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Affinity Designer Customer Beta (1.7.0.2)


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Status: Beta

Purpose: Features, Improvements, Fixes

Requirements: Purchased Affinity Designer

Mac App Store: Not submitted

Download: Here

Hello,

We are pleased to announce the immediate availability of the first beta of Affinity Designer 1.7 for macOS.

Designer 1.7 is a significant change to the currently shipping 1.6 version. Files edited in this version will not be backwards-compatible with the shipping 1.6 version. As such, we would not recommend using this 1.7 version for critical or production work at this stage. It is inevitable that there were will be a number of issues with 1.7 but we hope these will be minor and aim to resolve any issues very quickly, so please use it and explore the new features, but also do keep in mind that you may find snags and we would appreciate your help with finding and reporting these to us.

If this is your first time using a customer beta of an Affinity app, it’s worth noting that the beta will install as a separate app - alongside your store version. They will not interfere with each other at all and you can continue to use the store version for critical work without worry.

It’s also worth noting that we aren’t done yet - we are still working through reported bugs from previous releases and hope to fix as many as possible before the final release of 1.7.

With all that said, we hope that you will enjoy the new capabilities introduced in this initial release and we look forward to any and all feedback you give to us.

Many thanks,

Matt


Affinity Designer 1.7 - Changes Since Last 1.6 Release

 

Tools

- We've overhauled most of the core tools, adding subtle new features to make you more productive:

   - Node tool has a new 'Transform Mode' which provides a containing box for the selected nodes and allows for more freeform editing of the nodes.

   - Node and Pen tools have an utterly amazing Construction mode which gives easy access to common construction features to help you build complicated shapes or intersections accurately and easily, giving you simple access to parallels, right angles, reflected and mirrored angles, in addition to circular construction snaps and all construction intersections. This really needs a video to show how to use it - but it's awesome.

   - Pen tool now has a 'rubber band' mode and also a mode to allow future curves to be added to the current object's curves (for example, the character 'a' is constructed of two curves in a single 'curve object' and this mode makes that construction simpler).

   - Node tool can now auto-snap nodes if you drag a node from one curve over the top of a node from another (selected) curve and pause, it will offer to snap to the same geometry as the node you're hovering over (ie,  modify the on and off-curve nodes to match). This is really useful for trying to reconstruct areas of one curve from another curve.

   - Node tool now allows for lasso selection of nodes by holding the Alt/Option key and dragging a selection lasso.

   - Pencil tool now offers a 'sculpt' mode that allows for extending or manipulating curves in a more natural way. More to come in this area soon.

   - Many tools now allow for 'Alignment widgets' which you can toggle the visibility of in the context toolbar. When enabled you can visually adjust the alignment or even, for example, 'align to centre, snapped to the left edge of this object' by simply click/dragging.

   - Fill tool correctly allows editing of skewed fill handles and newly-created skewed fills draw much nicer now.

   - Ruler origin can be edited by simply dragging the area where the rulers intersect each other - it can even be snapped onto objects in the document.

   - Guides can be edited in most tools by simply dragging a guide in the ruler area.

   - Grid setup is now more interactive: origin can be dragged, axis scale adjusted and angle adjusted on-document, complete with snapping to objects and angles in the document to help you reconstruct useful grids from finished artworks or sketches.

   - By enabling 'Edit in Plane' on the new Isometric Studio, tools can edit objects and appear to make those edits along the currently active plane - extremely useful for artists who enjoy working with any axonometric projections.

   - You can now drag the rotation centre point (when enabled on the context toolbar) while holding Ctrl and it will translate the object - this is actually very useful for positioning and snapping objects relative to others.

   - Shapes tools now have presets so you can create your own favourite shape setups and more easily use them again.

   - There are just far too many subtle tool changes to mention here, but hopefully you'll find the tools much improved :)

 

General

- New brushes, styles and assets are now shipped with the product.

- Visible bleed (accessed from the View menu) so you can more easily design into the bleed area - a common feature request.

