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Two Questions About Affinity Publisher


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I would look at a purchase that supports the long-view of publishing. Why? Because it is going to take a while for APub--even once available--to be even close to what is currently available.

 

I have no experience with iCalmus/Swift (being on a PC). But I have used Viva Publisher. Certainly a more costly solution, but heck, the free personal use version may satisfy some peoples needs here. Other than that, seeing how most here have an aversion to CC ID, then the only other truly professional layout application is QXP (and the aforementioned Viva Designer).

 

I hope I am truly surprised at how capable APub is once released--it seems to have even slipped from one Serif employee's statement of it being released once it has enough minimal features. But in any case, I still believe it will take a few years once released to be a viable application for my needs (heck, it may never be). And lest we forget, ID, QXP, Viva Designer, et al, will be progressing during the same time as Serif is getting APub readied for market. That too may play into its usefulness.

 

Mike

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I would be happy with simple automatic toc generation, but sadly neither Swift Publisher, iStudio nor iCalamus has it. Are people really generating toc by hand?

Mac mini M1 / Ryzen 5600H & RTX3050 mobile / iPad Pro 1st - all with latest non beta release of Affinity

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You know that Serif announced it officially. For many people this was a promise, no fake news.

They also said they would not release it until it was ready. Those people also should have considered that a promise.

All 3 1.10.8, & all 3 V2.4.1 Mac apps; 2020 iMac 27"; 3.8GHz i7, Radeon Pro 5700, 32GB RAM; macOS 10.15.7
Affinity Photo 
1.10.8; Affinity Designer 1.108; & all 3 V2 apps for iPad; 6th Generation iPad 32 GB; Apple Pencil; iPadOS 15.7

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They also said they would not release it until it was ready.

 
Of course until it was ready. Already a few times:
 
“AFFINITY PUBLISHER
 
Available September 2015”
 
“Due in 2015, this publishing thoroughbred”
 
“Due in 2016, this publishing thoroughbred”
 
“Affinity Publisher, is due to complete the suite in 2017”

 

 
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Work started on Publisher 6 years ago with the team now being larger than the Photo and Designer teams.

 

It just takes that long to write good applications.

roger that

may I have to update this post then?

 

//////

Depending on how you want to count things, there are at most 8 devs working on OS X at present (6 contributing to Affinity up-to 1.5, 2 working on future things), 4 working on Windows and 1 running and improving our regression testing suite. So we have at most 13 devs at this point. In all honesty, increasing the number of devs we have would be unlikely to make a positive effect on our productivity (from experience) so we're very happy as we are - we all have areas of expertise and we rely on each other to be passionate and effective about what we're doing and it seems to be working

https://affinity.ser...ssues/?p=113170

//////

 

 

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So why is the only thing we hear about Publisher then always the has been moved back for a year text? Surely if working on it for 6 years there should be something to show by now.

 

A single developer could easily write something in the league of iStudio/SwiftPublisher in under 2 years - so what's hindering Publisher?

Mac mini M1 / Ryzen 5600H & RTX3050 mobile / iPad Pro 1st - all with latest non beta release of Affinity

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A single developer could easily write something in the league of iStudio/SwiftPublisher in under 2 years - so what's hindering Publisher?

So given your apparent familiarity with the development process, how long do you think it would take a single developer to write an app of this type that is cross-platform, maintains feature parity across both of them (& eventually iOS as well), & supports all the features of a unique file format shared by a vector & pixel editing app?

 

Not even Adobe has come close to doing that.

All 3 1.10.8, & all 3 V2.4.1 Mac apps; 2020 iMac 27"; 3.8GHz i7, Radeon Pro 5700, 32GB RAM; macOS 10.15.7
Affinity Photo 
1.10.8; Affinity Designer 1.108; & all 3 V2 apps for iPad; 6th Generation iPad 32 GB; Apple Pencil; iPadOS 15.7

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A single developer could easily write something in the league of iStudio/SwiftPublisher in under 2 years - so what's hindering Publisher?

 

You know what you need to do then.

 

1) Go to a bank and request a loan to cover two years salary for a developer

2) Hire a developer

3) We'll await your finished product in two years time.  Go.

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Well here comes the problem - cross platform sucks. And it is imo the point where Affinity failed. Pure Mac apps can be written rather fast with many mighty components available from the system. It get's slower when you have to consider the junkyard that is Windows because you have to write everything for it anew.

 

Isn't it strange how Affinity came to a near halt when Windows work started after making leaps before?

 

That it's possible I know as I had a DTP app going as a hobby project till 2,5 years ago (new job and no more time to continue it). It was pure hobby and afterwork but it was around 80% of what SwiftPublisher can do after 1 year. A full time developer should have been far beyond on features.

Mac mini M1 / Ryzen 5600H & RTX3050 mobile / iPad Pro 1st - all with latest non beta release of Affinity

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  • Staff

I interviewed a development guy in about 2005 who had worked on a new rewrite of Quark. I was told Quark had moved it's development from the US to Mohali in India and had about 300 people working on the new project. It was initially supposed be take 2-3 years to complete but ended up taking double that. During the development they had to release new updates on the old codebase to keep things ticking over. The guy was very knowledgeable but we couldn't afford him at the time.  I found one of the articles about the move here. The Quark guy told me they were trying to double the development team but struggled to find experienced people. I'm not sure how many people ended up working on Quark 7 but it's over 100 times as many that we have working on Publisher.

