Please NO MORE NEW FEATURES!

[Rabari]

I concur that any show-stopping bugs should be prioritised before new features. But with regards to features and speed, Publisher seems about feature complete (and speedy). I'd only like to see a more flexible table tool. For my part, any AI integration can wait, or at least be made optional.

I don't want to dismiss anybody's problems, but I have no problem exporting right hand pages (AF-1662), or any arbitary sequence of pages from Publisher. Works with "Current page", or by choosing "All pages", and typing in the page number you want to export. Come to think of it - I can't replicate any show-stopping bugs in Publisher at the moment. Corrupted save files was a huge problem in the beginning, but this seems to have been fixed – the file format seems very robust now.

Photo works also for me without problems. I use Designer pretty rarely, so I cant comment on any node problems - they seem very serious and frustrating, and I feel your pain.

Is my high confidence in the product due to there being very few alternatives (especially with publishing)? Perhaps? Going back to the main competition is however out of the question. The Affinity suite was a godsend for me an my small company, with a yearly workload of a few, but demanding and technically intricate projects for non-profit clients – which never sustained an app subscription model. With a huge and growing user base I think Serif can pull this one off. And as we really don't now anything, I prefer not too speculate on Serif's developer resources or developer priorities.

[Alfred]

33 minutes ago, Rabari said:

Publisher seems about feature complete (and speedy). I'd only like to see a more flexible table tool.

Really? No export to ebook formats or HTML? No fillable PDF forms with support for Acrobat JavaScript?

[Circulus]

**Playing devils advocate here**

There aren't that many bugs actually.
But there are loads of omissions, wrongly implemented features and very strange UX approaches.

The biggest elephant in the room is working with external devices and cloud services.
Every Tom ,Dick and Harry uses the cloud but all Serif does is, what exactly?
(Dropbox exists since 2007 / One Drive since 2007 / Google Drive since 2012)

So most are bad development/management decisions.
 

[PaulEC]

1 hour ago, Return said:

There aren't that many bugs actually.
But there are loads of omissions, wrongly implemented features and very strange UX approaches.

I have to agree.
I (and many other people) do tend to use the term "bug" rather loosely. A lot of the problems are to do with missing (or invisible) icons, inexplicable decisions about default settings, bad translations and so on, not actual bugs! Some of these things may just be matters of opinion and personal preference, but most are simply wrong and need to be fixed!

[Rabari]

1 hour ago, Alfred said:

Really? No export to ebook formats or HTML? No fillable PDF forms with support for Acrobat JavaScript?

Not critical to me. E-book could come in handy someday. 

[bbrother]

18 hours ago, Rabari said:

Works with "Current page", or by choosing "All pages", and typing in the page number you want to export.

"Current page" doesn't work, and AF-1662 is a confirmed (reproduced) bug that should be fixed on both Windows and macOS, otherwise it wouldn't be logged and wouldn't have a bug tag assigned. "All pages" and explicitly telling the app which page to export by entering a number is another option.

 

19 hours ago, Rabari said:

But with regards to features and speed, Publisher seems about feature complete (and speedy).

😲 Really. What about:

• Span columns
• GREP styles
• Tables across pages
• Global layers
• "no print" layers
• RTL support (which probably won't happen)
• and a lot more that users count for and you can read about in Feedback & Suggestions

 

18 hours ago, Rabari said:

And as we really don't now anything, I prefer not too speculate on Serif's developer resources or developer priorities.

Yes, we know something because they (stuff) admitted, without officially giving a number, and they did it more than once, that they have a small team of developers (maybe a dozen or so).

[Meliora spero]

On 12/11/2024 at 1:11 PM, Rabari said:

And as we really don't now anything, I prefer not too speculate on Serif's developer resources or developer priorities.

You don’t need to speculate. They’ve openly admitted that it’s very few. And the lack of results and the sluggish pace speak volumes about it. 

The phenomenon that grew beyond Serif’s control from their otherwise bold beginnings is well-known and referred to as The Complexity Trap. The company faces an exponentially growing workload, where development is no longer a simple brick-by-brick process but a struggle to manage overwhelming complexity. Adding new features and testing the product become increasingly demanding tasks. And it’s easy to see that with a limited development team, there’s less and less time to fix old bugs, which either remain unresolved or are addressed far too late. It’s a spiral that ends badly. It’s simply something Serif did not account for. Then AI came from the sidelines, potentially rendering the company obsolete, leaving the near-future situation highly critical. 