- “Alternate futures” for document history have been added. Traditionally, if you roll back the undo history then do something else all your changes after that point are lost. Designer will now display a small branch icon in the history tab when you do this. Pressing that button will cycle between all the different “futures” after that history entry - meaning you will never lose work you have done.

- New 'Isometric' Studio makes it easy to setup and work with various axonometric projections within the application.

- HEIF images can now be loaded directly into Designer. If they contain a depth map, this will also be loaded as a second layer. Because depth maps are typically lower resolution than the main image, optional “smart” upsampling will be performed.

- Designer now supports custom document presets - a popular feature request.

- A new blend mode - Linear Burn - has been added.

- New “Move inside / outside” commands have been added - useful for quickly clipping/unclipping.

- New "Merge curves/Separate curves" commands.

- Grids now have an editable number of angle subdivisions.

- The Hard Mix blend mode has been improved.

- Numerous text improvements have been made - including new features such as bullets and numbering.

- Significant PDF import / export improvements and fixes.

 

Brushes

- Designer 1.7 introduces a new “sub-brush” mechanism, developed in conjunction with Paolo Limoncelli (DAUB® Brushes). This exciting feature allows any brush to have a list of other brushes attached which will draw at the same time. Each sub-brush has a fully separate and customisable set of dynamics. You can control when the sub-brushes are drawn and how they blend with the main brush.

- Symmetry (up to 32-way) is now supported - including on-canvas controls and optional mirroring.

- Wet edges and accumulation are now available on colour brushes and brushes with HSL variance.

- Brushes with multiple nozzle textures have always chosen the nozzle at random. In 1.7, the nozzle choice has a dynamic controller and ramp for greater control.

- All pixel brush tools now support left and right arrow keys for rotation - a common feature request.


Adjustments

- The HSL adjustment layer has been rewritten. It now supports custom hue ranges, a new algorithm, new UI and picker controls.

- The Levels adjustment layer now supports output levels - a common feature request.

- The White Balance adjustment layer has been rewritten.

- The Selective Colour adjustment layer has been rewritten.

- PSD import / export of adjustments has been improved.

- The Vibrance adjustment layer has been rewritten.

- The Recolour adjustment layer has gained a lightness slider.

 

Misc

- Numerous other bug fixes - too many to list!

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This is really something: the isometric studio is really amazing: creating isometric art has never been easier!!

Many other great improvements all around.

I wonder about one thing though: The ipad version has a magic wand in the pixel persona, but this doesn't? Why not?

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Thanks very much A-team. Really great work.

But, IMO a lot of users will be a little dissapointed. Or... maybe much more dissapointed... Why? Because of arrowheads and mesh tools. They where asked 1000s time more then node, pen, isometric... and other enhancements. And not a word about it, or anything else.

All the latest releases of Designer, Photo and Publisher (retail and beta) on MacOS and Windows.
15” Dell Inspiron 7559 i7 Windows 10 x64 Pro Intel Core i7-6700HQ (3.50 GHz, 6M) 16 GB Dual Channel DDR3L 1600 MHz (8GBx2) NVIDIA GeForce GTX 960M 4 GB GDDR5 500 GB SSD + 1 TB HDD UHD (3840 x 2160) Truelife LED - Backlit Touch Display
32” LG 32UN650-W display 3840 x 2160 UHD, IPS, HDR10 Color Gamut: DCI-P3 95%, Color Calibrated 2 x HDMI, 1 x DisplayPort
13.3” MacBook Pro (2017) Ventura 13.6 Intel Core i7 (3.50 GHz Dual Core) 16 GB 2133 MHz LPDDR3 Intel Iris Plus Graphics 650 1536 MB 500 GB SSD Retina Display (3360 x 2100)

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As with Photo beta, the Edit in Designer option in Publisher beta works, but there is no corresponding Edit in Publisher option in the Designer beta to send it back.

The Designer beta (like the Photo beta) does not seem to offer a means by which to switch pages after opening a multi-page document from Publisher (even though they are all there, as they can all be printed).

