First impressions, UI issues & suggestions, bugs

[GrahamvdR]

I’m so excited to finally be playing with the Windows version! Well done, and thank you.

 

Some observations, queries, and suggestions based on my first experiences:

• I have my Windows taskbar set to auto-hide, and it’s not accessible when I’m in AD. I can press the Windows key to bring it up, but it would be nice to be able to move the cursor down to the bottom of the screen to access it, like I can from most apps.
• It would be nice to be able to tab between input fields, in dialogues and in palettes in the studio. I like to use keyboard shortcuts as much as possible, but it feels slow and clunky to have to manually click in each field to enter a new CMYK colour, for example, instead of tabbing between them.
• Esc doesn’t work across dialogues as I would expect it to. For example, if I bring up the preferences, I have to click “Close” to make it go away. Likewise for layer effects. Again this interrupts my keyboard shortcut flow.
• Also with layer effects, it would also be nice to have a single Cancel option. Sometimes I like to fiddle and play with effects to see how they look, but then decide to cancel. As far as I can tell, I need to remove each effect I’ve added. Perhaps this is just a different approach that I will grow to like once I’m used to it.
• Are there ways to create presets for new documents, PDF export, etc? That would be very useful for me.
• What about viewing colour separations? It’s essential for my work.

I’ve found working with text to be extremely buggy. AD has crashed more than ten times on me just doing basic text operations like changing fonts, font size, leading, escaping the text frame, etc. I will create another thread as soon as I can pin it down and be a bit more specific about the steps that lead to crashes, but for now it seems like there are a lot of issues with text, and many things have triggered the crashes. Also, relating to text:

• Ctrl + Shift + > makes the text bigger, as I am used to in InDesign and Illustrator, but only one step for each press. It would be nice to be able to press and hold it to scale a large amount quickly. Or is there another way to do this?
• No warning for overset text? Is it possible to flow text between frames?
• Filler text isn’t selectable, except as a whole block. It would be useful to be able to edit it directly, as if I had typed it.
• A few times certain characters wouldn’t appear when I typed them, but others would. An invisible space would appear, so I could continue typing afterwards, and clear the missing character, but still not type it. This seemed inconsistent and irregular, but was consistent for certain characters within a frame in a session. It was usually followed by a crash.
• If “Check Spelling While Typing” is checked, everything I type is marked with the red squiggly line.

When I restart AD after a crash it usually (but not always) says that it has been restarted after a serious error, and asks if I would like to send the error report. I always choose Yes, but then don’t see anything else about it. Does it send in the background, or should it be obvious that it is sending?

 

Any other suggested best practices for error reporting, or tracking steps that cause crashes? Obviously it’s helpful if we can list steps to recreate a crash, but anything else? Any way to automatically track and save a history?

 

Aside from the above problems I’m excited. It seems fast and has lots of useful features that I look forward to exploring more thoroughly. I look forward to a time when it’s stable and I can really start relying on it in my day-to-day workflow. Thanks for all your hard work, and the chance to give it a spin for free!

[Chris_K]

Hi GrahamvdR

 

Thanks for the feedback. Some of these issue are ones that were aware of coming into the beta, a few are new and I shall get them logged for the developers. Just to expand on a couple of your points:

 

• Layer Effects - Although the idea of a cancel maybe useful, the implementation of the layer effects is more dynamic than that and is not life applying a filter so this may not work to well with the way we have it set up
• Currently there is not a way to create new document presets but it is something that has been brought up on the Mac side too so hopefully we will some some implementation of it in the future
• Text size shortcut, this is actually a bug with the windows version so I shall get that reported. It should allow you to resize continually
• We don't hide overflowing text by design. Currently there is no option to flow to another text frame but this may become an option when publisher is release din the future.
• The filler text behaviour is also by design. This is more for general placement and dynamically fills the text frame as you change the size. Having the text itself editable would not allow us to do this I'm afrai
• I'm not able to get any missing characters,is it a specific font that you are using?
• For the spell checker can you go into the character tab (Text > Character) and under that language section can you make sure that the language is not set to 'None'

Cheers

[GrahamvdR]

Thanks for your reply, Chris_K.

