cajhin Posted October 25, 2023 Posted October 25, 2023 There is no easy way to find the online help. The included menu > Affinity Photo Help is rather useless, because the search is broken. Text is also too small for me. Online is much nicer overall, I'm happy with it. There should be a link under menu > Help > Online Help Quote
PaulEC Posted October 25, 2023 Posted October 25, 2023 Seems easy enough to me. - It took me about 10 seconds to Google for it, and then bookmark it! Quote Acer XC-895 : Windows 11 Home : Core i5-10400 Hexa-core 2.90 GHz : 32GB RAM : Intel UHD Graphics 630 – Affinity Publisher 2 : Affinity Photo 2 : Affinity Designer 2 : (latest release versions) – Also all apps on 12.9" (Second Generation) iPad Pro, OS Version 17.7.5 Old Lenovo laptop : Windows 10 - v1 and latest beta versions of all Affinity apps – Ancient Toshiba laptop: Vista - PagePlus X9, DrawPlus X8, PhotoPlus X8 etc
cajhin Posted October 25, 2023 Author Posted October 25, 2023 Step 1: read the forums for 10 minutes and figure out that a better help exists online. Why make it so hard for new users? Quote
cajhin Posted October 25, 2023 Author Posted October 25, 2023 Thanks for making the effort. My point is not that I need help, now that I know about it. My point is that, as an educated Windows user, the INTUITIVE way to get help on a topic is to press F1 or go to menu > help. Which works, just not very well. I think AP would be a little better, if the app would guide you towards the much better online help immediately, instead of forcing you to figure it out. But I'll rest my case; there are more important things that are hard to figure out intuitively. TestTools 1 Quote
walt.farrell Posted October 25, 2023 Posted October 25, 2023 14 minutes ago, cajhin said: Step 1: read the forums for 10 minutes and figure out that a better help exists online. Why make it so hard for new users? The in-app Help already has a link to the Learning Portal, and the Learning Portal has a link to the Online Help (and much more). Latens and PaulEC 2 Quote -- Walt Designer, Photo, and Publisher V1 and V2 at latest retail and beta releases PC: Desktop: Windows 11 Pro 23H2, 64GB memory, AMD Ryzen 9 5900 12-Core @ 3.00 GHz, NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3090 Laptop: Windows 11 Pro 23H2, 32GB memory, Intel Core i7-10750H @ 2.60GHz, Intel UHD Graphics Comet Lake GT2 and NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070 Laptop GPU. Laptop 2: Windows 11 Pro 24H2, 16GB memory, Snapdragon(R) X Elite - X1E80100 - Qualcomm(R) Oryon(TM) 12 Core CPU 4.01 GHz, Qualcomm(R) Adreno(TM) X1-85 GPU iPad: iPad Pro M1, 12.9": iPadOS 18.3.1, Apple Pencil 2, Magic Keyboard Mac: 2023 M2 MacBook Air 15", 16GB memory, macOS Sequoia 15.0.1
cajhin Posted October 25, 2023 Author Posted October 25, 2023 Thanks. Just for 'fun', I spent 3 minutes trying to find said link in the in-app help. No success (consider that the in-app search does not work). What's the point in not having a link to the 'real' help where you would expect it? Why make it hard when it could be so easy? Anyway, I don't need that link anymore, and new users are not my problem... Quote
Staff James Ritson Posted October 25, 2023 Staff Posted October 25, 2023 2 minutes ago, cajhin said: Thanks. Just for 'fun', I spent 3 minutes trying to find said link in the in-app help. No success (consider that the in-app search does not work). What's the point in not having a link to the 'real' help where you would expect it? Why make it hard when it could be so easy? Anyway, I don't need that link anymore, and new users are not my problem... Hey @cajhin, what you're saying is appreciated: there has always been an effort to maintain an 'offline' version of the help for users, the downside being that different search methods have to be implemented for each platform (let's not even talk about the help viewer frameworks and their issues). As you've discovered, due to OS updates and other factors, the experience with the search is not always wonderful, and easy (or rather, easier) access to an online version could be worth considering. Thank you for the feedback. Quote @JamesR_Affinity for Affinity resources and more Official Affinity Photo tutorials
cajhin Posted October 25, 2023 Author Posted October 25, 2023 I feel your pain, I still have horrible memories of using Robohelp. Is it worth the effort to maintain the offline help, when the online help is so good? (The actual content is very very well written once you find it). I would consider dropping the offline helps, and auto-generate a single PDF from the online help, just as a fallback for the few edge cases where online does not work. It's easy to search, platform-independent. (Or, as I do in my company, ship a generated html package with a simple javascript search engine - comes with extra trouble, browser security restrictions require a local webserver). Quote
Latens Posted October 25, 2023 Posted October 25, 2023 3 minutes ago, cajhin said: PDF from the online help Is requested before and could be translated with ease that way but alas Serif showed no interest and still uses IFrames for the online help. Quote .
cajhin Posted October 25, 2023 Author Posted October 25, 2023 Finally, that's the trick: Step 1: switch to the Photo Persona Otherwise the help menu looks like just one of the many things that are not intuitive... Quote
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