Designer V2 Crash Reports -- Do you guys receive Crash Reports from Apple? Do you look at them?

[jochoalions]

Designer REGULARLY crashes when Exporting to PNG & JPEG. These crashes are not new; they have been occurring for years.  Does Affinity receive Crash Reports from Apple?  Does anybody actually analyse them?  Are they of any use?  I must have submitted hundreds of them to Apple, but the crashes have never been fixed.

It is extremely frustrating and a huge waste of my work time.  How can a Product Critical Error go uncorrected for so long (YEARS)?  Obviously you guys don't have tests for this in your Release Test Suites.

[Callum]

Hi Jochoalions,

The Mac OS generated crash reports are sent to us and are looked at by a member of our dev team but they don't always provide enough info for us to investigate a problem fully. In regards to the app crashing when exporting to PNG / JPG this isn't a known issue as far as I'm aware and its not something I've personally seen. Are you exporting to a cloud drive or locally to your hard drive? It may be handy if you provide a copy of the latest crash report found using the below guide.

Thanks
C

 

[Gokhan Eser]

The issues need to be resolved promptly, and a new update should be released. I've run out of patience as well. I keep losing my projects. I have never encountered such a problematic version before. Crashes and freezes when exporting files. The program closes when zooming in. If I had anticipated this, I wouldn't have used V2...

[MikeTO]

3 minutes ago, Gokhan Eser said:

The issues need to be resolved promptly, and a new update should be released. I've run out of patience as well. I keep losing my projects. I have never encountered such a problematic version before. Crashes and freezes when exporting files. The program closes when zooming in. If I had anticipated this, I wouldn't have used V2...

Do you have Metal enabled? There's a known bug with crashing while zooming in with Metal enabled.

1. Choose Settings from the Affinity Photo (or whichever) menu and select Performance
2. Uncheck Enable Metal compute acceleration
3. Change Display from Metal to OpenGL

You have to change them in this order even though they're not listed in that order.

[Gokhan Eser]

It's not related to that. The settings are as they should be. I have already raised this issue before, and they noticed it. However, it has been a long time since the last update. There are tons of issues that need to be resolved since the release of V2.

[norbinw]

I stopped posting to this forum because it didn't matter. Sending in all the crash reports since the first time AD crashed, and still almost nothing got fixed, I swear it just got worse and worse, bugs building up. Now I'm waiting for this "Jesus 2.1" update which should fix a lot of issues.

But get used to this, companies pushing out unfinished and unpolished software with the mindset of fixing it later. It's the new norm. Just look at this month's games: Jedi Survivor and the absolute rubbish Redfall. Both are MAJOR companies, and released games that are unplayable, with the promise of fixing it later. 

[MikeTO]

5 hours ago, norbinw said:

I stopped posting to this forum because it didn't matter. Sending in all the crash reports since the first time AD crashed, and still almost nothing got fixed, I swear it just got worse and worse, bugs building up. Now I'm waiting for this "Jesus 2.1" update which should fix a lot of issues.

But get used to this, companies pushing out unfinished and unpolished software with the mindset of fixing it later. It's the new norm. Just look at this month's games: Jedi Survivor and the absolute rubbish Redfall. Both are MAJOR companies, and released games that are unplayable, with the promise of fixing it later. 

Posting here does matter. Sometimes I report a bug here and it's fixed in the beta a week or two later. Serif has fixed many bugs that I've reported, some serious, some minor or cosmetic, so I find it worth my time to post here.

I understand your frustration - there are some longstanding bugs that I wish would be fixed before anything else was done. I imagine Serif would fix them asap if they were able to but some bugs are just hard to track down. The most useful things we can do to get a bug fixed more quickly is to provide repeatable steps and a test document. Crash reports are useful but without knowing what led up to the event it can be hard to track down.

[GripsholmLion]

Unfortunately, my initial experience of reporting bugs and issues was not positive. If you install the application, immediately see something odd, and report it, it's a bit demoralising to be told that, effectively, there's nothing wrong. "Works fine for us" kind of thing.

I have a few things which I would like to report if they are still extant in 2.1, and I will do so if no-one else beats me to it. At least one has existed since v1.x, so I'm not super confident that they will even be logged, let alone fixed. But I accept that they can't be fixed if they are not reported, so I'll try.

[norbinw]

It takes MONTHS for some bugs to get fixed, while back when I purchased V1, there was a hotfix every 2-3 weeks. V2 was released in november, 7 months in, and selection bug, export bug, etc. are still present. Actually the only bug fixed, was the save to external ssd crash. SEVEN months, and counting. You can't blame it on the pandemic now.

Funny, how V2.1 will be (hoping) what V2 should have been from the start  

[jochoalions]

The Affinity Suite is a complex body of software, I am sure. It is also a superb sample of software design and engineering, I know that.

The fact that users have to deal with these problems for so long is not due to the difficulty of finding the problems and addressing them.

The persistent presence of these problems is a direct result of deliberate Product Management and Project Management decisions, and nothing else.

Product Managers and Project Managers continually have to make decisions which inevitably have trade-offs associated to them, and we the users are having to live with those trade-offs, for a very long time, until different decisions are made.

Affinity Product and Project Managers have their own internal priorities, all of which have resulted in superb products. And I do love the Affinity products, and would never even consider going back to Adobe, as superb as their products also are.

So I am sure that at some point we will see fixes to these long lasting problems. I am also sure that we the users will continue to bitch about them everytime we reach the boiling point.

And the Tao remains serene.