Anyway, the original business idea and staffing model can no longer sustain the workload. It hasn’t been viable for a long time, and even the most dedicated fanboy must admit it’s impossible to manage numerous bug fixes, refactoring, tackling technical debt, upgrading outdated routines, and especially implementing AI broadly across the applications. You all saw version 2.0 – it was meager, with a degraded interface and many rushed, sloppy implementations, especially export preview. Serif’s marketing fanfare didn’t fool many – the problem was obvious even then. You don’t have to be a business analyst like me to see it. It felt more like a relabeling effort to legitimize the shift to a new licensing model and pricing structure. And that’s a story in itself.

Welcome to the complexity ceiling. The ceiling that seems invisible to humanity.

[Conrad Hoffman]

I'll be a bit more positive. I've seen very small development teams, as small as one, accomplish impressively large software projects. A dozen people seems enough to catch up with the important bugs (and whatever you want to call the other stuff) if properly prioritized and managed. It's that last thing that's difficult.

[Meliora spero]

That's just not what you're witnessing here.

[ronnyb]

To all the Apologists: Yea, how about no. FIX THE DAMN BUGS, AFFINITY!

[অরুণ সরকার]

On 12/12/2024 at 2:08 PM, bbrother said:

• RTL support (which probably won't happen)

LTR support for complex script (which probably won't happen)

[Alfred]

On 12/11/2024 at 12:52 PM, Alfred said:

Really? No export to ebook formats or HTML? No fillable PDF forms with support for Acrobat JavaScript?

 

On 12/11/2024 at 2:40 PM, Rabari said:

Not critical to me. E-book could come in handy someday. 

So all you can say is that it almost meets all of your current needs, but it lacks a sufficiently flexible Table Tool. I wouldn’t call that “about feature complete” unless everyone else felt the same way as you do.

[CM0]

I have made this same comment so many times. I also emphasized this on every user survey. 

Fixing all the bugs is like getting new features because some things are so broken they can't even be used. It is so frustrating. One of the long standing bugs that was important to me was finally marked fixed this release. I was was so excited, but then I tested it and it wasn't fixed. Reported it as not fixed, so now there is a new bug logged that probably won't get fixed.

I would really love a major dedicated bugfix only release.

[Intuos5]

Usually I am against these kind of requests as I see the tradeofs being made and development priorities. Though for Affinity, it's time to deliver on what it advertises to do. Being less buggy is essential for me to use the software I bought. I'd like to like the software, but I can't due to the many bugs abnd usability issues I run into on the daily.

[Meliora spero]

It must be emphasised that, beyond the expectation of promptly fixing the many old bugs, there are more fundamental issues with the Affinity product that also need to be addressed ASAP. In particular, the outdated file access methodology, which loses file access or causes file corruption. Serif is years past the expiry date for this approach, which costs customers their data, money, and time. Affinity is not standing on a burning platform but on a burnt-out ruin.

It’s free, easy, and self-preserving to be an optimist – but the tasks of making Affinity seaworthy are not. It would be wise to resolve such critical conditions in the software before venturing into subscriptions or other endeavours. However, I now suspect that Affinity will simply be marketed towards younger audiences as part of the Canva brand; otherwise, Canva will need to dig deep and make serious investments. We are talking about investments of a scale that Serif's traditional customers are not accustomed to.

[Rabari]

The topic of this thread is "Please no more new features", so when I said Publisher feels almost feature complete (especially compared to ID), i find the opposition to this statement later in this thread a bit strange. And of course I meant "from my perspective”, as I obviously can't speak for anyone else.
So this discussion went from "no more features" to "we want more features!”. Or were lacking features actually considered ”long standing bugs”? I am confused now. Here is my comment to some ”feature requests" mentioned: HTML export from page layout programs will always be a joke compared to real html authoring, and the same goes for e-book export - at least the stuff I used to see from ID. The paradigms ar way to different for there to really be any meaningful overlap,. And if I want to use Acrobat Javascript (I don't), I would use Acrobat.