 

All three of the betas seem to take offense at not keeping a document that was created and never saved before quitting - if I create a document (any of the three betas) and quit with the document still open but never saved, I get the "Restore unsaved file?" box.  I'm starting to wonder if that is intentional, or if I should create a bug report thread for it?  It is not exactly a desirable behavior when I already told it not to bother saving it when I quit...

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9 hours ago, Petar Petrenko said:

Thanks very much A-team. Really great work.

But, IMO a lot of users will be a little dissapointed. Or... maybe much more dissapointed... Why? Because of arrowheads and mesh tools. They where asked 1000s time more then node, pen, isometric... and other enhancements. And not a word about it, or anything else.

Exactly my thoughts... if we compare this with the Roadmap, the only features that can be deleted are "Bleed area guides" and “Bullets and numbering”.

Best regards!

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Wow!  Great job Affinity.  Still a lot much more to try but the Node tool Transform is great.  Love being able to manipulate multiple nodes like that.  So far I really like the Isometric panel.  My first thoughts are that the Layers panel should have some indicator that shows which isometric view was used to create the layer.  Like "curve top" or even "curve t".  Or, maybe have the isometric panel show it.

 

57 minutes ago, Petar Petrenko said:

Thanks very much A-team. Really great work.

But, IMO a lot of users will be a little dissapointed. Or... maybe much more dissapointed... Why? Because of arrowheads and mesh tools. They where asked 1000s time more then node, pen, isometric... and other enhancements. And not a word about it, or anything else.

You are right Peter, I would much rather they had held onto this release until the Affinity people had addressed all the requests and complaints they have collected over the last 4 years.  Then when they released it 10 years from now we would all be so happy.  At least the dozen people still using AD would be so happy, the rest of us would probably be gone.  I don't know why anyone would figure the roadmap needs to be completed before version 1.7 was released.  The roadmap contains things Affinity has said would be done before moving on to version 2.  I for one am not disappointed so far and I am still opening presents.

 

iMac (27-inch, Late 2009) with macOS Sierra

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1 minute ago, Gear maker said:

indicator that shows which isometric view was used to create the layer.

The object has no concept of the plane that was used, it just adjusts the transform so it seems to follow the plane. The layers are NOT on those planes, so the layer tab has nothing to show.

Patrick Connor
Serif Europe Ltd

"There is nothing noble in being superior to your fellow man. True nobility lies in being superior to your previous self."  W. L. Sheldon

 

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17 minutes ago, Gear maker said:

You are right Peter, I would much rather they had held onto this release until the Affinity people had addressed all the requests and complaints they have collected over the last 4 years.  Then when they released it 10 years from now we would all be so happy.  At least the dozen people still using AD would be so happy, the rest of us would probably be gone.  I don't know why anyone would figure the roadmap needs to be completed before version 1.7 was released.  The roadmap contains things Affinity has said would be done before moving on to version 2.  I for one am not disappointed so far and I am still opening presents.

 

The level of disappointment will be proportional to the need of a very specific feature. I myself I'm grateful for some of these improvements/new features, but I get how others feel... and I know the Dev Team needs to address many internal parts before any specific features comes to life, I also am aware of the fact that many internal changes will eventually lead to a faster development of new Features (as Ben said).

Best regards!

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i think the isometric Panel has one flaw with a very simple solution, Sometimes we create a shape which seems viewed by an angle and than we decide to modify the surface of that shape, The way i see it is we have to manually align the isometric grids or to some level "eyeball" the accuracy and design on the surface, i would prefer the isometric studio has a button where it automatically recognize the grid angles from the values of selected shape and reduce the time of workflow.

all n all superb job guys. this is an amazing update. cant wait for the release of all 1.7s.

by the way, are these features coming on iPad as well?

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Downloaded the beta and now will try it in few !
Can we do blend/interpolate in this version or should we wait a bit more?

