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Ability to import InDesign (or XPress.. not my worry anymore.. but) files.
"Sorry but not for the initial release.”

 

 

 

https://affinity.serif.com/en-gb/about/

“Create precise layouts and a versatile range of professional publications with Affinity Publisher, even evolve designs that originated in Affinity Designer or Affinity Photo. Accurate typography, artwork, placement and colour will shine out from every layout, every page, every magazine, book, and digital publication, every logo and brochure. Expected to be in beta by the end of 2016 and launch later in 2017, Affinity Publisher will share the precision, speed, quality, and designer-led finesse found in other Affinity titles.”

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Should be available as a public Beta by the end of this year if everything goes well.

 

 

Yikes, that is terribly unfortunate. So basically we're several years away before your publishing app will be ready for every day use because let's face it: the beta won't be dependable and the launched version will take quite a few updates before it is ready. 

 

So if you're saying a public beta SHOULD be available by the end of the year IF everything goes well, it is safe to assume that a beta for your publishing app won't be available until 2017.  Nothing ever goes well in software development. Also as per an earlier announcement we SHOULD be in Publisher beta now.

 

Given that neither Designer nor Photo are 100% ready to replace their Adobe counterparts yet it wouldn't be foolish to assume Publisher will go through a similar cycle. So basically we're left with the daunting reality that Affinity Publisher won't be ready to replace inDesign until sometime in 2018.

 

Sorry to be so negative. I really do appreciate the work Affinity does. I've purchased both Photo and Designer and use them as often as my work allows. But given that both apps are still quite buggy and lacking features that should have appeared by now (ex. Filters Persona) and the next title (Publisher) keeps getting pushed further and further away I think it is time for me to pull the plug on this experiment and re-entrench in Adobe's ecosystem.

 

Thank you all for your hard work. Best wishes and best of luck to all of you.

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Just wondering ... all hate the Adobe Apps - certainly for the subscription modell - and want instantly a fully featured suite of tools that cost a fraction, has no subscription and is (at least nearly) as good as the Adobe Apps today - ideally with the same shortcuts and 100% interoperability. But PageMaker, Photoshop, XPress, CorelDraw, ... have taken a long time to evolute to be there were they are. Sure, I also want the Publisher as soon as possible for my prepress and design demands, all Apps bugfree with a lot of features, but sometimes we must be patient. It needs time to get a stable, feature rich, affordable software suite for publishing, illustration and photos. The staff of Serif Affinity listen to their users here and we all can help together to get a better product. And we are lucky that they are developing a mac style intuitiv software - and not only port the Serif counterparts for Windows (PagePlus, DrawPlus, ..). to Mac which are usefull, but not as half as intuitiv as the Affinitys Apps :)

iMac (Retina 5K, 27-inch, 2017), i7 4.2, Radeon 580 Pro 8 GB, 40 GB DDR4-RAM, 1 TB Flash, macOS 10.14.6

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  • Staff

Hi Diller,

I see your points and it's true (and expected i believe) that Publisher will go trough a development process as Photo and Designer. That's how software matures and grows.

Until a year and half away (a little more actually) there was no alternatives at all. Nobody was even discussing this. Affinity is a new line of software, started from scratch so naturally it won't be able to "replace" a 25 years old suite from one day to the next. Specially one that's dominating the market for so long and that a lot of people are used to work with.

 

I don't think it's fair to look at Affinity at this point for what it lacks compared to the competition. Instead i would hope people will look at it for what it already offers and for the possibilities it opens in the future with continuous development. 

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I don't think it's fair to look at Affinity at this point for what it lacks compared to the competition. Instead i would hope people will look at it for what it already offers and for the possibilities it opens in the future with continuous development. 

 

I do.

OS X 10.12 - AP 1.6.6 - AD 1.6

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I think AP and AD are phenomenal. Based on what I can see, and what I've seen from other users, everything is there for the majority of every day tasks. I wonder if the people complaining are the ones who didn't know Adobe when it was Illustrator 88, 8-bit PS 1.0, and no DTP solution.

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Guys,

Nobody is criticising Serif.