• Layer effects: fair enough. Different to what I’m used to, but possibly better. I just need to get used to it. I do like the realtime previewing of effects, etc, so it makes sense that it’s been done this way.
• Filler text: Ah, I see. Again, different, but possibly better.
• I’ll see if I can get clear steps to reproduce the missing characters issue. I feel like I had more issues when using fonts other than the default Arial (several different high quality fonts (I hope!) that I bought from reputable foundries and have had no trouble with in other software), but I’ll keep experimenting.

Thanks for the other tips. Clearly this is a work in progress, but as a first step it’s very exciting. I look forward to watching it mature as features are added and the bugs are ironed out. There are one or two features alone that make the $50 purchase price worth it for me (such as the ability to convert text to outlines on export to PDF), so even if it’s not ready to take centre stage in my workflow it’ll certainly be a valuable addition until it is.

[Martigny]

Hi Affinity

 

First impression; what a lovely, lovely new program. I'm looking forward to using it much more.

 

I am a long term user of Drawplus and have illustrated 4 books with it. The feature I use on all my illustrations is the ‘inner shadow’ on filter effects so I was delighted to find this feature on Affinity.

 

However, I find the inner shadow effect on Drawplus far superior to that on Affinity. When adding a shadow to a shape in Affinity it’s too harsh and very limited in terms of how far into the shape I can take it. At some levels it also interfers with the outline of the shape and makes it look more like a 3d object. Unfortunately I'm unable to upload an image example here as it won't allow it.

 

One other problem I'm unable to solve yet (I may have missed something) is there doens't seem to be a way to size two different objects horizontally and vertically, as in Drawplus. Sure I can do it with the snap feature but this takes a bit longer.

 

Help on these two issues would be amazing.

 

Martigny

[Chris_K]

Hi Martinguy

 

The sliders on the inner shadow to have a smaller range however you can manually enter larger values to extend the effect. I'm not 100% sure what you mean about the 3D with the shadow, that is one of the effects you can achieve with the inner shadow

 

For you're second point I'll take it you're referring to DrawPlus's smart size feature? Unfortunately no, this is a feature we do not have.

[Martigny]

Thanks for the reply. Somehow I am unable to repeat the effects I was getting yesterday and this 'inner shadow' feature is working much better. Perhaps Affinity have tweaked something. Still not as good as Drawplus because the effect had a useful 'blur' feature.

 

Love the program and accept that it's a beta.

 

Oh and one other thing. I imported a .psd file (a book cover). Images were okay but all the text was converted to pixel layers making it uneditable. Is this something that will change at all?

 

Thanks again

[voom]

About the PSD: there is a setting under preferences / general "import PSD text as text rather than as bitmap". Maybe that helps :) 

[Martigny]

Thanks Voom ... it's helped with some of it. Strange thing happened with the book title text though ... it's all over the place but easy for me to replace.

 

Thanks again.

[Chris_K]

Text from PSDs is quite a tricky mistress. As it's their propriety format we're not able to access everything flawlessy. We get close and are always improving, but you may find the odd thing going awry

[jaron11]

My first impressions.
 

On that point Desinger is useless – I can’t add polish letters (using combination AltGr + letter).

 

Also:

 

TAB button don’t work as expected (it should move focus to next field).

PLUS on numerical keyboard don’t work as zoom in (works only MINUS as zoom out).

 

Lack of bleeds field on creating new document.

Managing artboards is very unintuitive. I’ve got artboard that is some kind of layer and objects disappears when I put them in that artboard. That’s not what I expected. Also I can’t see bleeds (good that they can be as big as I imagine).
 

[Martigny]

Text from PSDs is quite a tricky mistress. As it's their propriety format we're not able to access everything flawlessy. We get close and are always improving, but you may find the odd thing going awry

Hi Chris. I think it does a pretty good job and plain text was ok. The book cover text had been manipulated quite a bit so I'm not surprised. I love this program ... brilliant!