I'm simply tired to create my waves of lines with inkscape then import them into ADesigner or Photo as svg and edit them (color add), want to do it all from the same place.

One more thing here !
Like with the new APhoto i have to load my 10000's brushes, styles, color palettes etc... Ouch ! can it be fixed so nex version can pickup stuffs loaded on old one ?
if not possible please let us know so we can prepare in advance.
Blessings !

Never be the Same Again !
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Aaron - iPad version will follow shortly after :)

 

Uncle Mez - the Beta and Store versions are completely separate - deliberately. Brushes from one unfortunately cannot be automatically mirrored in the other. If you have previously used the Beta, created brushes in it and these have now disappeared, then we have a problem and could do with this bug reporting in a new thread :)

 

ALL - sorry that some of the long-standing requests aren’t here this time. Over the last development cycle I’ve been very busy writing the iPad version so I haven’t had chance to look at those issues- but now the iPad version has been written, I should be able to dedicate more time to those long-requested features :)

 

Thanks!

Matt

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43 minutes ago, Uncle Mez said:

Like with the new APhoto i have to load my 10000's brushes, styles, color palettes etc... Ouch ! can it be fixed so nex version can pickup stuffs loaded on old one ?

if not possible please let us know so we can prepare in advance.
Blessings !

The RELEASE build will pick up all your brushes and palettes, but with sandboxing this beta only picks up the brushes and palettes from the last beta release on your machine !

Anything else is quite hard

(Should have pressed submit before I drove home!, Thanks Matt)

 

Patrick Connor
Serif Europe Ltd

"There is nothing noble in being superior to your fellow man. True nobility lies in being superior to your previous self."  W. L. Sheldon

 

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Hi,

would it be possible to put all those brushes, regardless the applications, in one common brushes folder and when we start any of them, it should choose which to load?

All the latest releases of Designer, Photo and Publisher (retail and beta) on MacOS and Windows.
15” Dell Inspiron 7559 i7 Windows 10 x64 Pro Intel Core i7-6700HQ (3.50 GHz, 6M) 16 GB Dual Channel DDR3L 1600 MHz (8GBx2) NVIDIA GeForce GTX 960M 4 GB GDDR5 500 GB SSD + 1 TB HDD UHD (3840 x 2160) Truelife LED - Backlit Touch Display
32” LG 32UN650-W display 3840 x 2160 UHD, IPS, HDR10 Color Gamut: DCI-P3 95%, Color Calibrated 2 x HDMI, 1 x DisplayPort
13.3” MacBook Pro (2017) Ventura 13.6 Intel Core i7 (3.50 GHz Dual Core) 16 GB 2133 MHz LPDDR3 Intel Iris Plus Graphics 650 1536 MB 500 GB SSD Retina Display (3360 x 2100)

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15 minutes ago, MattP said:

ALL - sorry that some of the long-standing requests aren’t here this time. Over the last development cycle I’ve been very busy writing the iPad version so I haven’t had chance to look at those issues- but now the iPad version has been written, I should be able to dedicate more time to those long-requested features :)

 

Thanks!

Matt

@MattP Are you the only developer/coder? If so, that's incredible, I thought Serif was a small to medium company.

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30 minutes ago, MattP said:

Aaron - iPad version will follow shortly after :)

 

Uncle Mez - the Beta and Store versions are completely separate - deliberately. Brushes from one unfortunately cannot be automatically mirrored in the other. If you have previously used the Beta, created brushes in it and these have now disappeared, then we have a problem and could do with this bug reporting in a new thread :)

 

ALL - sorry that some of the long-standing requests aren’t here this time. Over the last development cycle I’ve been very busy writing the iPad version so I haven’t had chance to look at those issues- but now the iPad version has been written, I should be able to dedicate more time to those long-requested features :)

 

Thanks!

