Canva

[walt.farrell]

2 minutes ago, Chills said:

OR they move more people and resources in.
However Brooks Mythical Man Month comes to mind https://www.waterstones.com/book/mythical-man-month-the/frederick-brooks-jr/9780201835953

Yes, that's an important consideration. 

But there are areas where a new group of developers could help, such as Variable Font support, or Scripting, or RTL support, which may offer large functional areas that can be largely isolated so they can be worked on separately and on their own schedules. That can mitigate the effects that Brooks discussed. 

[Archangel]

21 minutes ago, Alfred said:

Do you have a DrawPlus product key? Serif stopped selling DrawPlus several years ago, so unless you can find a copy on Amazon Marketplace or eBay you won’t even be able to install it, let alone try it out.

Unless someone shares their key with you to allow you to try it out, Naughty, yes. Illegal possibly. But Draw plus and accompanying Plus applications are no longer actively supported by Serif and they do provide some facilities that would complement Affinity. Serif still own the copyright of course and now I suppose Canva might as well.

[Matterdor]

6 hours ago, Duskstalker said:

there is. canva is a company that runs a subscription based cloud service. canva is going to be publicly traded soon, that means canvas actions are going to be hypercapitalistic, because their only goal is to increase value to their shareholders, which mostly boils down to predatory monetization and absorbing competition with the goal of ultimately becoming a monopoly. adobe is mostly there.

canva will integrate the "pro tools" from affinity into their cloud service. this is why they bought affinity. they didnt want a desktop app to maintain, they want to merge affinity tools with their cloud. because this is their business model.

the affinity suite remaining a standalone desktop app on a perpetual license is fierce competition for canva at that point. when they are done merging affinity into their cloud they will of course shut down the desktop versions of affinity to force people into their cloud business. its quite simple really. and the pledges by former serif - now canva - employees are just that. 

It's not that simple. Professional tools like Affinity won't work reliably as cloud software. That doesn't mean that they can't add cloud features such as AI that require a subscription or even convert the software to subscription only (e.g. the recent VMWare changes). If Canva want to move into a more professional market then they will need professional tools that run client side.

The danger for the users is that .afpub, etc. are proprietary formats. Any work that they do embeds their processes more in Affinity for the future. If anything, people should be pushing for better import and export from formats like psd as that gives them options to migrate if things went south here. A user would be much happier to continue using Affinity if they knew that they wouldn't be stuck in the future. It would also make sense for Canva to pursue better import and export for the Adobe formats as that would give Adobe customers a migration path across to Affinity. As I said before, I am a casual user. I little while back I had an issue where my daughter needed to use Adobe for school. I was left with no option but to get a Adobe photo subscription because she couldn't share files between work and school reliably. She has finished that course so it's no longer an issue for me but it did shine a spotlight on the issue for me. PhotoPea did a better job of importing PSD files than Affinity photo which was very surprising.

[RichiePhoto]

9 hours ago, Dee3D said:

Yes. I've used their software since Serif PagePlus back in the 1990s! That's why I'm so saddened at their demise.

I think this is more of a merger to be honest, Affinity is still here

I had a look at the Canva site, the only sub based is for AI usage and collaborative models

[jimh12345]

I spent half my working life in software development, on projects large and small.

These deals never, ever work out. All that stuff about "transferring technology", "synergy", "joining the family", and "adding functionality" is just leveraged execs blowing smoke as they collect bonuses and sell stock.

What actually happens is that after a few months the key developers are gone, they're impossible to replace, and the product becomes a zombie.  There might be a pathetic "feature release", and updates to run on the latest OS versions so sales can continue, but any faith in a more glorious future is misplaced. 

 

And with that I'll stop commenting. Good luck to those of you heavily invested in this tool, I hope to be proven wrong.

 

[R C-R]

6 minutes ago, walt.farrell said:

But there are areas where a new group of developers could help, such as Variable Font support, or Scripting, or RTL support, which may offer large functional areas that can be largely isolated so they can be worked on separately and on their own schedules.

Believe it or not, here in the 21st century not everyone working on application development has to be in the same location or even in the same country. Does anyone really think all of Adobe's developers are located at Adobe's headquarters in California & not in the various locations Adobe owns & operates?

[nickbatz]

I feel a lot more sanguine after today's release (https://affinity.serif.com/en-us/press/newsroom/affinity-and-canva-pledge/).

Two reasons: 1. because of what it says, and 2. because it's written in English rather than corporate doubletalk.

