Affinity Designer Customer Beta (1.6 - Beta 11)

[MattP]

Firstly, an explanation: So... why did Beta 11 take me such a long time to release? Well, it turns out that the released version of High Sierra showed stability issues with the Metal view mode that the High Sierra Beta didn't. I don't know why and it doesn't seem to have been fixed yet, but as such I could no longer set everyone's default view to the Metal view as they would potentially get a poor experience. We've got our existing OpenGL view there to fall back to, but it's now missing some tweaks and features that the Metal view had been given - so I just spent the last 2 weeks completely rewriting the OpenGL view mode to have parity with the Metal view. So, this new OpenGL view is now in and is set to the default for all users. I will add the legacy OpenGL view mode back in for the next Beta for customers that may suffer very specific GPU-related issues (I can't imagine there will be any, but just in case...). The new OpenGL view should be a little faster at all times and should get rid of some of the long-standing issues that people were seeing - but let me know how it goes!!!

 

So... on with the next Beta!

 

 

Status: Beta Release

Purpose: New features, fixes

Requirements: Purchased Affinity Designer

Mac App Store: Not Submitted

Download: Here

 

This beta version represents a substantial change to our codebase and as much as we have tried to ensure the quality of the code, it should be considered to be not suitable for production use. This means that you should not attempt to use it for commercial purposes or for any other activity that may be adversely affected by the application failing. In addition it is definitely worth noting that files created in Affinity 1.6 may not open in 1.5 so always make a copy of your important documents before opening them in 1.6 to ensure you do not accidentally overwrite them and are unable to open them in your 1.5 version.

 

To use this beta, simply download the file from the link given above and double-click on the file to open the installer. Follow the instructions to install the beta version. The beta sits alongside the Mac App Store version and will not interfere with it.

 

Fixes/Improvements:

• Completely new OpenGL view (selected by default)
• Light-UI tweaks
• Pen Tool tweaked to allow a click on the selected start/end node to force a cusp
• Tablet input's 'Angle' and 'Tilt' are now mapped more sensibly. 'Tilt' is how far down the pen body is laid towards the device, 'Angle' is the direction formed by the pen on the device.
• Fix for pressure input with Pencil Tool
• Fix for importing Text Styles in High Sierra
• Fix for Colour Picker preview not disappearing correctly in High Sierra
• PDF export tweaks to avoid rasterising embedded documents where possible and fix colour profile issues
• Miscellaneous other fixes and tweaks

[A_B_C]

Cool … thanks for the explanation, Matt! Must have been an incredible amount of work … 

[MattP]

Just a quick update to let you know that QA have just alerted me to the fact that I've got a bad merge in source control and it's causing a problem - will be back with an updated version very soon! Sorry!

[000]

iOS has been really strange this time around too ... I didn't have any issues with the last public beta, but since 11 has been released, my phone is acting up in really strange and annoying ways.

[A_B_C]

Yay! You fixed the “Artboards under Pixel Preview” issues (Open GL).

Everything is crystal clear now and properly aligned.

 

Thank you, Matt! 

 

(Well, this little UI-related observation will apply in the case of Designer too.)

[MattP]

I've updated it now - if you got it earlier, probably best to download again for the sake of it!

[MattP]

51 minutes ago, A_B_C said:

Yay! You fixed the “Artboards under Pixel Preview” issues (Open GL).

Everything is crystal clear now and properly aligned.

 

Thank you, Matt! 

 

(Well, this little UI-related observation will apply in the case of Designer too.)

You said it would make you happy if I fixed it, so....

[A_B_C]

Wonderful! Thank you so much! 

[dcarvalho84]

It's looking good @MattP. Let me just point 2 small things for now.

In the fonts panel the "All, recent, used" are blurred!

Another thing, the font preview looks a little bit too harsh on edges. in the screenshot is not so noticeable but i think that the actual 1.5 looks better  

And yes you're right the High Sierra is not as good as it should be. I'm experiencing 1 min boot time when having trim enabled...(Normal is about 23secs) The screen protector hangs. Waiting that Apple fixes it asap.

[TheOtherRoland]

Ugh. This again. I'm trying the new Beta and getting the "A purchased copy of...must be installed" notice. I've got 1.55 on my machine. It's an old Intel Mac running Lion.

What's the fix to this? Seem to recall some trick or other. I've downloaded the Beta (11) twice. Still not working as it should.