Diller expressed his disappointment at the lack of progress in regards to the Publisher.

He is not bashing the developers, or anything like that.

He realised that for professional work he still needs adobe and he'd rather stay there for another while (hopefully, I'm not putting my words into his mouth).

I only hope that he comes back when the platform matures.

Peace.  :)  :)  :)

2017 27” iMac 4.2 GHz Quad-Core Intel Core i7 • Radeon Pr 580 8GB • 64GB • Ventura 13.6.4.

iPad Pro (10.5-inch) • 256GB • Version 16.4

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Of course it would be great to have that new app quickly and full featured, or the DAM one which will my personal treat, but like MEB said you cannot catch up 25 years of development from scratch in just months.

 

I just want to add an important point about the Affinity products, it's this forum. I don't know any other application, except in the open source, where you have a direct contact with the developers !

It takes time to have a new, completely functional feature but you have a direct feedback about how it works and how it is improved.

 

So yes, all they can say about the schedule is "probably", "expected", etc... and how could they do differently ? At least it's not an automated answer  ^_^

But when you hit a bug, they ask for the files to check it out.

OS X 10.12 - AP 1.6.6 - AD 1.6

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Affinity is a new line of software, started from scratch so naturally it won't be able to "replace" a 25 years old suite from one day to the next. Specially one that's dominating the market for so long and that a lot of people are used to work with.

Adobe's long market dominance will make it very hard for Affinity to fully "replace" the Adobe line for a reason that goes beyond the often mentioned 'head start' one. A big part of it is that over the years Adobe has created some de facto "standards" that are actually proprietary features the company owns. It is extremely unlikely Adobe will allow any competing company to include those same features in their products, meaning alternatives & workarounds for those features must be developed.

 

That process is neither quick nor simple, & regardless of what it produces it will never completely satisfy anybody that expects a seamless transition from Adobe to Affinity.

All 3 1.10.8, & all 3 V2.4.1 Mac apps; 2020 iMac 27"; 3.8GHz i7, Radeon Pro 5700, 32GB RAM; macOS 10.15.7
Affinity Photo 
1.10.8; Affinity Designer 1.108; & all 3 V2 apps for iPad; 6th Generation iPad 32 GB; Apple Pencil; iPadOS 15.7

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Hi all, this is my first post, I'm an instructor of InDesign so I'm very curious about the development of Publisher.

Other products of Affinity seems great, I have to test those.

 

It'd be great if Publisher will have a scripting framework and a robust data import feature (from XML or other kind of DB), XML features in InDesign are the same since long time and it need to be improved.

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  • 10 months later...

This thread seems to have died in March 2016 and I can't find any more information about Affinity Publisher (Windows). Any news on this at all guys?

 

Many thanks

 

Martigny

iMac: iMac (Retina 4K, 21.5-inch, 2017)  -   3.4 GHz Intel Core i5   -   8 GB 2400 MHz DDR4  -  Radeon Pro 560 4096 MB 

Windows: Nvidia GTX 960m 4k UHD 2gb ram video (Windows 10 Pro) -  Laptop screen (resolution 3840x2160 magnified 300%)

2nd Monitor: Phillips 226E9Q HD 1920 x 1080 (125%)

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What I have "from normally good informed folks" overheard is that the Affinity Publisher beta may be (if everything works out well as the Affinity iPad app has most probably priority and human resources are scare) ready first half of 2017

Mac print publishing X-Press & Adobe hostage, cooking on extrem high level, subscribing with joy to US Cooks Illustrated & Foreign Affairs, the british Spectator and the swiss Weltwoche - absolute incompatible publications 

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Don't forget what Adobe did to Quark. I wouldn't be surprise if Affiinity does that to Adobe..over time.

 

Don't get me wrong. I am not Adobe's fan also, but you can't blame Adobe about Quark's wish to take a little (too long) nap.

