Why so expensive?

[deeds]

OK fair comment; but that's why the Betas are SO important. The users, myself included are shaping versions 2,3,4 etc. This is a very dynamic forum, with a sense of community. (I've been on it every day, since I joined).

 

This will be a game changer in the long run, not tomorrow, as it is incomplete (but extremely functional) at the moment and the dev team DO listen. How powerful is that? Very!

 

Just like ballroom dancing, this forum and the dev team are equal partners who rely on each other's feedback and right now that's all that matters.

 

As for price...expensive is the wrong word!

 

ALL your reasoning is wrong.

 

It's arguable that what's been released is an Alpha build with better than beta level stability. There's much of what a vector design based illustrator/designer/creative needs that's simply not yet in Affinity Designer. Many of these are complete showstoppers for incorporating (deeply) AD into a workflow, because they prevent the strengths of AD being exploited sufficiently in a production environment.

 

The developers are in consultation with designers (I assume) and know this, but someone in management made release date and decision on what would make it into that release. From that moment on it's being sold as a completed piece of software.

 

It's not the selling price that's the main cost to end users. It's the time it takes to learn the software sufficiently to realise its advantages and disadvantages, and its inadequecies such that a user can make a choice on when, where and how to use it. That's going to cost much more than $50 worth of time, for every single new user of the product.

 

Affinity and Serif haven't sufficiently considered this realty, I think, which is why the user forum is a ghost town.

 

It doesn't matter how reactive and responsive the developers are, if the general consensus of those that have come to Affinity (and left) is that it's not ready for production consideration, even as owners, they're not going to come back and spend more time to find out how complete it is becoming through any future points in time. They'll simply tuck in on what they know they can produce on.

 

And there is no equal partnership between the forum and the dev team. If you had ANY idea how hard it is to design software, let alone create it, you'd understand that there's no balance, at all. We're the minions.

 

And the management have made a mistake releasing Affinity Designer early, before it was a sufficiently compelling product to move to for professional designers. It's a mistake because it's obvious the development talent and design team have the ability to make a truly worthy Illustrator competitor, and in many ways superior product, but it's not there yet, and designers don't have spare time to spend sitting around relearning and understanding the capabilities of AD at every point release to see if its ready for them.

 

Serif should have waited until it was more ready.

 

As for price, they could have (and should have) charged 4x as much if they'd waited until it was more feature complete and ready for prime time use, front and centre for those that do illustrative and vector design work.

 

Now it's a lost opportunity, one in which everyone that's come to it has sunken enough time to find its shortcomings and missing functionality, and (mostly) gone back to their previous workflows.

 

It's only the loyalists and those utterly infuriated with Adobe's products that are hanging around. And they can't really help unless they can see a fast track to bringing back everyone that's wanting an Illustrator alternative. 

 

The next problem with this is that it's jaundicing the opinion of all those who have previously tried AD into thinking that Affinity Photo will probably be the same, not near ready to be fully incorporated and therefore not worthy of their time to spend on learning to use it.

 

pushing something out the door half baked has a cost, and I'm afraid that Serif is paying that price.

[00Ghz]

Do Affinity Designer and Photo have missing features for professionals? Yes..

Do they compete with AI and PS at every level? No..not yet

Do they have enough features to be usable by professionals with some workarounds and hiccups? .... I can say yes.

 

I managed software dev for mobile in the past and it is often the case where you simply can't wait until you got all the features everyone wants or could want. Budget, missing information and a couple of other factors come in. So what Serif did was what I would do as well. Put enough features until it's ok to be used by a small to medium number of users, make that version stable and continue developing as you are doing that. Eventually in 1-2 years you will have enough to cater to most people needs, without being at risk to run out of money. And I didn't even mentioned the needed user input a dev team can get through a beta program. 

 

As for the price compared to a yearly Adobe subscription is definitely worth it. You pay about 300$ a year for a single app that you don't own and never will. Serif charges 50$ per app with let's say 1/6 of Illustrator or PS features. I say that's fair.

