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Customising toolbars and Icons


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I love icons and I love toolbars and much prefer them to keyboard combinations I used to using the undo and redo icons, also  the full page and page width ones. Hopefully I will eventually be able to make my own toolbars as I can currently from the large selection of icons in PP.

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  • 1 month later...

I, too, prefer icons, especially for things like save, save as, undo, copy, cut, paste, etc. I constantly have to resort to the menus which drives me batty. It's time consuming. Please consider adding the ability to choose icons rather than trying to find and remember shortcut keys. The lack of icons that I can use in the older Serif products is what keeps me using them rather than switching over completely to the Affinity programs. It's like the designers of the Affinity apps have gone out of their way to make things more difficult for those of us who prefer clicking an icon to perform a task. I hope you will seriously consider giving us back the icons that are missing.

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  • 2 months later...

As with previous commentators, I go back to older products when I have somethng to do in a hurry. My general feeling is that everytime I want to do something with affinity, I have to fight the the programme to get it done. Nothing is even remotely intuitive and I have to look for a tutorial or a forum for even the simplest of tasks

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5 hours ago, Papatez said:

As with previous commentators, I go back to older products when I have somethng to do in a hurry. My general feeling is that everytime I want to do something with affinity, I have to fight the the programme to get it done. Nothing is even remotely intuitive and I have to look for a tutorial or a forum for even the simplest of tasks

Learning curve.  So many good things!   But definitely worth it.   And it gets easier and easier as you work with it more and more.    Once the commercial Publisher is available, they will undoubtedly have an excellent Help section, if Photo and Designer can be used as examples.    Meanwhile, use the Beta with caution, and export a PDF for anything you wish to keep -- just in case.   Soon you may find yourself waking up in the middle of the night, thinking "h'm'm, I could make an Asset out of that" or "bet a Symbol would solve the problem!"  or "wouldn't an offset in the text frame look nifty?"  or etc.    And there are always the forums, with so many really helpful people!!       


24" iMAC Apple M1 chip, 8-core CPU, 8-core GPU, 16 GB unified memory, 1 TB SSD storage, Ventura 13.6.  Photo, Publisher, Designer 1.10.5, and 2.3.
MacBook Pro 13" 2020, Apple M1 chip, 16GB unified memory, 256GB  SSD storage
,  Ventura 13.6.   Publisher, Photo, Designer 1.10.5, and 2.1.1.  
 iPad Pro 12.9 2020 (4th Gen. IOS 16.6.1); Apple pencil.  
Wired and bluetooth mice and keyboards.9_9

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6 hours ago, Papatez said:

As with previous commentators, I go back to older products when I have somethng to do in a hurry. My general feeling is that everytime I want to do something with affinity, I have to fight the the programme to get it done. Nothing is even remotely intuitive and I have to look for a tutorial or a forum for even the simplest of tasks

Completely with you here. There are right now many usability problems that make the software harder to use than it would be necessary in my opinion.

Many of them are already suggested and I hope they can at least change a few.

EDIT: @Papatez Please don't forget to write down your own experience and share what things you exactly fight. Serif needs to know what you want to achieve, how it works now and how you expected it to work (and also maybe why). This point is really important because Serif will not be able to fix a "general feeling", but concrete points.

This may sound stupid, but sometimes I get tickets like "Loading of XY is too slow" where people forgot to state how long loading of XY took and what they expected. So to give really useful feedback it must always be as precise as possible.

1 hour ago, jmwellborn said:

Learning curve.  So many good things!   But definitely worth it.   And it gets easier and easier as you work with it more and more.

IMHO you're absolutely wrong here. If a program is hard to use and can be changed to a better user experience it should be done.

Of course a human brain can adapt to even the crudest and cumbersome workflow, but it really should not be necessary.

Software should always feel easy and intuitive to use and not require you to learn a complicated workflow to achieve relatively simple things. There should be no fight. It should be a flow.

Disclaimer:
And of course in this early stage there are rough edges. When a new software my company works on comes out there are also usability problems. I believe without user input nobody can get it right in the first place. This is why there is a beta.

Edited by Steps

Windows 10 Pro x64 (1903). Intel Core i7-9700K @ 3.60GHz, 32 GB memory, NVidia RTX 2080
Affinity Photo 1.7.2.471, Affinity Designer 1.7.2.471, Affinity Publisher 1.7.2.471

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On 10/4/2018 at 8:09 PM, tirzamay said:

I, too, prefer icons, especially for things like save, save as, undo, copy, cut, paste, etc. I constantly have to resort to the menus which drives me batty. It's time consuming.

You're really using the menu to do copy & paste instead of Ctrl-C & Ctrl-V and you don't do a "undo" with Ctrl-Z?

Sorry, but this sounds time consuming to me. These are shortcut that almost every application supports and is quite worth to learn.

