Feather stroke/shape/edges/mask?

[Guest]

Having used Macromedia Fireworks (I remember ye fondly) for many years I find myself still missing many of it's lovely little features that made working in it such a pleasure. One of these features was the ability to apply a feather effect to a stroke, shape, edge or even mask. This enabled all sort of quick and easy styles (vignettes, gradient fades, reflections, etc). I've tried doing these in Affinity designer using effects (using a gradient to 0% alpha and outer glow effects), but when you mask an image within the shape it reverts to it's hard edge. The wonderful thing with this approach was the 'shape/mask' remained vector (and editable), while enabling you to create more complex alpha masks that are typically done (in Photoshop) using bitmaps.