[deeds]

Do Affinity Designer and Photo have missing features for professionals? Yes..

Do they compete with AI and PS at every level? No..not yet

Do they have enough features to be usable by professionals with some workarounds and hiccups? .... I can say yes.

 

I managed software dev for mobile in the past and it is often the case where you simply can't wait until you got all the features everyone wants or could want. Budget, missing information and a couple of other factors come in. So what Serif did was what I would do as well. Put enough features until it's ok to be used by a small to medium number of users, make that version stable and continue developing as you are doing that. Eventually in 1-2 years you will have enough to cater to most people needs, without being at risk to run out of money. And I didn't even mentioned the needed user input a dev team can get through a beta program. 

 

As for the price compared to a yearly Adobe subscription is definitely worth it. You pay about 300$ a year for a single app that you don't own and never will. Serif charges 50$ per app with let's say 1/6 of Illustrator or PS features. I say that's fair.

 

With all due respect, this is Adobe's market to lose. And they've priced themselves as sufficiently attractive to the common man that there's no way to compete on price.

 

As such the ONLY consideration and benchmark is what pro users need to be creative and productive. And pro users don't need a taste of all features, just a subset of those that make their lives faster than working in the competing Adobe product.

 

Instead Serif have released Designer in a half baked state, with a lot of "jack of all trades, master of none" style indication of its potential.

 

They've fallen for the trap set by Apple for Mobile Developers, that of thinking that it's best to ship, ship at some state, rather than to get to a truly usable and influential state. Apple needed that for mobile so they could preach the size of their app store. They weren't telling devs this for the sake of the devs.

 

This model doesn't apply to Desktop software of most sorts (anything entering an established and rationalised market, for example) but does apply to something incredibly new, innovative and compelling because of its newness and innovation.

 

Serif have made a mistake prematurely releasing and/or going for the "jack of all trades" style release of AD.

 

It remains to be seen if they can recover the interest of everyone as they make it more professional, or if they get dragged down by the weight of supporting both Photo and Designer as they concurrently work on the layout application, and consumers wonder when the potential promise of these apps reaches a point where they should take the time to learn to use them and fully incorporate and therefore promote what they're using.

 

Most potential digital creatives (up and coming tinkerers) will go straight to the Adobe 30 day trials and then subscribe for as long as they feel they have the potential to be digital creatives. 

 

Because Adobe software is so terrible in terms of usability and productivity (and methodology) most of them will give up and never find things like Affinity Designer and Photo, or dismiss it out of hand because most professionals are not using them, promoting them, discussing them or even referencing them, at all.

 

And that's full circle, back to the fact that they're not ready for pros to use, so almost nobody does.

[TonyB]

With all due respect, this is Adobe's market to lose. And they've priced themselves as sufficiently attractive to the common man that there's no way to compete on price.

 

As such the ONLY consideration and benchmark is what pro users need to be creative and productive. And pro users don't need a taste of all features, just a subset of those that make their lives faster than working in the competing Adobe product.

 

Instead Serif have released Designer in a half baked state, with a lot of "jack of all trades, master of none" style indication of its potential.

 

They've fallen for the trap set by Apple for Mobile Developers, that of thinking that it's best to ship, ship at some state, rather than to get to a truly usable and influential state. Apple needed that for mobile so they could preach the size of their app store. They weren't telling devs this for the sake of the devs.

 

This model doesn't apply to Desktop software of most sorts (anything entering an established and rationalised market, for example) but does apply to something incredibly new, innovative and compelling because of its newness and innovation.

 

Serif have made a mistake prematurely releasing and/or going for the "jack of all trades" style release of AD.

 

It remains to be seen if they can recover the interest of everyone as they make it more professional, or if they get dragged down by the weight of supporting both Photo and Designer as they concurrently work on the layout application, and consumers wonder when the potential promise of these apps reaches a point where they should take the time to learn to use them and fully incorporate and therefore promote what they're using.

 

Most potential digital creatives (up and coming tinkerers) will go straight to the Adobe 30 day trials and then subscribe for as long as they feel they have the potential to be digital creatives. 