All the latest releases of Designer, Photo and Publisher (retail and beta) on MacOS and Windows.
15” Dell Inspiron 7559 i7 Windows 10 x64 Pro Intel Core i7-6700HQ (3.50 GHz, 6M) 16 GB Dual Channel DDR3L 1600 MHz (8GBx2) NVIDIA GeForce GTX 960M 4 GB GDDR5 500 GB SSD + 1 TB HDD UHD (3840 x 2160) Truelife LED - Backlit Touch Display
32” LG 32UN650-W display 3840 x 2160 UHD, IPS, HDR10 Color Gamut: DCI-P3 95%, Color Calibrated 2 x HDMI, 1 x DisplayPort
13.3” MacBook Pro (2017) Ventura 13.6 Intel Core i7 (3.50 GHz Dual Core) 16 GB 2133 MHz LPDDR3 Intel Iris Plus Graphics 650 1536 MB 500 GB SSD Retina Display (3360 x 2100)

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  • 2 weeks later...

I fully understand, it is not that easy to bring out a new application.

Developing designer first, well ok. Photo second, why not. Then anything for windows? Well, I had to swallow hard, but ok, money and markets... very important.

And now? "IPad takes ressources", so it is not in 2015, not in 2016 and now, if everything works, at the end of first half 0f 2017, maybe... And we are talking about the beta, not more.

 

I will tell you something. I do know some advertising a2gencies, cause I do Apple support as well. I told them to test photo and designer and they said, "very interesting products".

They do like adobe in general, but not their pricing anymore. BUT: They will never switch to affinity unless there is a mighty desktop publisher.

You want to make affinity great and being a standard? Bring out publisher asap, guys!!

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Everything needs it's time. Better good than fast. With AD and AP, much is still not quite round.

 

But it's also a mystery for me that Serif works for IPad software instead for the desktop suite. This is development for a minority.
I would really care what the reason for this idea is.

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@Michail

 

Well I believe the dev team still works eagerly on all platforms here, the desktop and tablet versions.

 

Further also supporting a tablet device like the iPad makes sense, since it's a bigger market as some people might think. Nowadays pretty every household has/uses tablets and most kids do grow up with these (iPhones/iPads etc.) instead of desktop computers.

 

Another point might be, that a lot of designers, artists etc. nowadays also use tablet devices, since the iPad pro models do support a quite good pen usage, which in turn somehow resembles for them a more flexible way than using instead a common graphics tablet (Wacom like device etc.). Also the competitors in this field of the market do all try to support that tablet segment too, so it's common usage to also support that fast growing market in parallel.

 

And from a developers view, it should be interesting too to see, if your backend code works equally good for these devices once you have a working and for a wider range sharable code base.

☛ 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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But it's also a mystery for me that Serif works for IPad software instead for the desktop suite. This is development for a minority.

I would really care what the reason for this idea is.

You may not know that Affinity started off as a research project at Serif to test an idea about coding for memory-constrained hardware, & that this was done on an iPad for that reason. It was so successful that the decision was made to develop Affinity as commercial software. Since iOS & OS X use many of the same API's & (I am guessing) they probably used Apple's development tools for part of the development process, porting the Mac versions back to iOS could take far fewer development resources away from other projects than one might expect.

 

Another thing to consider is their return on investment -- there obviously are far fewer iPads than desktops in the world but there are many more graphics apps for desktops than iPads, so since the development work is already partially done, it makes good business sense to get into the iPad graphics market ASAP.

All 3 1.10.8, & all 3 V2.4.1 Mac apps; 2020 iMac 27"; 3.8GHz i7, Radeon Pro 5700, 32GB RAM; macOS 10.15.7
Affinity Photo 
1.10.8; Affinity Designer 1.108; & all 3 V2 apps for iPad; 6th Generation iPad 32 GB; Apple Pencil; iPadOS 15.7

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Also: A serious graphic artist does not work on such a mouse cinema surface.

I am not sure what you mean by that. What is a "mouse cinema surface"?

All 3 1.10.8, & all 3 V2.4.1 Mac apps; 2020 iMac 27"; 3.8GHz i7, Radeon Pro 5700, 32GB RAM; macOS 10.15.7
Affinity Photo 
1.10.8; Affinity Designer 1.108; & all 3 V2 apps for iPad; 6th Generation iPad 32 GB; Apple Pencil; iPadOS 15.7

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