2.1 Offer? nope, still not interested...

[Fritz_H]

For a short time I was tempted to purchase the upgrade from 1.x to 2.1. but having seen all those complaints about very very basic features being broken or still missing completely: nope, sorry.

I am not asking for AI-stuff but basics like variable fonts support or an option to set the color of every guide - perhaps even an algorithm that automatically finds a color that differs from all/most colors the guide crosses on the screen..?

Actually I am not asking for any new features but having the UI completely redesigned to meet state of the art usability requirements.
But as it seems, the Brits will prefer to add some more "nobody asked for"-filters.

sad story.

[Bryan Rieger]

7 minutes ago, Fritz_H said:

Actually I am not asking for any new features but having the UI completely redesigned to meet state of the art usability requirements.

What's particularly sad about this is Serif just completely redesigned the UI for v2, but chose to disregard many basic UI/UX fundamentals along with modern usability recommendations. I'm not sure having Serif go back and redesign it again will magically fix all of the issues. Hopefully, Serif are paying attention (not just here, but also in various communities across the web, Reddit, etc) and will honestly begin to work to resolve these issues in the coming v2 updates.

I'm not sure I'd be willing to fork out again for v3 if these issues aren't addressed. 

[Conrad Hoffman]

I have Photo, Designer and Publisher, but mostly use Photo. There are certainly things I'd change in the UI, but overall the program offers so much that I can easily put up with it. Unless they do something incredibly stupid, I'll be upgrading to whatever versions come out.

Now, specifically, the drop down presets for many functions are useless to me. If I select a function, just open the window for it. There has never been a situation where I've use a preset for anything. Waste of keystrokes. This probably only applies to photo.

"Help" drives me crazy. It describes functions but doesn't tell you what the damn icon looks like or where to find it. I've wasted HOURs on this. It would be so easy for help to be helpful if somebody spent a day or three to embellish it.

[MCFC_4Heatons]

Compared to the bloated clunky UI of Photoshop it is a triumph IMO

[Twolane]

You're all so enamored of the competition, but you still come here to comment on Serif's shortcomings. If you find the product unusable, as you seem to claim... Yet, here you all are. GIMP and photo DOT net are freely available.

[Bryan Rieger]

47 minutes ago, Red Sands said:

…but as a product the user interface should be build from the bottom and up with some serious assistance from hired user experience designers. And a handful of algorithms should be replaced with serious algorithms.

My partner is a (very) senior UX designer at a company that primarily uses Figma, but they do provide employees optional licenses for Procreate and Affinity (Adobe software isn't offered to anybody who isn't in marketing). She was thinking about requesting licenses for Affinity for more visual/sketch work, but she opted to take a look at my copies (macOS and iPadOS) before doing so. I've never heard so many expletives come out of her mouth in 20 minutes, never mind the multiple face palms, and constant muttering of “what, how, why… it's so bad. The basics are completely missing. Was this designed by engineers? How can you use this?[1]"

In the end (about 20 minutes later) she opted to simply go with Procreate and pretty much wrote Affinity off as unusable, which is quite damning from somebody in a design leadership role at a Fortune 500 company.

[1] I primarily use Procreate for my illustration work these days (I was a UI/UX designer for 25+ years, and ran a tiny, but well known product design studio with my partner). I have a love/hate relationship with Affinity. I LOVE the combination of vector and bitmap drawing in one application (ah, Fireworks RIP), the quality of the brushes, and the overall performance, but I struggle daily with the UI/UX, as well as the countless bugs, weird design choices, and frequent crashes (hello v2.x). I feel like I've developed a case of Stockholm Syndrome while using Affinity products. 

Adobe is (sadly) still my primary driver for "getting sh!t done" and working with others.

[_Th]

40 minutes ago, rgba said:

pretty much wrote Affinity off as unusable, which is quite damning from somebody in a design leadership role at a Fortune 500 company

Hmm. Similar chops here, but no longer with a Fortune 500 company. (And quite happy about that!) The Affinity suite functions very differently than the Adobe suite, though there are obvious similarities. When anyone who's accustomed to Adobe tries Affinity software, the differences are clear hurdles to productivity. Admittedly, some of the differences aren't completely logical, certainly not at first. However, the fact that there are many professional creatives making their living with Affinity software, deeming it unusable is an obvious overstatement.