 

Because Adobe software is so terrible in terms of usability and productivity (and methodology) most of them will give up and never find things like Affinity Designer and Photo, or dismiss it out of hand because most professionals are not using them, promoting them, discussing them or even referencing them, at all.

 

And that's full circle, back to the fact that they're not ready for pros to use, so almost nobody does.

 

I agree with many of your points but the idea of developing a range of applications that compete with Adobe CC and only release when they have full feature parity is farcical. We had been in development for 4 years and it was the devs that decided to ship as we wanted to polish and stabilise what we had before moving on to implement further features and cover more use cases. Even if we had unlimited time and money we would still ship before we had feature parity with CC. This is more to do with the process of developing software than market forces.

 

When Adobe InDesign 1.0 was released it received a similar obituary to what you have provided for Affinity but they kept at it and now where is Quark? 

 

The idea of any company developing a replacement for Adobe CC in secret and releasing with full feature parity will never happen and surely you must acknowledge that. So what do we do? Do we have a go or leave the market to just Adobe for ever.

 

One more point is that this discussion doesn't actually help me or other professionals out there. What does help is people like you telling us what we need to do to make Affinity better and in what order we should proceed. 

 

Many thanks

TonyB (Head of SerifLabs)

[Dave Harris]

To be fair, Deeds has made some constructive proposals, especially in the earlier posts. One interesting idea is that we should be more upfront about what the limitations of our products are. I don't recall many other products that advertise what they can't do, but I don't think we're opposed to this philosophically because we are already quite open about it. For example, we've published our roadmap for Designer in this forum. Perhaps if that roadmap were polished a little it could be included in the Designer web pages, where it would be more visible than here.

[deeds]

I agree with many of your points but the idea of developing a range of applications that compete with Adobe CC and only release when they have full feature parity is farcical. We had been in development for 4 years and it was the devs that decided to ship as we wanted to polish and stabilise what we had before moving on to implement further features and cover more use cases. Even if we had unlimited time and money we would still ship before we had feature parity with CC. This is more to do with the process of developing software than market forces.

 

When Adobe InDesign 1.0 was released it received a similar obituary to what you have provided for Affinity but they kept at it and now where is Quark? 

 

The idea of any company developing a replacement for Adobe CC in secret and releasing with full feature parity will never happen and surely you must acknowledge that. So what do we do? Do we have a go or leave the market to just Adobe for ever.

 

One more point is that this discussion doesn't actually help me or other professionals out there. What does help is people like you telling us what we need to do to make Affinity better and in what order we should proceed. 

 

Many thanks

TonyB (Head of SerifLabs)

 

the idea of developing a range of applications that compete with Adobe CC and only release when they have full feature parity is farcical.

 

This is not what I'm saying, at all.

 

I'm suggesting you pick your battles (within the vector illustrative world of design feature sets) and absolutely win a couple of them, and (by all means) put as many shiny new indications of your intended feature set in as you can, in whatever state they're in, but focus on winning the crucial battles first, the ones that people are going to talk about the most, and make sure those couple of battles aren't hobbled by any missing functionality.

 

One of those (that's easy to win) is having better path creation and editing tools. And you've pretty much nailed that. And hit a couple of sixes*, as well (*home runs, for the yanks).

 

But to then have to deal with not having space around the document to layout iterations upon ideas expressed with these wonderful path tools as they flow so effortlessly during creation, experimentation and editing is a slap in the face to the creative process of doing that these tools deserve.

 

And this is what I mean by "jack of all trades, master of none". Master a couple of genres of the illustrative processes (like path tools) so thoroughly that there's enough justification to buy and constantly use AD for those battles won, and over time win all the battles of illustrative vector endeavour as you flesh out all the many and varied ideas you clearly have on the 'hows' and 'whats' of illustrative creativity in a vector/pixel hybrid space.