 

[retrograde]

Thanks Matt, I will download and start kicking those tires. Much appreciate all of the hard work and perseverance the Affinity gang is putting in!!

 

Gotta say, it will be nice when some of these OS, Open GL, stability, etc, etc issues are behind your team and you can get back to implementing and/or streamlining some more of those awesome roadmap features on that dang to do list. :-)

 

[MEB]

Hi TheOtherRoland,

Make sure you have the Affinity Designer.app in the root of the Applications folder (not inside another folder or somewhere else).

[Michael Sheaver]

Not to add confusion to the issue here, but I have been using AD beta 10 on High Sierra (both beta and release), on a mid-2012 MacBook Pro Retina 15" and a late 2015 iMac 27", for about a month now, with absolutely none of the performance issues you describe above. In fact, I switched to using Metal exclusively in AD on both platforms, and saw a big jump in performance and transition smoothness. App response is much zippier and snappier in Metal on both platforms, and I almost never get the checkerboard effect when zooming or panning quickly around the canvas. 

 

Is there some kind of system report I can give you to see why it is working so well for me? I am a registered developer with the latest Xcode installed, so if there are any system diagnostics I can run for you on my computers, let me know and I will be more than glad to help.

 

I will hold off on downloading beta 11, just in case you need any data off the current configuration.

 

The only thing I might have different than other folks is that both of my. machines have 16 GB RAM, if that makes a difference.

[Bri-Toon]

I'm glad the next beta is out. Apple's issue must've made this frustrating.

[MattP]

7 hours ago, Bri-Toon said:

I'm glad the next beta is out. Apple's issue must've made this frustrating.

Yes. Very...

 

...but development is a tricky business no matter the size of the company so it's just 'one of those things'

[MattP]

8 hours ago, Michael Sheaver said:

Not to add confusion to the issue here, but I have been using AD beta 10 on High Sierra (both beta and release), on a mid-2012 MacBook Pro Retina 15" and a late 2015 iMac 27", for about a month now, with absolutely none of the performance issues you describe above. In fact, I switched to using Metal exclusively in AD on both platforms, and saw a big jump in performance and transition smoothness. App response is much zippier and snappier in Metal on both platforms, and I almost never get the checkerboard effect when zooming or panning quickly around the canvas. 

 

Is there some kind of system report I can give you to see why it is working so well for me? I am a registered developer with the latest Xcode installed, so if there are any system diagnostics I can run for you on my computers, let me know and I will be more than glad to help.

 

I will hold off on downloading beta 11, just in case you need any data off the current configuration.

 

The only thing I might have different than other folks is that both of my. machines have 16 GB RAM, if that makes a difference.

Metal is best on my MacBook Pro and Mac Pro too... but on a 5K iMac it's 50/50 OpenGL/Metal unless you have an i5, in which case it starts to be OpenGL that has least problems... (at least that's the case in the office - and we all have a minimum of 24GB on the iMacs) That's why I've left both options available   I do think that in the last week of High Sierra GM, they may have changed something to do with thread priorities because (as far as I can tell) the problems show themselves when your CPU is extremely busy (we're one of the few apps that multi-threads so heavily and occupies all your CPU!) the Metal render pass just gets buffered until there's some resources available - and this makes things look jumpy, whereas OpenGL is forced to present itself 'NOW' so it doesn't matter so much what the rest of the system is doing... It didn't act quite as extreme as this even a couple of weeks before the release, at least I don't think it did?  

 

Edited to add: I know that I've seen quite a few issues about High Sierra in terms of graphical issues - missing textures, corruption, jumping, and of course Adobe fell foul of one of their last minute changes too - I just think it was all a bit unfortunate and maybe whatever they changed was necessary but it needed more testing really...  

[Michael Sheaver]

Your assessment is spot-on, and because my iMac is 5K and i5, it was spared some of the grief.  Please don't let this snafu with Metal being released on macOS before it was ready for prime time get you down; know that all that work you are doing now WILL pay huge dividends down the road! Just from the little experience I had using it in AD, I can tell that it will be a huge game changer for those devs who choose to embrace and use it. The only problem I have now is how much it pains me to have to use other apps that don't use Metal, especially those that use the Chromium or Electron frameworks. They are so jerky and clunky, that they remind me of why I don't use Windows any more than I absolutely have to.

