General thoughts

[matt.baker]

I’m impressed with Affinity Designer so far. Really looking forward to using it for UI designs.
 
Things I like/love

• How intuitive it is
• Stroke pressure profile and stroke behind fill
• Snapping and guide helpers
• Corner tool
• UI on the whole. Tool glyphs with colour.
• Personas
• Customisation of the toolbars (flexible spaces).

Feature suggestions

• Shape tool: precise size and shape specific option dialog when single clicked on canvas instead of having to manually draw the size. Similar to Adobe products.
• Auto panning when dragging objects, selection or anything where the mouse button held down when the cursor hits the edge of the view (e.g. zoomed in).
• Toolbar/palette button background or highlight for active tool could do with being more noticeable.
• Performance issues: opening the Space example document by Poked Studio was very slow at rendering when layers were switched off/on, moved etc. Maybe use some sort of cached low quality redraw initially? I know this is a complex drawing.
• Recommended system specs, although I guess this might rely on the Beta.
• Object dragging/selection hotspot with strokes: if the mouse cursor is above the stroke (inside, outside, centre) and the left mouse button is clicked, the object should be selected. At the moment it’s not very user friendly.
• New document based on the size of an image in the clipboard. Similar to Adobe products.
• Stroke width displayed in document units. (already an option)
• Imprecise stroke sizes when expanding stroke: A rectangle of 100 x 100 px with rounded corners of 10 px and with a stroke width of 1 px inside changes to 100.3 x 100.3 px when expanded.
• Slice tool: add right click export shortcut to the hovered over slice (similar functionality to the slices palette -> export for this slice).
• UI gamma: still faulty on the latest update. Slider become unmovable/unresponsive.
• Right side palettes: couldn’t see any way to shrink down to icons and have as flyouts. Again similar to Adobe products.

Crash report 1:

• New document
• File -> Export
• Click More…
• Change mode to ‘Selection’
• Click close
• Application crashes

Edit
Crash report 2:

• Drag all Studio palette items off of the right hand dock. Right hand dock should disappear.
• Drag brush palette back so that it docks.
• Shrink width to very small
• Application crashes

[Alfred]

For item 8 (stroke width displayed in document units) you can choose 'Preferences...' and then clear the 'Show Lines in points' checkbox on the User Interface pane.

[matt.baker]

Thanks Alfred

[Mark Ingram]

Hi Matt, thanks for the information. There is a Feature Requests forum where you can post your ideas, but I'll try to answer / clarify some of your points.

 

2. This is a bug, auto-panning should work! I've logged this now and should have a fix shortly.

 

4. If you use a high DPI display (200% zoom or more on Windows, Retina on Mac) we do a low quality render first, then a high quality one afterwards. Do you have a video highlighting the problem, as on my machines, toggling layer visibility is fast.

 

5. We have rough system specs in mind, but we're trying to identify any potential hardware problems via the beta first.

 

6. Can you explain a bit more?

 

7. File | New from Clipboard, or do you just want the size, but not the image?

 

9. I can't reproduce this, when I try it, the resulting curves are still 100px x 100px.

 

11. It's still logged, but we've not made a fix yet.

 

Crash report 1. We've already logged this issue and a fix should be available shortly.

 

Crash report 2. Thanks! I've logged this now.

[matt.baker]

Thanks for the information, Mark.

4. On reflection, I think I was exaggerating this. I did a comparison between Adobe Illustrator and Affinity Designer and they were virtually the same (if anything Affinity was better on my simple test file). I think the (forgotten the term) parallelised redraw area boxes made it more noticeable, just because it was different to Illustrator (no redraw until finished). I prefer Affinity though, as you can see where you are moving elements to in realtime.

6. Re-reading, that was a crap explanation. I'll try again :)
https://vimeo.com/175279723
The video shows a rounded rectangle with a large stroke size (in comparison with the rectangle's size) and no fill.

When I click/drag anywhere outside of the rectangle's bounding box it is not selected even if the cursor was above the displayed stroke (I wanted it to select).
If do the same where the stroke intersects with the shape area (even with no fill), the shape becomes selected (as expected).
If I apply some effects to the shape, these are also not selectable.

In Illustrator it doesn't include the stroke width regardless of whether it was inside or outside of the shape's area (not what I wanted).
However, if an effect is applied and I click/drag on any area that the effect paints over, the main object is selected/moved (exactly what I would like)

In my opinion, it would be great to have two options to fine tune the selection modes: 'include stroke' checkbox and 'include layer effects' checkbox
Where 'include stoke' is anywhere that the stoke has painted over regardless of the shape's area. So for dashed stokes it should miss anywhere that the opacity is 0%.

What do you think?

7. Sorry, I completely missed that. So used to Adobe again. That does exactly what I wanted (cant think of any uses for just the clipboard dimensions and no data).

9. Here is a video that shows the problem: https://vimeo.com/175279722
I wonder if it's grid snapping related? If I resize the rectangle to 300 x 300 before expanding the stroke, it changes to 300.9 x 300.9 px after expanding the stroke.
 

[Mark Ingram]

Hi Matt, apologies for the delay in getting back to you.

 

With regards to #6, you can create a Feature Request, as this is currently the way we intended it to work.

 

With regards to #9, this is a bug (on both Mac and Windows), when using Inner Stroke. As a work around, you can double the stroke width, use centre stroke alignment, expand the stroke and then intersect the stroke and original rectangle. I would record a video but my video recording software isn't working right now... I'll report this issue and hopefully will have a fix soon.

[matt.baker]

Feature request links for reference:

https://forum.affinity.serif.com/index.php?/topic/23047-stroke-and-effect-selection-options/

https://forum.affinity.serif.com/index.php?/topic/23043-shape-properties-dialog-on-creation/