 

In the case of your wonderful path creation and editing tools this situation is made more intensely frustrating (this lack of ability to use the space around the current document for iterations) by the fact that you've gotten copy/paste between where they might finally go (Adobe products) absolutely flawless, also.

[deeds]

I think what i was trying to say got lost in the wall of text, it was this line that was the TL;DR summation of my point:

 

As such the ONLY consideration and benchmark is what pro users need to be creative and productive. And pro users don't need a taste of all features, just a subset of those that make their lives faster than working in the competing Adobe product.

 

'subset' being the key word.

[TonyB]

I think what i was trying to say got lost in the wall of text, it was this line that was the TL;DR summation of my point:

 

As such the ONLY consideration and benchmark is what pro users need to be creative and productive. And pro users don't need a taste of all features, just a subset of those that make their lives faster than working in the competing Adobe product.

 

'subset' being the key word.

 

I agree. All the devs working on Affinity are very passionate and do share your perspective, it's just going to take us a bit longer than maybe some people hope.

 

Just for reference, Affinity is a developer lead initiative. If we fail it's all our own fault and can't blame the management.

[deeds]

The context of my points is that I'm from a marketing and design background. So i see things not just from the literal usage point of view, but also from the means and massages of the market required to make sufficient, sustainable conversations and compelling use cases and examples of the benefits of learning and subsequently incorporating AD into a professional designer's workflow.

 

It's a pre-requisite for this (IMNSHO) that AD provide a couple of killer features in such a thorough manner that they can immediately replace the same facility within Illustrator, so that professionals find the time to learn and continue using AD as it fleshes out its massive feature and functionality to the point of maturity and the ultimate vision.

 

At this point there's a handicap to everyone of the standout features of AD (in my journeys through its use so far) that impede it from excelling at any of the smaller battles it could and should have comprehensively won so that pros felt compelled to turn to it every time they had an idea that was best suited to those won battlegrounds.

 

With pros then discussing (everywhere that they do) that they're using AD for 'this' or 'that' whenever that strikes them, and continually referencing its strengths in those little subsets of their workflows, the more casual users and up and coming curious about illustrative software will feel sufficiently confident to consider doing investigating this new software and not instantly assume it's not for them.

 

The barrier is the entrenched consideration that Adobe Illustrator can do it all, and should be used for everything. It's a bloated pig with some truly peculiar, pedantic and archaic processes that greatly hamper creativity and productivity. 

 

You have my vote of confidence, in spades. The feature set is STUNNING in its breadth and capability, but you could have launched with just the massively improved processes of path creation and editing and a couple of other won battles in their entirety and slowly grown from there, too.

 

As it is now, you have to make the case that you're going to win all these little battles over time, having not yet won any of them, and only indicated that you're going to fight every single one, and be more creative about what an illustrative vector app can be, thanks to your deep consideration of it as a vector/pixel hybrid.

[deeds]

One interesting idea is that we should be more upfront about what the limitations of our products are. I don't recall many other products that advertise what they can't do, but I don't think we're opposed to this philosophically because we are already quite open about it. 

 

This point came from the same position I'm expressing above, that it's imperative to get professional users willing to spend the time to find the strengths (and weaknesses) of AD in the fastest time possible, so they're incorporating the strengths into their workflow, and talking about it!

 

Time is the enemy of the professional. If using time to find the weakness is required, it's very disappointing and indicates that I'll constantly spend more time finding more weaknesses, for each strength that I find. So it's also off-putting. 

 

If you can speed up that process by simply saying "Look, we're sorry, but we don't yet have this, this, this or this, but we're really confident that this, this and this will so completely speed up this, this and this task that you should consider using AD for just those things until such time as we've made this, this and this work ideally, too." then you'll get converts within the professional space advocating for your product, and continually using it, and doing the things that they struggled to do creatively and iteratively in Illustrator.

 

I want you to win all the battles, and I'm sometimes overly frank about how to do that, and what is right and wrong, but you won't find anyone that wants you to win nearly as much as I do ;)

[VectorCat]

Interesting points and rationales for them, deeds...

