I cannot believe tht the UI icons and text are not scalable!

[Ianthompson]

OK, this might be addressed somewhere else on this forum, but I can't find it if so....

Most 'serious' users of Affinity software use high resolution (4K and above) displays on which to work - I'm pretty sure that's not an over-statement.  Therefore, the need to scale UI icons and text would seem to me to be essential.  Other software provides for this, but not Affinity.  All 3 programs in the suite have the same 'settings' panel, none of which allows sizing of UI stuff.  How on earth does a company so capable of creating great editing software not acknowledge this hugely obvious need??  Do their developers all work on 1024 x 768 displays in this day and age??  I have searched the globe over and over for a solution to this problem, and seen hundreds of mentions of this, but other than advice that concentrates on 'change your windows screen scaling' (how crass!), the requirement seems to have been completely ignored.  I cannot find any sensible response from anyone at Serif as to when this omission swill be corrected.  Come on guys - listen to your users!  If you don't fix something that simply allows easy sight of icons and text on a hi-res screen, you don't deserve the following that you are pushing for.  It's no good scaling the whole screen via the Windows OS to get icons of sensible size - surely you must realise that his method eliminates the usefulness of having a hi-res screen in the first place?!

I have great respect for the quality of operation of the AF trio-suite, especially considering its cost.  But holes in the armour like this are going to leak loads of users.  I was fully committed to leaving Adobe behind and throwing my kit-bag onto the deck of the AF ship but - honestly - this UI thing is holding me back.  I know many others who think the same. I have excellent 'desk-top' near vision but in all honesty I have to squint at the icons and text on my 32" 4K display - this reduces my productivity many-fold.

PLEASE DO SOMETHING ABOUT THIS!  EVEN SIMPLY ADMITTING THAT IT'S A PROBLEM MIGHT GIVE US CONFIDENCE THAT THERE'S A PLAN IN PLACE......

 

[ronnyb]

Yea we’ve been asking for this for 7-10 years… don’t hold your breath unless you have a dozen scuba tanks handy…

[PaulEC]

3 hours ago, Ianthompson said:

Most 'serious' users of Affinity software use high resolution (4K and above) displays on which to work

I suppose that depends on what you mean by "serious", but I think that it is a rather disparaging comment on other users choice of equipment! 

(Not that you're wrong about the UI generally!)

[Ianthompson]

Amongst many other sins I'm a software engineer and I KNOW that this is not difficult to implement - I have done this several times for various UI's that I have written.  There's no need to have continuously scalable icons/text - a granularity of 25% steps would be enough. If the UI stuff on my screen was possible to be enlarged to 200% (linearly - so %400 area) i.e. an additional 100%, that would be plenty big enough. So 125%, 150%, 175% and 200% is all that's needed.  Text isn't a problem here - scaling of fonts is inherent to the OS - but the icons might need 3 more images each to be created, if you discount enlargement/interpolation and the jaggies that would occur with such.  Spend half a day of a developer's time on this and you would win the hearts of multi-thousands of customers.  Get on it guys!

[Ianthompson]

13 minutes ago, PaulEC said:

I suppose that depends on what you mean by "serious", but I think that it is a rather disparaging comment on other users choice of equipment! 

(Not that you're wrong about the UI generally!)

No disparagement intended - i don't do sneaky insults.  'Serious' to me means folk who rely on such software to generate a living. In no way does this imply that amateur photographers et al are to be ignored.  Which is what Serif seems to be doing to its entire user-base, on this subject at least.

[Granddaddy]

For a relatively recent thread on this topic, see

https://forum.affinity.serif.com/index.php?/topic/180602-ui-generally-too-small-windows-no-scale-option/

which includes my post containing links to some history of the topic. 

For some of us, the dysfunctional Affinity interface has provided a compelling reason to purchase alternative software. Some of us still come back to Affinity for some tasks not possible in the alternative products. 

I do not expect Affinity to ever improve its interface. There has never been any acknowledgment from the company that the UI could be improved. Perhaps some in the company have too much ego invested in keeping it as it was poorly designed a dozen years ago. Perhaps the design is so hard-coded into the software that changing it is prohibitive. We learn to make do with their decisions when necessary. It's nothing to get upset over, just something to recognize.

