voice would have been heard, too… ;) 

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've recently completed some large projects (including a 264-page catalog with over 700 images) with Publisher 1.10.5 and 1.10.6 on Windows 10, trying to work around the known issues. That worked very well and I was able to complete all projects in a good time. Adobe is not an alternative for me. I work alone and can import templates or third-party work as IDML.

Serif should give the V2 buyers access to the stable 1.10.6 release for work. And give us a way to import V2 files into V1. Maybe also via IDML.

 

                                                                                                                                                          
Desktop: Windows 10 22H2 / Intel i5-9600K / 32 GB RAM / Affinity Suite V1 (work) and Affinity Suite V2 (test) for Windows

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I have to concur with OP. V2 although could be great, it has major stability problems. Never had any crashing issues at any point in V1, but V2 I cannot go 15 mins without it crashing out. I thought it could be a memory issue due to having a 8gb base M1 Mac mini, but other users appear to be having similar issues and in activity monitor memory pressure is green and amber. I'll be going back to V1 on my next job unless there is a major update soon.

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On 1/10/2023 at 7:08 PM, entropy said:

I had a lot of hope and I thought it was great to finally have a real alternative to adobe. But I've been fooled by hype, reviews, forums and marketing.

I know the feeling.  I'm not going to rehash what I don't like about v2 here.  At the moment, I'm sticking with v1, looking for and researching alternatives and no longer recommending Affinity.

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Weekend after working week among educated, nuanced and creative people. Look into this forum for a few minutes, shake my head, and am on my way out again. I simply can't take it seriously.

On 1/12/2023 at 8:59 PM, v_kyr said:

A common saying is: "the early bird catches the worm". - Well in IT it's more like: "the early adopter catches the bug".

And they eat daily at a different restaurant in the future, so you forum veterans should read Patrick's post one more time. This forum has the ideal regular members whose Serif's purpose for it is to scare away new and serious customers. 

When it again leans on victim blaming, it's nice to know we made the absolute right choice in terminating Affinity and Serif Software in any workflow these months.

On 1/11/2023 at 7:07 PM, entropy said:

I just hope that the voice of a "pro" user will be heard

I do have the impression that someone in Serif is listening, but I don't see that the talent or capacity to deliver is there. A thorough analysis of functionality, usability and algorithms and comparison of results with other products even in a similar price range testifies to a company that has not moved like other companies in the last decades. And does not understand their shortcomings. So invest only when and if the products have one day caught up.

As you can observe here there are shortcomings, fanboys and far out unrealistic marketing. But the products have to stand the test of reality.

What creates value for us is delivering excellent quality to customers, customers we physically meet and look in the eye (and want to sell to again, thank you), after a process where the tools helped us towards the goal, didn't stand in the way and didn't crash. Not to sit and write thousands of posts on this forum, and not to report in trivial bugs that should have been caught early in a large internal testing process.

That's why Affinity is 100% out in all workflows - even for assistants and student workers. It's out.

 1) You have completely wrecked the layers panel, Serif.

2) I recommend Reddit groups instead of this forum. Not the same few bot-like users replying to everything, a wider representation of users, fewer fanboys, more qualified users. In short, better!

3) I was here to report bugs and submit improvement requests for professional work professionally in a large setup and to bring a lot of knowledge from the world, i.e. professional product development, web- and software development, usability, user experience design and accessibility. I actually know what I am talking about!

BUT! We are phasing out Designer and Affinity in 2022 Q1 - and replacing it with feature complete and algorithmically competent alternatives.
Publisher is unsuitable for serious use, and was never adopted.

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1 hour ago, François R said:

not to report in trivial bugs that should have been caught early in a large internal testing process

That is why you should report bugs. I've been on the "other side" and at a company where our internal testing did not encounter problems. On release, some of our customers found some bugs which we did not. We were grateful to them for reporting the bugs.

This "problem" of customers finding bugs which internal testing does not is not limited to Serif. Not a single "patch Tuesday" goes by from Microsoft without a few million problems being created around the world. A recent example: https://www.theregister.com/2023/01/13/happy_friday_13th_microsoft_defender/

 

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49 minutes ago, François R said:

And they eat daily at a different restaurant in the future, ...

That's pretty legitimate, because anyone who has to work in day-to-day business to make his living needs reliable tools.

Quote

... This forum has the ideal regular members whose Serif's purpose for it is to scare away new and serious customers.