Also I never saw a application that does not save on Ctrl-S.
And I press that a lot, nearly after every action as I'm a bit paranoid.

I won't say that there shouldn't be a option to configure the toolbar if one is really not happy with a missing entry, but for the given examples above not using the common keyboard shortcuts sounds inefficient to me.

No offense.

Windows 10 Pro x64 (1903). Intel Core i7-9700K @ 3.60GHz, 32 GB memory, NVidia RTX 2080
Affinity Photo 1.7.2.471, Affinity Designer 1.7.2.471, Affinity Publisher 1.7.2.471

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32 minutes ago, Steps said:

I won't say that there shouldn't be a option to configure the toolbar if one is really not happy with a missing entry, but for the given examples above not using the common keyboard shortcuts sounds inefficient to me.

Of course, one might not have a physical keyboard, or one might prefer to keep one's hands on a tablet and stylus. In that case, the shortcuts are less useful, and one is forced to use the menus unless one can configure a button.

-- Walt
Designer, Photo, and Publisher V1 and V2 at latest retail and beta releases
PC:
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    Laptop:  Windows 11 Pro, version 23H2, 32GB memory, Intel Core i7-10750H @ 2.60GHz, Intel UHD Graphics Comet Lake GT2 and NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070 Laptop GPU.
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16 minutes ago, walt.farrell said:

Of course, one might not have a physical keyboard, or one might prefer to keep one's hands on a tablet and stylus. In that case, the shortcuts are less useful, and one is forced to use the menus unless one can configure a button.

Yes, you're absolutely right. The use case of tablet and stylus just slipped my mind.

Windows 10 Pro x64 (1903). Intel Core i7-9700K @ 3.60GHz, 32 GB memory, NVidia RTX 2080
Affinity Photo 1.7.2.471, Affinity Designer 1.7.2.471, Affinity Publisher 1.7.2.471

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On 12/25/2018 at 5:07 PM, walt.farrell said:

one might not have a physical keyboard

Some level of inefficiency should be expected in this situation.

 

On 12/25/2018 at 9:34 AM, Papatez said:

Nothing is even remotely intuitive

Your brain must work very differently from mine.

 

On 12/25/2018 at 2:49 PM, jmwellborn said:

And it gets easier and easier as you work with it more and more.

Most likely from familiarity.  If you spent a lot of time learning how to do things in some other program, the fact that they are somewhere else in the Affinity products means you now need to unlearn old habits to become efficient while building new ones.  For the most part the program is not harder to use than other programs, just different.

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2 hours ago, fde101 said:

Some level of inefficiency should be expected in this situation.

 

Your brain must work very differently from mine.

 

Most likely from familiarity.  If you spent a lot of time learning how to do things in some other program, the fact that they are somewhere else in the Affinity products means you now need to unlearn old habits to become efficient while building new ones.  For the most part the program is not harder to use than other programs, just different.

Right on all counts!   


24" iMAC Apple M1 chip, 8-core CPU, 8-core GPU, 16 GB unified memory, 1 TB SSD storage, Ventura 13.6.  Photo, Publisher, Designer 1.10.5, and 2.3.
MacBook Pro 13" 2020, Apple M1 chip, 16GB unified memory, 256GB  SSD storage
,  Ventura 13.6.   Publisher, Photo, Designer 1.10.5, and 2.1.1.  
 iPad Pro 12.9 2020 (4th Gen. IOS 16.6.1); Apple pencil.  
Wired and bluetooth mice and keyboards.9_9

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It's mixed.

I tried many different DTP programs and photobook creation software and see Publisher from a usability point of view above average.

It's fun to use it and I saw many things solved in a nice way I found nowhere else. For example selecting multiple layers on a page and applying a layer effect like outline from the effects studio panel is a time saver.

But there are also plenty pitfalls and also surprising things you would not expect in a modern software like this. The lack of drag and drop support in the assets panel is a example for this.

Overall I like Publisher since the most important functions like moving, resizing and rotating layers are easily accesible.

There is still a lot of room for improvement.

But if you want to see my definition of "Nothing is even remotely intuitive" you should check out Scribus. This is a usability nightmare. I love open source and I'm thankful for peoples effort, but this software needs a overhaul if regular people should be able to use it or willing to learn it.

And yes, there are also a lot of things that are done different but there is no clear better since you need the same time or click count to achieve it. Deriving of master pages is an example for something I would have expected to work different but how it's done is okay for me. This is a thing I'm ready to learn for each app.

So imho it's really mixed into things that are better, worse and just different.

Since @Papatez did not state which "simple tasks" he refers to I find it hard to judge.

Windows 10 Pro x64 (1903). Intel Core i7-9700K @ 3.60GHz, 32 GB memory, NVidia RTX 2080
Affinity Photo 1.7.2.471, Affinity Designer 1.7.2.471, Affinity Publisher 1.7.2.471

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