 

Adobe by now have a what, 20..25-year lead on any newcomer to the market. AD has more functionality than AI had in its first 6 months of life, but the point stands is that some compelling wins have to happen now, as opposed to "along the way."

 

Is there data to support the idea that the forum is a "ghost town?" ought it be teeming with user by now, or does it take longer for software to grow a user base?

[deeds]

 

 

Is there data to support the idea that the forum is a "ghost town?" ought it be teeming with user by now, or does it take longer for software to grow a user base?

 

A ghost town is left with only the faithful to the ideal of the town. 

That's what's left here, despite a couple of spikes in interest during big announcements (like the beta release of AP), few have hung around, even fewer contribute in a meaningful way. Most are asking for help with things that they can't find other ways to solve.

 

An initial question would be "how many didn't bother seeking an answer, and simply went back to whatever they came from?"

 

From here on in it's a long slow grind to build users without spending on advertising, huge endorsements, significant new features and/or the release of something fantastic.

 

Things having stalled so soon after AP Beta has been released should be worrying.

 

Might be a good time to do a survey of the AP Beta users to find out why they're not more frequently/consistently/permanently using the product.

[ronnyb]

For some reason, the old cliché "Rome was not built in a day" comes to mind...

 

As I recall, the entire publishing industry did not jump on Adobe in their 1.0 releases... Obviously it was a different landscape back then and digital had not penetrated into the market, but nevertheless, it takes time to penetrate any market, specially on the first release of any product. Affinity is laying the foundation for a seriously powerful environment, and they're doing a pretty amazing job of it. Is it ready to replace the industry standard on it's first release? Umm, that may be a little unrealistic... it's like criticizing the Wright brothers for not reaching the moon with their first airplane... 

 

In any case, from my perspective working in this industry for the last 22 years, Affinity is the most exciting development in a long time. I have a feeling things are going to be quite a bit different in about 2 years. After the 2.0 release of the entire sweet (that's right), I have a feeling the Adobe monopoly might be experiencing some loss of market share ;)

 

Keep up the great work guys! You are winning the hearts of the graphic design community!

[Hokusai]

A ghost town is left with only the faithful to the ideal of the town. 

That's what's left here, despite a couple of spikes in interest during big announcements (like the beta release of AP), few have hung around, even fewer contribute in a meaningful way. Most are asking for help with things that they can't find other ways to solve.

 

deeds,

 

VectorCat asked you"Is there data to support the idea that the forum is a "ghost town?" ought it be teeming with user by now, or does it take longer for software to grow a user base?" you didn't answer his question with facts only opinions. Opinions are meaningless compared to facts. Do you have any facts to support your opinions? Of course you don't because if you did, you would have said them. There are many people who visit forums and don't join but read the posts. This is very common. So you can't just look at the total number of posts or the total number of members and say "the sky is falling". 

 

Why are you so negative and pessimistic? The Affinity team needs constructive criticism and suggestions, not unrealistic predictions of doom by some "marketing" bloke who feels the need to prophesy. The Affinity team is working hard to make their products a cut above the rest. In my opinion, they have done a great job. Sure there are some missing features and a bug here or there but that is expected of a version 1 release. There are many things that Illustrator was lacking for more than 10 years. For example even up to Illustrator 7 the ruler was on the bottom and the left side of the screen, not the top and the right (which was and is common on most applications). As well, Illustrator didn't get a trace feature until CS 2 (version 12). It took Adobe 12 versions to add the trace feature and when they did, it was simply adding the code from Streamline into Illustrator and calling it a new feature (which is lame). So don't be so hard on the Affinity team. They have done a great so far and I'm sure that they will continue to add more features and fixes things that aren't working as soon as they can. In the end it comes down to the question "Do you want to be positive and contribute to something worthwhile or do you just want to be just a negative fearmonger?" 

[deeds]

deeds,

 

VectorCat asked you"Is there data to support the idea that the forum is a "ghost town?" ought it be teeming with user by now, or does it take longer for software to grow a user base?" you didn't answer his question with facts only opinions. Opinions are meaningless compared to facts. Do you have any facts to support your opinions? Of course you don't because if you did, you would have said them. 