That's not my intension, to scare away users. Usually I try instead to help people in finding some way to solve their problems with Affinity software (...be it via workarounds or the like...). - But I also tend to say directly how certain things are behaving in their current state and if certain features are not working properly, i.e. are behaving incorrectly and need to be fixed.

 

1 hour ago, François R said:

When it again leans on victim blaming, ...

I'm not sure in what context you mean that, so what does victim blaming really mean here and to whom. - In general, however, software bugs need to be discovered, verified, and then hopefully fixed as quickly as possible. When some software glitches make users unable to work with this software and they are pressed for time, they have to decide maybe to use another software that might do the task better.

☛ Affinity Designer 1.10.8 ◆ Affinity Photo 1.10.8 ◆ Affinity Publisher 1.10.8 ◆ OSX El Capitan
☛ Affinity V2.3 apps ◆ MacOS Sonoma 14.2 ◆ iPad OS 17.2

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On 1/11/2023 at 1:08 AM, entropy said:

SERIF : FIX YOUR SOFTWARE, STABILITY/RELIABILITY SHOULD BE THE #1 PRIORITY

Fully agreed.
Instead of going from "well.. yes"  (lots of promising ideas that need some polishing..) to "Hell, Yes!" Serif went to "well, well, well... perhaps."

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I have been trying to be patient as I know programming isn't an easy task but I am really starting to have the same feeling as the OP (finding something different to use).  It has been a nightmare using 2.0 version of affinity.  What use to take me a few minutes in version 1.0 is now taking me hours.  The program freezes, is very slow and when you try to add an asset it takes forever to add just 1 thing.  To create a new sub category takes a long time before the subcategory appears.  Then if you try to rename it its take even more minutes.  That is just dealing with svg type graphics I create in designer and store as assets in both designer and publisher to use later.  Try to swap to a different asset categories and you will wait 3+ minutes or it freezes.  Happens in Publisher and Designer.  I have lost count of how many times I have had to go to task mahager and END the program.

I recently created my first document in Publishers.  It was a 252 page document and I used the master page feature for the firsst time.  It was supposed to be simple.  It was, it crashed, froze and has been nothing but a headache. 

I could go back to 1.0 but have created a lot in version 2.0 so reverting would mean recreating everything again.  Talk about more hours to redo things.  I have tried all the suggestions of check/unchecking open gl option in settings.  Didn't help.

I was so hoping by now the kinks would have been figured out.  I am using the following equipment in case it could be helpful to developers;

- ASUS ROG Gaming Laptop
- Intel Core i7-8750H
-  GeForce GTX 1050 Ti-1080p NVDIA Compatible
- CPU: 2.20GHZ 2208 Mhz
- 6 Core(s)
-Memory 32 GB
- 1 TB Hard Drive
- Windows 11 10.02261 Build 22621

I have been using Affinity for over 5 years and haven't experienced anything like this.  I've purchased 3 universal licenses for my business and we can't continue to work like this.  I'm coming up on my busy season and I can't create graphics and/or simple projects like bookmarks, round designs to make buttons, etc. as the program is soooo very slow and unstable.  The only thing holding me here is I like using the asset features which I just started using heavily.  I also just learned how to use master page feature where I can put 1 thing in the master page area and it appears on any page(s) I need it to.  It's a great feature I had been sleeping on in version 1.  But trying to use it was a nightmare.  Crashes, freezing, rebooting was a required every so many hours.

All said,   I have to figure our the direction to go as I can't continue to like this.  😬

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2 hours ago, anto said:

Try to close all studio panels. They can cause a problem.

It is strange, because i have desktop ICore i5-7500, GeForce GTX 1050 Ti, and 32 gb, win 10 and i do not feel such grave problems. There are still a few performance issues, but each update seems to fix them.

I use a 10+ year old i5 2500 processor with 16gb running W10 and I too don’t suffer crashes with v2.

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@Printchic

A belated Welcome to the Serif Affinity forums :) 

I would appreciate f you could make  copy/paste of the first part of your post (up to and including the System Specs) as this is not normal and we should try to get to the bottom of it in it's own report/thread rather than here. We are still behind with bugs threads, but I would hope that we can find either a work around or a fix.

Patrick Connor
Serif Europe Ltd

"There is nothing noble in being superior to your fellow man. True nobility lies in being superior to your previous self."  W. L. Sheldon

 

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