Actually, it's the other way around - #2 comes first.  Corporate talk is fine among suits, but when I see that I've learned to put up my guard immediately. It's invariably used to sanitize something people won't like!

[jackamus]

3 minutes ago, Archangel said:

Unless someone shares their key with you to allow you to try it out, Naughty, yes. Illegal possibly. But Draw plus and accompanying Plus applications are no longer actively supported by Serif and they do provide some facilities that would complement Affinity. Serif still own the copyright of course and now I suppose Canva might as well.

For years I have asked Serif why DrawPlus was better, for me that is, than AD? DP had more drawing features then than AD has now! All I got in response was DP was old and not a platform that was compatible with modern OS. Basically what they were saying was that the new way of doing things was not going to be as good as the old way! Isn't this called 'dumbing down'?

[Chills]

6 minutes ago, R C-R said:

Believe it or not, here in the 21st century not everyone working on application development has to be in the same location or even in the same country. Does anyone really think all of Adobe's developers are located at Adobe's headquarters in California & not in the various locations Adobe owns & operates?

In the last century I was part of a development that had people on 8 sites in 4 countries.  It can be done. But this wasn't IT or desktop software

[Komatös]

13 minutes ago, Archangel said:

Unless someone shares their key with you to allow you to try it out, Naughty, yes. Illegal possibly. But Draw plus and accompanying Plus applications are no longer actively supported by Serif and they do provide some facilities that would complement Affinity. Serif still own the copyright of course and now I suppose Canva might as well.

You can be helped:

 

[AffinityMakesMeWonder]

9 hours ago, Ash said:

To followup on some of my comments yesterday, we are today enshrining our commitment to the Affinity community in 4 pledges made by the Affinity and Canva teams.

You can read about them here.

We do truly believe the coming together of Affinity and Canva is only going to be a good thing for our customers, staff and the development of our apps. We very much hope you will all continue to be with us on this journey.

All the best,

Ash

Favorite in reprise:

 

Thanks to the great member @Bit Disappointed

 

 

[R C-R]

2 minutes ago, Chills said:

But this wasn't IT or desktop software

But Adobe's offerings are at least primarily desktop software, so there is no good reason I can see to think it will be any different for Affinity/Canva.

[walt.farrell]

5 minutes ago, R C-R said:

Believe it or not, here in the 21st century not everyone working on application development has to be in the same location or even in the same country. Does anyone really think all of Adobe's developers are located at Adobe's headquarters in California & not in the various locations Adobe owns & operates?

Physical location is not terribly important, though it has some effect.

In case you're not familiar with Brooks's work, it's about how you can't just throw twice as many people at a project and finish in half the time. IBM provided that in the early days of the S/360 mainframe.

Something similar happens in computers, where having 2x the number of cores does not give you 2x the speed.

[R C-R]

1 minute ago, walt.farrell said:

In case you're not familiar with Brooks's work, it's about how you can't just throw twice as many people at a project and finish in half the time.

Yes, I know about that. But as several people have already mentioned, Canva already has experience in several of the things Affinity users have been asking for, like RTL support, so it is not as if they are starting from scratch for all of it.

[pixelstuff]

10 minutes ago, walt.farrell said:

Physical location is not terribly important, though it has some effect.

In case you're not familiar with Brooks's work, it's about how you can't just throw twice as many people at a project and finish in half the time. IBM provided that in the early days of the S/360 mainframe.

Something similar happens in computers, where having 2x the number of cores does not give you 2x the speed.

That reminds me of some of the comments from the Star Citizen developers talking about how studios in different time zones does have some benefits when one team working on something finds a bug in another system, they can pass the info to the other studio on the other side of the world who works on it while everyone is asleep, then when the first team comes back into work the next day it's fixed.

[Chills]

9 minutes ago, R C-R said:

But Adobe's offerings are at least primarily desktop software, so there is no good reason I can see to think it will be any different for Affinity/Canva.

Neither can I see any reason why they can't do it.  If you can do critical systems SW across 4 countries with 4 different languages (India wasn't one of them) I am sure they can do IT sw between 2 countries speaking the same language.  As noted some things like variable font support can probably be encapsulated in to one area of code.

[Chills]

13 minutes ago, walt.farrell said:

Something similar happens in computers, where having 2x the number of cores does not give you 2x the speed.

Mr Farrell please report to Marketing for..... err.... Re-Education! 🙂

[walt.farrell]

9 minutes ago, R C-R said:

Yes, I know about that. But as several people have already mentioned, Canva already has experience in several of the things Affinity users have been asking for, like RTL support, so it is not as if they are starting from scratch for all of it.