 

Calm down.

 

Go back to the days when AP was released. Note the massively increased number of postings. 

 

Did that level of activity sustain, or massively decline?

 

There's your evidence. It doesn't take a genius to find it for themselves, just some of that discretionary observation you'd could have used instead of a knee jerk reaction to being confronted with some rather significant factual considerations of the results of the forum becoming a ghost town.

 

There are many people who visit forums and don't join but read the posts. This is very common. So you can't just look at the total number of posts or the total number of members and say "the sky is falling".

 

See the number right next to the number of topics and posts? That's VIEWS! Think before you attempt to critique.

 

Why are you so negative and pessimistic? The Affinity team needs constructive criticism and suggestions, not unrealistic predictions of doom by some "marketing" bloke who feels the need to prophesy. 

 

What they need is a good hard kick up the arse because they're not appearing to be concerned about a lack of (and loss of) momentum. You'd know something about the intrinsic importance of momentum when going up against an entrenched monopoly if you didn't have a condescending view of market considerations.

 

Your subsequent comments about the appalling lack of progress in Illustrator (below) mean nothing because you've completely removed them from the context of Adobe's other activities and actions, and their state and nature within the industry, and the very industry itself, and the media influence and sway they held and how they held it.

 

But, again, those are all market considerations, which you've already made clear you don't think about, let alone value consideration of.

 

 

The Affinity team is working hard to make their products a cut above the rest. In my opinion, they have done a great job.

 

Wait... so your point about opinions being meaningless compared to facts is only backed by your opinion?

 

 

 

Sure there are some missing features and a bug here or there but that is expected of a version 1 release. There are many things that Illustrator was lacking for more than 10 years. For example even up to Illustrator 7 the ruler was on the bottom and the left side of the screen, not the top and the right (which was and is common on most applications). As well, Illustrator didn't get a trace feature until CS 2 (version 12). It took Adobe 12 versions to add the trace feature and when they did, it was simply adding the code from Streamline into Illustrator and calling it a new feature (which is lame). So don't be so hard on the Affinity team. They have done a great so far and I'm sure that they will continue to add more features and fixes things that aren't working as soon as they can. 

 

Great. Feature creep at the expense of functional issues going unaddressed. Stop and think when this sounds familiar.

 

In the end it comes down to the question "Do you want to be positive and contribute to something worthwhile or do you just want to be just a negative fearmonger?" 

 

No, I think I can be both.

[deeds]

For some reason, the old cliché "Rome was not built in a day" comes to mind...

 

As I recall, the entire publishing industry did not jump on Adobe in their 1.0 releases... Obviously it was a different landscape back then and digital had not penetrated into the market, but nevertheless, it takes time to penetrate any market, specially on the first release of any product. Affinity is laying the foundation for a seriously powerful environment, and they're doing a pretty amazing job of it. Is it ready to replace the industry standard on it's first release? Umm, that may be a little unrealistic... it's like criticizing the Wright brothers for not reaching the moon with their first airplane... 

 

In any case, from my perspective working in this industry for the last 22 years, Affinity is the most exciting development in a long time. I have a feeling things are going to be quite a bit different in about 2 years. After the 2.0 release of the entire sweet (that's right), I have a feeling the Adobe monopoly might be experiencing some loss of market share ;)

 

Keep up the great work guys! You are winning the hearts of the graphic design community!

 

Being a loyalist doesn't absolve you of your critical faculties. 

 

There are nearly no parallels between the history of Adobe and that of Affinity.

 

None.

 

There was no Adobe in the early times of Adobe, that's the first point you should consider.

 

The second you should consider is that a platform maker (Apple) not only engineered their hardware and operating system to the benefit of Adobe's software engineers (yes, RIGHT back in the beginning) but also helped them to understand and exploit it at the deepest possible level, for the greatest possible benefit, and the launch of an era.