[Ianthompson]

Thanks Grandaddy - an interesting read.  I find it hard to understand that a company so proud of its work (and for the most part it deserves to be) and yet over the years absolutely; TOTALLY ignores the comments from its user-base regarding such a simple requirement.  This is not difficult to fix!  It's almost a legal requirement these days, hardly a 'feature'.  Maybe they can't afford 4K screens for their code-monkeys, and that's why it matters so little.  Hey ho - let's not give up on the push though.  Doesn't anyone know how to get to the person who sits at the 'top desk'?

[fde101]

The general idea behind a graphical user interface is that all applications should be *consistent* in areas that they have in common.  This includes things like standard UI text and icon sizes, meaning that all applications should be doing essentially the same thing.

To promote this, operating systems with graphical interfaces (or graphical environments that build on them) provide common sets of controls that promote this consistency in the interface.

If individual applications all provide their own scaling controls, this by definition works against the principle that the applications should be consistent with each other.  You would not expect the native OS-provided text editor, calculator, calendar app, email program and the like to all provide their own independent scaling controls for the user interface, because they should be following the OS convention.

The "correct" solution is not for the Affinity apps to provide their own scaling controls, but rather for the OS vendors to provide a flag that applications can set to indicate they require a "professional gray" look (for color accuracy reasons) and for the applications to then adopt the standard controls of the platform so that they conform correctly and consistently to the standard scaling of the OS on which they are being used.

Instead, we have a lot of individual applications all going off and doing their own thing, often in a misguided attempt to give consistency across platforms priority over consistency with the rest of each platform, and we wind up with large numbers of users complaining about the end results by incorrectly requesting fixes for symptoms instead of for the underlying problems which caused them in the first place.  In duplicate threads, no less.

[Alfred]

2 minutes ago, fde101 said:

In duplicate threads, no less.

Now, there’s a novelty! 🙃

[Pšenda]

18 hours ago, Ianthompson said:

I'm a software engineer

21 hours ago, Ianthompson said:

but I can't find it if so....

Hmm - even though I wrote it with a typo in your post title, it's not difficult at all to find a lot of posts on the topic:

https://www.google.com/search?q=I+cannot+believe+tht+the+UI+icons+and+text+are+not+scalable!+site:https://forum.affinity.serif.com

[Komatös]

You could limit this discussion to one sentence:
A user interface should adapt to the user and not the user to the interface.

But it is also fair to say that it is impossible for developers to design all customization options in such a way that every user can adjust the UI according to their wishes without impairing usability.
A good example are the different iPad/Mac Book models with their different display sizes. On a 13“ Mac Book, the menu bar is cut off if you use the same font size for the menu texts as on a 15” Mac Book. Or am I wrong?

[ronnyb]

18 hours ago, Ianthompson said:

but the icons might need 3 more images each to be created, if you discount enlargement/interpolation and the jaggies that would occur with such. 

If only Affinity had a program that could make scalable vector graphics to export as bitmaps at multiple dimensions for use n the graphics software…🧐

Maybe they ALSO can’t find the icons on those programs bc of the tiny UI. It’s a terribly unsolvable  conundrum, the ultimate catch-22….

[Pšenda]

47 minutes ago, Komatös said:

A user interface should adapt to the user and not the user to the interface.

Therefore, it is solved at the OS level (at least in Windows), where the user adjusts the size according to their monitor and their needs/preferences, for all applications at once. Not separately for individual applications, as required here, which then have to reconfigure all of them again when changing the monitor (for example, after connecting an external monitor to a laptop).

 

[Obscured]

.

[Pšenda]

2 hours ago, Return said:

But you can try, with the compatibility settings. 
See:https://www.thewindowsclub.com/how-to-change-scaling-for-specific-apps-in-windows-11

This option has already been discussed here (by the way, the link also includes Serif's opinion, which was asked here), but I have never personally tried it - I have never had this need, because if the monitor resolution is high (as we "serious" users usually have), I cannot use any application without setting the Scale factor.

 

[Komatös]

2 hours ago, Return said:

But you can try, with the compatibility settings.

However, the linked procedure does not work with UWP (MSIX) programs.

[xanathon]

I will now write a few bad reviews about this software. All other software either scales well on my 4K screen or offers UI scaling option in settings. Serif know about these problems for about five years and does nothing about it, quite the contrary they remove the font scaling option in settings. This software is completely unusable on HighDPI screens and the world should know this about a so-called Photoshop alternative.