Yes, and my point was that for some things, adding additional developers can help. 

One of us must be misunderstanding the other.

[Bwood]

5 hours ago, Johannes said:

I like how the teams are doubling down together now. 😮‍💨

via https://affinity.serif.com/de/press/newsroom/affinity-and-canva-pledge/

ANNOUNCEMENT 

27 March 2024 

The Affinity and Canva Pledge 

By the Affinity and Canva Teams. 

As we step into our shared future, we are committing to four pledges that we’re excited to share with the current and future Affinity community. 

 

Earlier this week we shared the news that Affinity had been acquired by Canva. As the dust settles on the announcement, we wanted to share more about our future together and our commitment to the Affinity community. 

Since our inception, both of our companies have shared the same mission and vision. We were both founded with the belief that design shouldn’t be limited to those who can afford complex software. Our goal has been to make the highest quality design tools available to the largest number of people with fair, transparent and affordable pricing at our core. By joining forces, we’re looking forward to accelerating this shared vision. 

Above all, together, we’re committed to continuing and amplifying Affinity’s position as the highest-quality professional-grade design suite on the market, while continuing to empower millions of designers to unlock their creativity and achieve their goals. 

1. We are committed to fair, transparent and affordable pricing, including the perpetual licenses that have made Affinity special.

We share a commitment to making design fairer and more accessible. For Canva, this has meant making our core product available for free to millions of people across the globe, and for Affinity, this has meant a fairly priced perpetual license model. We know this model has been a key part of the Affinity offering and we are committed to continue to offer perpetual licenses in the future. 

If we do offer a subscription, it will only ever be as an option alongside the perpetual model, for those who prefer it. This fits with enabling Canva users to start adopting Affinity. It could also allow us to offer Affinity users a way to scale their workflows using Canva as a platform to share and collaborate on their Affinity assets, if they choose to. 

2. We will double down on expanding Affinity’s products through continued investment in Affinity as a standalone product suite.

We believe Affinity is the highest-quality professional-grade design suite on the market. It’s non-destructive, super fast, and easy to use. As such, we want to reassure you that it isn’t going anywhere. 

In fact, we’re committed to using our shared resources to continue expanding Affinity’s products through further investment in Affinity as a standalone product suite. We’re looking forward to accelerating the rollout of highly requested features such as variable font support, blend and width tools, auto object selection, multi-page spreads, ePub export and much more. 

These additions will further cement Affinity as the best advanced design suite on the market and will be released over the coming year as free updates to V2. 

3. We will provide Affinity free for schools & nonprofits (NFPs).

Canva, which has pledged 30% of its value as a company towards doing good in the world through its two-step plan, offers premium plans at no cost to schools and NFPs all over the world. More than 60 million students and teachers, plus 600,000 charities and registered nonprofits, benefit from this each month. 

We’re excited to extend this programme to include free access for schools and nonprofits to Designer, Photo and Publisher. These professional-grade tools will add enormous value to this free offering, helping millions of students to master the craft of design, and empowering mission driven organisations to amplify their voices and maximize their impact. 

We’ll share more details on this in the coming months, including what it means for our education and NFP customers that already use Affinity. 

4. We are committed to listening and being led by the design community at every step in this journey.

Affinity and Canva were both founded on the basis that their respective communities – of expert and non-expert designers – deserved better. The tools available were overly complex, overly priced, or both. We know designers deserve better. They deserve the highest quality tools to serve their needs and they deserve to be treated fairly. 

We also believe the design community also knows best what it needs. As such, we are committed to shaping our products based on your ideas, your feedback and your needs. To kick things off, we’d love to learn more about what you’d like to see as we embark on this next chapter of our journey. What would you like to see in Affinity? What features have you been dreaming of? What would you love to achieve? We’d love to hear from you. 

Thank you to everyone who has been an integral part of the journey so far. We’re excited for the future and can’t wait to see what we can build together. 

With gratitude and excitement, 

The Affinity and Canva Teams

Crisis management teams are busy. I was burned once with Macromedia to Adobe. Burned again AF to Canva. Shame on,e. 