 

Given all this, is there any particular area that you want tested in beta 11? Do you want/need us to continue testing Metal? 

[MattP]

1 minute ago, Michael Sheaver said:

Your assessment is spot-on, and because my iMac is 5K and i5, it was spared some of the grief.  Please don't let this snafu with Metal being released on macOS before it was ready for prime time get you down; know that all that work you are doing now WILL pay huge dividends down the road! Just from the little experience I had using it in AD, I can tell that it will be a huge game changer for those devs who choose to embrace and use it. The only problem I have now is how much it pains me to have to use other apps that don't use Metal, especially those that use the Chromium or Electron frameworks. They are so jerky and clunky, that they remind me of why I don't use Windows any more than I absolutely have to.

 

Given all this, is there any particular area that you want tested in beta 11? Do you want/need us to continue testing Metal? 

Thanks Michael!

 

If you give the new OpenGL version a quick sanity check on both your machines that would be a great help, but apart from that I'd say just 'general day-to-day use' is the best kind of testing we can get at this point - we're gearing up for release (would've been sooner if it weren't for the little 'glitch' just then...) so just want to make sure it behaves itself and plays nicely in general use... I've been making invites to my son's birthday party the other day and it was a trooper - smooth and fast all the way and didn't put a foot wrong, but it's this kind of usage that normally throws up the kind of bugs we need to make sure are gone at this point.

 

Metal is the future, no two ways about it, but I think the future's not quite ready just yet

 

[Bri-Toon]

6 hours ago, MattP said:

Yes. Very...

 

...but development is a tricky business no matter the size of the company so it's just 'one of those things'

 

Very true, but real commitment makes it all work out in the end, right? 

[TheOtherRoland]

16 hours ago, MEB said:

Hi TheOtherRoland,

Make sure you have the Affinity Designer.app in the root of the Applications folder (not inside another folder or somewhere else).

Hi Matt. AD app is in root folder of Apps. Always was, always will be. It's the app, not me. I have changed nothing and work daily with v 1.55. But as I said, it's an old intel Mac running Lion. Maybe it's a prefs file thing or other. This happened to me before and I then downloaded a later BETA version and it worked. Again, it's not my fault. My computer is clean and running the orig. app as it should.

[MattP]

2 minutes ago, TheOtherRoland said:

Hi Matt. AD app is in root folder of Apps. Always was, always will be. It's the app, not me. I have changed nothing and work daily with v 1.55. But as I said, it's an old intel Mac running Lion. Maybe it's a prefs file thing or other. This happened to me before and I then downloaded a later BETA version and it worked. Again, it's not my fault. My computer is clean and running the orig. app as it should.

Are you placing the Beta in the Applications folder alongside the Mac App Store version of Designer? If so, it should really work... Lion is supported and should work fine?  

[TheOtherRoland]

2 minutes ago, MattP said:

Are you placing the Beta in the Applications folder alongside the Mac App Store version of Designer? If so, it should really work... Lion is supported and should work fine?  

Yup. One sitting right next to the other.

I do have a CCC clone of my boot drive (on a separate disk), so there's an exact replica of AD on my machine for backup. But this has never affected my testing of AD Betas in the past. Maybe I shouldn't be testing them.

[MattP]

It should simply be asking your machine if there's an application called Affinity Designer in the Applications folder - and if so, doing some checks on it to see if it's a valid copy. I'm sure you're doing nothing wrong, but I can't really offer an explanation for why that's not working as expected  

[VIPStephan]

I’ve got a reproducible crash when dragging windows between two displays. 13" MacBook (2012) with El Capitan and HP w2408h monitor.

When dragging a window (in modular mode) to the other display the canvas disappears, so I just see a flat gray background color in the window. Then, dragging the window back and forth (without releasing the mouse button) after a few back and forths AD will crash.

[TheOtherRoland]

2 hours ago, MattP said:

It should simply be asking your machine if there's an application called Affinity Designer in the Applications folder - and if so, doing some checks on it to see if it's a valid copy. I'm sure you're doing nothing wrong, but I can't really offer an explanation for why that's not working as expected  

Oh well. Maybe I'll try prayer.  

Update: Tried a restart, and new download (my third). Beta still not starting up because it wants me to purchase the retail version. Maybe the shareholders snuck this in the code so they could get paid twice.