Matt

Does it mean that 1.8 or 1.9 will come out faster than 1.7? :)

All the latest releases of Designer, Photo and Publisher (retail and beta) on MacOS and Windows.
15” Dell Inspiron 7559 i7 Windows 10 x64 Pro Intel Core i7-6700HQ (3.50 GHz, 6M) 16 GB Dual Channel DDR3L 1600 MHz (8GBx2) NVIDIA GeForce GTX 960M 4 GB GDDR5 500 GB SSD + 1 TB HDD UHD (3840 x 2160) Truelife LED - Backlit Touch Display
32” LG 32UN650-W display 3840 x 2160 UHD, IPS, HDR10 Color Gamut: DCI-P3 95%, Color Calibrated 2 x HDMI, 1 x DisplayPort
13.3” MacBook Pro (2017) Ventura 13.6 Intel Core i7 (3.50 GHz Dual Core) 16 GB 2133 MHz LPDDR3 Intel Iris Plus Graphics 650 1536 MB 500 GB SSD Retina Display (3360 x 2100)

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Just now, MattP said:

Not necessarily, but it might mean you get a 1.7.1/.2/.whatever that has more features in it? :)

Wow. That's great. Maybe it will be version 1.7 33 1/3 as "The Naked Gun"? :)

All the latest releases of Designer, Photo and Publisher (retail and beta) on MacOS and Windows.
15” Dell Inspiron 7559 i7 Windows 10 x64 Pro Intel Core i7-6700HQ (3.50 GHz, 6M) 16 GB Dual Channel DDR3L 1600 MHz (8GBx2) NVIDIA GeForce GTX 960M 4 GB GDDR5 500 GB SSD + 1 TB HDD UHD (3840 x 2160) Truelife LED - Backlit Touch Display
32” LG 32UN650-W display 3840 x 2160 UHD, IPS, HDR10 Color Gamut: DCI-P3 95%, Color Calibrated 2 x HDMI, 1 x DisplayPort
13.3” MacBook Pro (2017) Ventura 13.6 Intel Core i7 (3.50 GHz Dual Core) 16 GB 2133 MHz LPDDR3 Intel Iris Plus Graphics 650 1536 MB 500 GB SSD Retina Display (3360 x 2100)

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The construction mode looks like it'll be very handy to be able to create points/shapes that can be snapped to but aren't in the drawing.

Is there a way to delete points when they aren't needed any more?  I see they can be moved but when I don't need them any more they could get in the way (snapping wise).

I see the history is for the time in Construction mode.  But going out of construction mode looses the construction history, so that can't be used to delete the construction points.

When a construction shape is created I see it can be moved but I don't see anyway to change the diameter of the circle.  We would have to move the existing circle out of the way then find the same center and then create a new circle, correct?

iMac (27-inch, Late 2009) with macOS Sierra

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12 hours ago, Gear maker said:

The construction mode looks like it'll be very handy to be able to create points/shapes that can be snapped to but aren't in the drawing.

Is there a way to delete points when they aren't needed any more?  I see they can be moved but when I don't need them any more they could get in the way (snapping wise).

I see the history is for the time in Construction mode.  But going out of construction mode looses the construction history, so that can't be used to delete the construction points.

When a construction shape is created I see it can be moved but I don't see anyway to change the diameter of the circle.  We would have to move the existing circle out of the way then find the same center and then create a new circle, correct?

Hi! :)

Construction objects can be deleted by Ctrl-clicking their visible handle - this is because they aren't ever 'selected' so there's no way to select one and press Delete. I've spoken to Ben about resizing circle construction objects and we'll look at this - sorry about the inconvenience in the meantime... :/ 

Thanks,

Matt

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17 hours ago, fde101 said:

All three of the betas seem to take offense at not keeping a document that was created and never saved before quitting - if I create a document (any of the three betas) and quit with the document still open but never saved, I get the "Restore unsaved file?" box.  I'm starting to wonder if that is intentional, or if I should create a bug report thread for it?  It is not exactly a desirable behavior when I already told it not to bother saving it when I quit...

This is something I've noticed a fair bit - I'll get it passed on to development! Thanks :) 

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