It seems that many detractors ignore that Affinity does not claim parity with Adobe, or any other, software. The clear attraction to Affinity—and likely why many stick around vs. just leaving and not commenting regularly about Affinity's shortcomings—is that it's a company determined to deliver a viable alternative to the software rental model that is consuming the market via Adobe and others.

Most everyone here detests, with a passion, the idea of renting software. It's on par with renting a house for thirty years vs. buying. At the end, you've got nothing. Nothing current, nothing outdated ... nothing. This is why (most of us) fervently support this little company and its software.

Are there issues yet to be overcome? Undoubtedly. Are there UI/UX choices that are frustrating? Clearly. But is the software functional, usable? Absolutely. If it weren't, Serif wouldn't exist. That said, the progress lately has been very encouraging. Not perfect, just encouraging.

And encouraging is what I intend to be while I'm here. Developing software that challenges the 800 pound gorilla and their endless treasure chest is hard enough without me bashing the team at every turn. If I ever get to the point where I find something better for my needs, that's it, I'm out of here. But that hasn't happened yet, and as long as that remains true, I'll praise every positive thing I can, and offer only constructive and hopefully helpful critiques along the way.

Cheers.

[steps down from soapbox]

[Bryan Rieger]

2 minutes ago, _Th said:

The Affinity suite functions very differently that the Adobe suite, though there are obvious similarities. When anyone who's accustomed to Adobe tries Affinity software, the differences are clear hurdles to productivity. Admittedly, some of the differences aren't completely logical, certainly not at first. However, the fact that there are many professional creatives making their living with Affinity software, deeming it unusable is an obvious overstatement.

While she has extensive experience with the Adobe suite, she hasn't used it in a few years now (everything is Figma). And yes, 'unusable' is possibly an overstatement, but in her context it translates to "there are too many quirks, gotchas, and workarounds that it would negatively impact her work, and the work of others within the company".

I agree with much of what you said, and although critical, I do try to be positive (or at least constructive)—but I do think it's also important to be realistic. For me, for now, Affinity fills a very specific niche, but if (and when) other alternatives become available, I'm not sure there's enough beyond that niche to justify any further investment in Affinity.

[also steps down from soapbox ]

[Alfred]

40 minutes ago, _Th said:

[steps down from soapbox]

 

29 minutes ago, rgba said:

[also steps down from soapbox ]

Did somebody say “soapbox”?

[Pšenda]

1 hour ago, Red Sands said:

There is no hope.

Only for interest - this fact must have been obvious to you for a long time, so why are you constantly involved here? Why do you keep posting negative posts on anything that has anything to do with Affinity/Serif and its god forbid satisfied users?

[PaoloT]

4 hours ago, out of office said:

uses Figma

And, are Figma and Designer comparable? Yes, they both allow to draw, but I would guess that an experienced professional could have noticed that they are not the same type of tool.

Paolo

 

[Bryan Rieger]

24 minutes ago, PaoloT said:

And, are Figma and Designer comparable? Yes, they both allow to draw, but I would guess that an experienced professional could have noticed that they are not the same type of tool.

Sigh, thank you @PaoloT for explaining that in such a sarcastic manner.

She wasn't looking to replace Figma with Designer, just use Designer to sketch out rough ideas, create richer visual design elements, etc. Some people use more than one tool to solve their problems.

[v_kyr]

40 minutes ago, out of office said:

She wasn't looking to replace Figma with Designer, just use Designer to sketch out rough ideas, create richer visual design elements, etc. Some people use more than one tool to solve their problems.

Well as PaoloT shortly already indicated, Figma is more of a dynamic collaborative software for creating prototypes in the field of UX and UI design, in contrast to what ADe offers here in a more statically manner. Even you can create UX/UI designs with ADe (...if wanted), it doesn't offer all the UX/UI specific bells & whistles Figma is specialized on and offers here for prototyping. - It's pretty much the same here like creating digital presentation slides with ADe instead of using something more specialized for that tasks/jobs as Keynote or PowerPoint etc. Or creating some architecture- or engineer drawing with ADe instead of using some more specialized CAD software for that purpose.