 

And the very key aspects of the purpose of the Mac were designed around Adobe's killer product. Affinity has nothing of the sort.

[Hokusai]

deeds,

 

If you are so unhappy here why don't you go somewhere else? I don't believe that you can contribute anything useful other than to spout your negative opinions, so why don't you prove me wrong and make some worth while suggestions or comments?

[deeds]

So what I believe, the value of my contributions, their nature, effectiveness, and even my mood and attitude are all determined by your opinion?

 

And opinions... what was it you said about opinions?

[Dave Harris]

deeds,

 

If you are so unhappy here why don't you go somewhere else? I don't believe that you can contribute anything useful other than to spout your negative opinions, so why don't you prove me wrong and make some worth while suggestions or comments?

 

Deeds is a valued contributor here. He (or she) is passionate about our products and wants the same things we do: to make them better. Let's not be telling other forum members to leave.

[denironaut]

So negative, we need to focus on positives surely?

[ronnyb]

My original comments stands: Rome was not built in a day. Your analysis is interesting, but not accurate for someone who appears so keen on "market forces"... Again, obviously no product will be able to dislodge any market leader with a 1.0 release. How many years did it take Apple to become the dominant smartphone manufacturer in the world? How many iterations did they produce until being able to do that?

 

In order to succeed one needs: Courage, to enter the challenge, to face the Goliath in the challenge; Commitment, to stay on an arduous path, commitment to fail over and over in order to ultimately succeed; and Consistency, to continue the constant improvement, strengthening, and determination necessary to reach the goal and succeed.

 

Serif is being very smart about their process: with an affordable 1.0 release, they may not be getting ALL "pros" to convert (but plenty of them interested enough to download and purchase for their own use and with clients who don't care about what software you use. Yes, there are A LOT of clients who don't even know the word Adobe, lol). They are also getting the next generation of designers to fall in love with an obviously superior platform (yet admittedly not fully mature, which cannot be the fault of this 1.0 release) and contribute to the development in a meaningful way. Furthermore, the people like us who LOVE the app are more than happy to beta test and help Serif create a product and feature set which WE want, which is not the case with Adobe. While this constant improvement is going on, they are releasing the holy trinity of design software, piece by piece, which is much smarter, as their efforts are being informed by their users, and will therefore prevent much re-coding than if they attempted to get every single feature right in the first release...

 

As far as being a loyalist and critical faculties: There is a time for criticism and a time for support. Support is 10X more valuable than criticism in the development and cultivation of something NEW; criticism is 10X more valuable than support when the core values, mission and techniques are mis-aligned with the idea. We are now in the early stages of development of the platform. Dude, just have a little patience. Great feedback and insight, but just have little patience...

[Hokusai]

Deeds is a valued contributor here. He (or she) is passionate about our products and wants the same things we do: to make them better. Let's not be telling other forum members to leave.

Dave,

 

Sorry, I'm not sure you read my post. I never said that he should leave, I said that "if" he is unhappy he should go someplace else. I think that this is good advice, not just here but in general. If someone is unhappy, then maybe they can find their happiness in another place rather than being negative and spreading their negativity to others. 

[deeds]

@RonnyB and Hokusai and anyone else preaching blind optimism and positive reinforcement as some kind of magic panacea or wonder lotion:

 

I'm a critic... because I care, understand and am sentient.

 

All your points are not worthy of the time it takes to critique them, but I still care about your growth as humans, which most definitely involves coming to deeply understand the importance of criticism and the many roles it plays in life, love and liberty.

 

However, in the meantime, I suggest you spend some time ascertaining the difference between negativity/pessimism and very deliberate and considered criticism.

 

For you both, and anyone else surfing the blight of faux positivity, and because Serif is an English company, I offer this:

 

"Criticism may not be agreeable, but it is necessary. It fulfils the same function as pain in the human body. It calls attention to an unhealthy state of things."

 

~ Winston Churchill 

[denironaut]

Yawn.

[deeds]

Yawn.

 

Yeah... everything is awesome, right?

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=StTqXEQ2l-Y