Filterforge

[Raymondo]

Hi

I recently contacted Filterforge to find out why it has stopped working on Mac. Their response is as follows:

"We haven't been able to make Filter Forge work reliably under Affinity for Mac, so we have never supported it.

The culprit is Serif's design decision to use some sort of sandboxing that prevents proper data exchange between Affinity and Filter Forge. If it is changed we will surely look into supporting the Mac version."

Your response to this please.

[R C-R]

I do not work for Serif but I do know that to sell the Mac versions through Apple's Mac App Store, apps (not just Affinity ones) must meet certain criteria defined by Apple. I am reasonably sure that one of them is to support sandboxing, as defined in Apple's developer guides, which has gotten progressively more rigorous with each new OS release.

 

So I find it a bit odd that the Filter Forge people would refer to this as "some sort of sandboxing," as if this is a mystery to them.

[Raymondo]

I'm hoping Serif can shed some light on Filterforge's response. As Filterforge did originally work in AP, what is it that Serif have changed to stop it working. They say they have undergone a significant code change with 1.6 so how has this affected third party developers?

[R C-R]

1 hour ago, Raymondo said:

As Filterforge did originally work in AP, what is it that Serif have changed to stop it working.

Note that Filter Forge said they have never been able to get Filter Forge on Affinity for Mac to work reliably, so while it may have worked OK for you in the past there is no guarantee that it would for all documents or for other users, or after updates or upgrades to the OS. In developer speak, "unsupported" traditionally means "try it if you want, but you are own your own if it doesn't work, doesn't work as expected, or stops working for no apparent reason."

 

So it is quite possible the reason it quit working for you is because you have updated/upgraded the OS you are running, or are using some third party enhancement that isn't fully compliant with that OS version's requirements, or for some other non-obvious reason that has nothing directly to do with Affinity's code.

 

Also, there is no way any code changes in the customer betas (the only desktop 1.6 versions currently available) can have any effect on the current stable retail versions. Are you maybe testing FF with one of the betas?

[InfoCentral]

It was officially supported on Windows but it stopped working there also.

[Raymondo]

RCR

Filterforge works just fine in the stable version 1.5.2. I can only deduce that the codebase change has introduced an incompatibility. The fact InfoCentral has made the point that the supported windows version has stopped working as well backs up my theory the the codebase change is the culprit. Interesting that Serif have not yet responded.

[pioneer]

I can use FilterForge6 in the 1.5 AP release version but not in the latest beta version on win10.  John

[Chris B]

8 minutes ago, pioneer said:

I can use FilterForge6 in the 1.5 AP release version but not in the latest beta version on win10.  John

That sounds about right. I believe some work has been put into PS Plugins in the beta which has obviously had an adverse affect on some other plugins. I'll see if I can get some more information on this.