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It get's slower when you have to consider the junkyard that is Windows because you have to write everything for it anew.

You are wrong about that too.

All 3 1.10.8, & all 3 V2.4.1 Mac apps; 2020 iMac 27"; 3.8GHz i7, Radeon Pro 5700, 32GB RAM; macOS 10.15.7
Affinity Photo 
1.10.8; Affinity Designer 1.108; & all 3 V2 apps for iPad; 6th Generation iPad 32 GB; Apple Pencil; iPadOS 15.7

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I interviewed a development guy in about 2005 who had worked on a new rewrite of Quark. I was told Quark had moved it's development from the US to Mohali in India and had about 300 people working on the new project. It was initially supposed be take 2-3 years to complete but ended up taking double that. During the development they had to release new updates on the old codebase to keep things ticking over. The guy was very knowledgeable but we couldn't afford him at the time.  I found one of the articles about the move here. The Quark guy told me they were trying to double the development team but struggled to find experienced people. I'm not sure how many people ended up working on Quark 7 but it's over 100 times as many that we have working on Publisher.

 

Yes Quark is another Beast to reach then SwiftPublisher/iStudio that I named.

 

But after all you wrote about Publisher it will be more in League of these two instead of InDesign/Quark. As far as I remember the feature set won't even reach PagePlus for quite a while.

Mac mini M1 / Ryzen 5600H & RTX3050 mobile / iPad Pro 1st - all with latest non beta release of Affinity

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I'm a little out of track on the WIndows side, but when did Windows get a useable text and font subsystem?

Somewhere around 1997. (Try a web search on "OpenType Initiative" for more about that.)

 

But more to the point about why you are wrong about having to "write everything for it anew," the developers have explained several times in these forums that from the beginning the core Affinity code was written to be platform independent. Regarding your assertion that "Affinity came to a near halt when Windows work started," the facts do not support that -- just consider how many new features have been added to both Designer & Photo since the Windows beta program began.

 

Aside from all that, consider the financial implications of not supporting Windows. Affinity is not somebody's hobby project, it is a commercial venture that must turn a profit to continue to grow & develop anything new. It should be obvious why developing both Mac & Windows products is important for that.

 

I get it. You are not happy about the delays in the release of Publisher -- nobody is, Affinity staff included. But that does not justify ignoring the realities of the situation or asserting things that have little or no demonstrable factual basis. That won't accomplish anything that benefits anyone except possibly Affinity's competitors, who I am sure are quite interested in any tidbit Tony & company have been kind enough to share with us about the internal workings of the company.

 

Frankly, I think they may have already said more than they should about that.

All 3 1.10.8, & all 3 V2.4.1 Mac apps; 2020 iMac 27"; 3.8GHz i7, Radeon Pro 5700, 32GB RAM; macOS 10.15.7
Affinity Photo 
1.10.8; Affinity Designer 1.108; & all 3 V2 apps for iPad; 6th Generation iPad 32 GB; Apple Pencil; iPadOS 15.7

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Hmm I don't get what OpenType has to do with it - Has GDI finally something comparable to the Cocoa Text System? Or do you still have to build everything from string output functions?

 

I didn't mean having to write anything for Mac and Win anew. What I meant is that on Mac you have very powerful apis that you can take advantage of while on Windows you have to build nearly everything from annoyingly primitive apis that trace their design back to the pre Win95 time. So I guess because of the cross platform backing Serif can't utilise the many advantages Cocoa provides or have to implement something similar anew from hand for the Windows support.

 

On the financials: Affinity line has provided a nice profit from all I hear before Win support - while the old Serif line didn't. Why should that change with a Win version of Affinity? Besides annoying the profit bringing Mac customers by being slowed due to not being able to utilise the platform to it's fullest? I don't get it.

Mac mini M1 / Ryzen 5600H & RTX3050 mobile / iPad Pro 1st - all with latest non beta release of Affinity

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Besides annoying the profit bringing Mac customers by being slowed due to not being able to utilise the platform to it's fullest? I don't get it.

What specifically makes you think that Mac customers are "slowed" due to the development of Windows versions somehow preventing the Mac versions from using that platform to its fullest, or for that matter that Windows buyers are not a large & desirable source of profit for the company? What specifically do you know about which API's they are using on either platform?

 

No disrespect intended, but this all seems like a large amount of vague speculation, some of it contradictory, all of it based on little more than guesswork. It is hard to take it very seriously.

All 3 1.10.8, & all 3 V2.4.1 Mac apps; 2020 iMac 27"; 3.8GHz i7, Radeon Pro 5700, 32GB RAM; macOS 10.15.7
Affinity Photo 
1.10.8; Affinity Designer 1.108; & all 3 V2 apps for iPad; 6th Generation iPad 32 GB; Apple Pencil; iPadOS 15.7

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...

On the financials: Affinity line has provided a nice profit from all I hear before Win support - while the old Serif line didn't. Why should that change with a Win version of Affinity?... I don't get it.

 

The Plus line had likely gotten to market saturation and hence sales numbers that were no longer sustainable. As well, there really wasn't much Serif could do with the Plus line consisting of legacy code to further its development. Hence flagging sales revenue.

 

A new line has opportunity not only for Plus line sales conversions but because of the hype surrounding the Mac Affinity products, it has opportunity to widen its Windows sales base due to marketplace perception, something the Plus line suffered from.

 

Good luck goading more information from Serif. I personally think that, like R C-R, Serif has gotten too far down this rabbit hole of coddling up to your accusations.

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