Affinity Designer Public Beta (1.5.0.2)

[johnsawan79]

Installed the designer beta, i'm using win 7 64bit with ATI RADEON HD 6490M. It installed fine but running the app has some few buggy behavior.

 

1. When launching the app, opening a new document disables Aero theme and appears that no option is available to enable it again unless you log off & logged in on the system again. In my observation it appears like it crashed the display driver.

 

2. In relation to point 1 closing & opening the app again while aero is disabled displays a warning message shown attachment #2.

 

2. New document appears all black, this occurs in each time on a newly started computer instead of showing the artboard. Also in my observation as soon as the aero is disabled (referring to point 1) closing & running the app again displays the newly created document properly.

 

3. Clicking on tools/panels has a slow/sluggish response not instantaneous.

 

4. Upon testing the pen tool, when creating a point, result is not created where i clicked, instead it is adjacent to the cursor location around 10px or more.

 

Attachment #1 is my system specs.

[Jimmini]

Hi,

just wanted to express my appreciation for your work and give you some feedback. I'm looking forward to finally drag Illustrator to the recycle bin as I think Affinity Designer is superior in many ways and a good example of how modern software should be like.

 

These are some minor issues/bugs i found:

• After entering a hexadecimal color in the color panel (not window), I can't confirm using Enter. When clicking into another input field, the color changes in the panel but doesn't change the selected shape's color. Only after dragging a slider it does.
• When dragging the layer's opacity slider too fast (or to 100%), it doesn't get applied correctly. For example, I drag it to 100% but the layer remains translucent.
• When rotating the mouse wheel over the document while a slider is open, the slider moves, but the view gets zoomed/scrolled too.
• When clicking the Manage Presets button in the export window, nothing happens.
• When clicking a layer's fx symbol while another layer is selected, the effects window for the selected layer gets opened and not for the one i clicked.
• The selected alignment buttons don't reset when closing/opening the arrange panel. Thus, if i align a shape, select another, open and close the arrange panel without changing anything, the alignment from the first shape gets applied to the second one too.
• Opening a file with AD in the File Explorer while AD is open, doesn't open the document.
• The assets panel can't be scrolled using the mouse wheel.
• When resizing AD's window to a narrow size, the buttons in the title bar get stretched and cropped.
• In certain input fields (like the ones in the transform panel) the context menu opens at the wrong position (ie. top left corner of the window).
• When using the arrow keys to move a shape and later duplicate it, the translation doesn't get applied to the duplicate. It works only when dragging using the mouse.

AD once crashed when using the vector crop tool, but I couldn't reproduce it. Another time AD got unresponsive when I was dragging a layer using the layers panel.

Another curious bug I found happens when I

• open untitled2.afdesign
• then open untitled3.afdesign, leaving the first one open
• select the node tool
• double click the white triangle to select it
• dragging a node of the triangle around a bit

then the CPU usage stays at about 5% even when minimizing AD.

 

 

Finally, some features I'd like to have in AD:

• Export preview (ie. for JPEG quality).
• Ability to retrospectively reposition a shape while creating it.
• Invert shape to fill the outside instead of the inside.
• Tool to crop the document or crop by selection as I can't see the result using Document Setup.
• Keyboard shortcut presets for different keyboard layouts.
• Ability to detect and convert a curve shape back to it's basic 'shape' (ie. to convert the path of a rounded rectangle back to an actual rounded rectangle).
• When exporting a non .afdesign file, set the suggested file name's extension to the export type's extension (ie. 'file.jpeg' when exporting a PNG file as JPEG, instead of 'file.png').

I am using Affinity Designer 1.5.0.2 on Windows 10.

 

Thank you again for this marvelous software!

[TonyB]

A couple of questions.

1 Am I able to drag the rulers onto the page?

2 Am I able to change the colour of the guide lines I drag onto the page from blue to red?

thanks John

 

1. Not at the moment. We do plan on letting you  change the ruler origin but i'm not sure about dragging the actual ruler.

2. Not at the moment but improvement to guides are coming to v1.5

[TonyB]

There are some problems when aligning symbols. My artboard is 800x600 px. I created a circle which is 100x100 px. Now a second one which is 50x50 px and in the middle of the first one (used align tool with center/center here). I grouped the circles and created a symbol. When I drop a second instance of the symbol on the arboard and use the align panel I get strange behaviour. Just try to align both symbols horizontally or vertically and you should see what I mean. OS is Win 7.

 

Any chance you could create a post in the beta forum and post a screen shot and afdesign file. I had a go at reproducing but i'm not sure i follow.

[Alfred]

- Some menus are too overloaded with commands. Especially the View menu.

 

I couldn't agree more! On this laptop with its display height of only 768 pixels (typical of screens which are not Full HD) the bottom of the View menu is cut off, even if I move the taskbar or set it to auto-hide.

 

[moth3r]

Hi,

 

In terms of grid settings I have not found anything about "grid dots". Sometimes lines of your grid look a bit too intrusive so most of the apps also give you an option to turn lines into dots (major, minor or both). I have to say I am surprised Affinity Designer does not have this already implemented considering vast amount of other options.

 

Thanks!

[pioneer]

Good afternoon. trying to follow the

In-house Affinity Designer Video Tutorials.....For beginners'

When I get to following the switch from draw persona to pixel persona, and trying to select a textured brush this option is not available.

Is this my installation or is it a missing feature from the beta version 1.5.0.4?

Update... Has now appeared after closing program and restarting. Weird?

Thanks John

[pioneer]

Good afternoon a couple of questions about the programs future.

1 I notice that I can only export a selection in png-24.  Will in future will the program be able to support export png-32?

2 Will there be a print feature similar to Drawplus where you will be able to print N-up. I use the feature quite a lot for designing and printing Christmas cards etc.

best regards

John

[Ken Cope]

Hi John,

We need to open the Document Setup tab that runs along the top of the workspace and 1) Select the Colour tab/section 2) check the Transparent Background check box. See screenshot

[pioneer]

Hi John,

We need to open the Document Setup tab that runs along the top of the workspace and 1) Select the Colour tab/section 2) check the Transparent Background check box. See screenshot

Thanks Ken, good to see your "brain and expertise" on here  :) .  A further elaboration if I may,  should I select the selection with or without background? 

[Ken Cope]

Hi John,

If you have the document set as transparent background then either png option will produce the same result - a transparent background. :)

[sunjays]

i am not sure if this the right forum. Is there a waypath for following the tutorials. 

 

right now it seems it like pick and choose. for newbies that is a bit overwhelming. 

 

thanks

sunjay

[MEB]

Hi sunjays,

Welcome to Affinity Forums :)

You can follow them in the order they are listed here.

If you have any question regarding any of them just go ahead and post it in the forums.

There's always someone willing to help.