[_Th]

5 minutes ago, v_kyr said:

Figma is more of a dynamic collaborative software for creating prototypes in the field of UX and UI design

Figma's value goes way beyond UI/UX work. It's actually fairly good for logo design, for example. It does have a radically different UI and workflow than "traditional" design software like Illustrator or Designer, yet its widespread adoption (and its pace) was amazing. Free, yes, but it was competing with (and kicking the butt of) Adobe's XD among others.

I'm certainly not promoting Figma here. However, the Affinity team would do well to study it and learn from it, or at least listen to those professionals here who are also Figma users. There are many non-standard features in Figma that would be a huge boost to Affinity. One example is the "control palette" where you type Command/Control-/ and you get a search box where you type in what you want to do. The result(s) can be accessed by keyboard or mouse, and each shows the corresponding keyboard shortcut to help you remember that in the future.

This single feature, the control palette, if added across the Affinity suite, would be one of the most useful additions I could think of—and I can think of quite a few.

[v_kyr]

15 hours ago, _Th said:

Figma's value goes way beyond UI/UX work. ...

As the preposter especially emphasized and named the UI/UX usage field, I've just responded in relation to this UI/UX area of application usage.

In different huger distributed company projects, where I development wise tend to work in, such software (Figma, Sketch, InVision, Adobe XD ... etc.) is mainly & mostly used by the frontend part dev people and designers. Hard core main backend developers do use other specific tools for their work. But of course all do collaborate with each other in order to keep defined and needed interfaces in sync here. - Things are slightly different for full stack (frontend & backend) developers, which also do make a lot of use of the above named apps. -- However, in the project domains I tend to work, nobody really uses Affinity products.

 

[MCFC_4Heatons]

On 6/7/2023 at 3:05 PM, a user was here said:

My partner is a (very) senior UX designer at a company that primarily uses Figma, but they do provide employees optional licenses for Procreate and Affinity (Adobe software isn't offered to anybody who isn't in marketing). She was thinking about requesting licenses for Affinity for more visual/sketch work, but she opted to take a look at my copies (macOS and iPadOS) before doing so. I've never heard so many expletives come out of her mouth in 20 minutes, never mind the multiple face palms, and constant muttering of “what, how, why… it's so bad. The basics are completely missing. Was this designed by engineers? How can you use this?[1]"

In the end (about 20 minutes later) she opted to simply go with Procreate and pretty much wrote Affinity off as unusable, which is quite damning from somebody in a design leadership role at a Fortune 500 company.

 

20 mins ... must have reallygone in to it in great detail 😉🤣 I'm not buying this

[Patrick Connor]

1 hour ago, MCFC_4Heatons said:

I'm not buying this

nor was she  

[Pšenda]

On 6/7/2023 at 10:30 PM, Red Sands said:

You don't care, and I don't see any signs that you take criticism or take in the knowledge of others. Just a mental wall.

I have to ask again - and why are you wasting your precious time here? Banging your head against a wall doesn't seem like a rational thing to do.

[Dan C]

10 minutes ago, Red Sands said:

My question is why are you here, commenting on almost every thread for years? I don't get the impression that you use the product as frequently and ambitiously as I do, and I see very few requests for improvement from you. It doesn't seem like your time is precious at all. In any case, you prioritise passive or active counter-pressure against feedback from other customers over and over and over again. 

You have been warned previously regarding personal attacks here on the Affinity Forums and continue to weave individualised criticism of other Affinity Forum members into your posts.

We have had a number of reports against your account, including reports originating from this thread above, and from this thread here of users asking that you share your opinions on the Affinity apps without including direct criticisms of others. This is rule 1 in our Guidelines.

As I have covered previously, this is not acceptable here on the Affinity Forums. You are certainly allowed to criticise the application, tool functionality, UI/UX etc as you see fit - and we welcome this as it helps us to improve the Affinity apps - but you cannot continue to personally berate or belittle other Affinity Forum users (or ex-staff), for any reason.

I will be locking this thread from further replies, but should you continue to post in this manner then we will have to take further action on your Forum account, possibly including full suspension.

I certainly hope this is not the action we have to take as we do appreciate your genuine feedback and suggestions for the Affinity apps here on the Forums, as it is clear you have a wealth of knowledge within the industry - but that does not allow you to include such personal critiques within your posts.

__

As the thread is locked, should any users have an issue with the above, please feel free to DM a moderator.