[Ciaran77]

Todays press release statement was very telling:

"If we do offer a subscription, it will only ever be as an option alongside the perpetual model, for those who prefer it" - So basically, a subscription model is coming and this is how it will work: 

(a): Perpetual model for those who prefer it - This is code for, right pleps, now that we are ultra rich and most of the future trajectory responsibility has been taken out of our hands by Canva, we pledge to you, yes you, you working class s&"m, that you will still be able to purchase 'Photo', Designer' and 'Publisher' but it will not be as feature rich, you'll have some access to a few useless tools that won’t really changed your workflow in the slightest but thanks for being a good dog and rolling over for us with your money

(b): If we do offer a subscription, it will only ever be as an option alongside the perpetual model - We want to hoard as much money as we can just like Adobe, this is the future model that we want implemented for the novelty of using our premium versions of 'Photo', Designer' and 'Publisher', which will be jam packed with feature rich tools to excelerate your workflow, again, Canva is our shield to hide behind, blame them not us if you dont agree.... CAUSE WE'RE ARE LOOOOOOADED

[AffntyXara]

3 minutes ago, Ciaran77 said:

Todays press release statement was very telling:

"If we do offer a subscription, it will only ever be as an option alongside the perpetual model, for those who prefer it" - So basically, a subscription model is coming and this is how it will work: 

(a): Perpetual model for those who prefer it - This is code for, right pleps, now that we are ultra rich and most of the future trajectory responsibility has been taken out of our hands by Canva, we pledge to you, yes you, you working class s&"m, that you will still be able to purchase 'Photo', Designer' and 'Publisher' but it will not be as feature rich, you'll have some access to a few useless tools that won’t really changed your workflow in the slightest but thanks for being a good dog and rolling over for us with your money

(b): If we do offer a subscription, it will only ever be as an option alongside the perpetual model - We want to hoard as much money as we can just like Adobe, this is the future model that we want implemented for the novelty of using our premium versions of 'Photo', Designer' and 'Publisher', which will be jam packed with feature rich tools to excelerate your workflow, again, Canva is our shield to hide behind, blame them not us if you dont agree.... CAUSE WE'RE ARE LOOOOOOADED

I kinda like the way Xara (which has had a turbulent ownership history to say the least) is handling subscriptions. They still have perpetual license which will get a (paid) new version every year and a subscription licence which will be updated several times a year. The worst thing there is again the activation server. From a security view I understand why companies want this but it's not user friendly at all.

[Altima Neo]

9 minutes ago, Ciaran77 said:

Todays press release statement was very telling:

"If we do offer a subscription, it will only ever be as an option alongside the perpetual model, for those who prefer it" - So basically, a subscription model is coming and this is how it will work: 

(a): Perpetual model for those who prefer it - This is code for, right pleps, now that we are ultra rich and most of the future trajectory responsibility has been taken out of our hands by Canva, we pledge to you, yes you, you working class s&"m, that you will still be able to purchase 'Photo', Designer' and 'Publisher' but it will not be as feature rich, you'll have some access to a few useless tools that won’t really changed your workflow in the slightest but thanks for being a good dog and rolling over for us with your money

(b): If we do offer a subscription, it will only ever be as an option alongside the perpetual model - We want to hoard as much money as we can just like Adobe, this is the future model that we want implemented for the novelty of using our premium versions of 'Photo', Designer' and 'Publisher', which will be jam packed with feature rich tools to excelerate your workflow, again, Canva is our shield to hide behind, blame them not us if you dont agree.... CAUSE WE'RE ARE LOOOOOOADED

I mean it's expected, given canva's business model. And that's fine, of canva offers affinity with it's other subscription services.

 

What worried me is no affordable perpetual license. Which they made clear they will still offer. If they're offering both, then great, more options for people. But if they lose perpetual, that sucks. I can't see myself paying a subscription.

Edited March 27 by Altima Neo

[RichardMH]

Over the past year or so I've moved from Affinity Photo being my main photo editor to something I use occasionally for specialised tasks. The RAW editors are just so good these days. With the talent at Affinity and better funding from Canva  I hope Photo can catch up. AI masks and scripting asap would help. Did I mention Capture One Live?  Modern noise reduction and sharpening? Keystoning? 

[R C-R]

1 minute ago, RichardMH said:

With the talent at Affinity and better funding from Canva  I hope Photo can catch up. AI masks and scripting asap would help. Did I mention Capture One Live?  Modern noise reduction and sharpening? Keystoning? 

For me, the number one improvement I hope will come from this is elimination of the plethora of bugs on the apps.

[Archangel]

1 hour ago, Komatös said:

You can be helped:

 

True but registration is not the same as activation in the Plus software. You have to have an activation key to use the software. The registration was something else and could be ignored, although the software kept nagging you to register it.