Jump to content
You must now use your email address to sign in [click for more info] ×

Publisher release


Recommended Posts

The answer to all "when do you plan to release?" questions has always been the same since the first Affinity app beta was made available to users. That answer is "when it is ready."

This is because they cannot predict how long it will take to refine all the features & iron out all the bugs that prevent a beta version from being suitable for serious/commercial use.

All 3 1.10.8, & all 3 V2.4.0 Mac apps; 2020 iMac 27"; 3.8GHz i7, Radeon Pro 5700, 32GB RAM; macOS 10.15.7
Affinity Photo 
1.10.8; Affinity Designer 1.108; & all 3 V2 apps for iPad; 6th Generation iPad 32 GB; Apple Pencil; iPadOS 15.7

Link to comment
Share on other sites

9 hours ago, Muadib24 said:

Hi, When do you plan to release Affinity Publisher? Last Beta is great and I can't stand InDesign anymore! Please hurry up...

Old proverb:   "Patience is a virtue."    Old response.   "Virtue is its own reward."     When Publisher is ready it will be even better than it is now!    We are all waiting in pleasant anticipation!!


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

Link to comment
Share on other sites

2 hours ago, Flo-rian said:

What would change with a release for you? If it's great now, you can use it already. No need for a "stable" version.

Yes, it's great already, but...

"As this is a beta it is 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 where you may be adversely affected by the application failing, including the total loss of any documents."

And the other - and more serious - problem is that you can't yet change between the applications (Affinity Designer & Affinity Photo) when working on an Affinity Publisher document.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

1 hour ago, janndk said:

And the other - and more serious - problem is that you can't yet change between the applications (Affinity Designer & Affinity Photo) when working on an Affinity Publisher document.

It's not a "problem", it's just not ready.

It's a good thing that Serif take their time to polish Publisher. I'm confident it will become a great tool at release, but right now it needs more love. And that needs time. Everything is fine.

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

Link to comment
Share on other sites

8 minutes ago, Steps said:

It's not a "problem", it's just not ready.

It's a good thing that Serif take their time to polish Publisher. I'm confident it will become a great tool at release, but right now it needs more love. And that needs time. Everything is fine.

A problem if you use it (beta) now.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

22 minutes ago, janndk said:

A problem if you use it (beta) now.

It would be an even bigger problem if they did not take the time to work out the issues in the beta that make it unsuitable for production use & at some point in the beta cycle just released it 'as is' as a retail product.

All 3 1.10.8, & all 3 V2.4.0 Mac apps; 2020 iMac 27"; 3.8GHz i7, Radeon Pro 5700, 32GB RAM; macOS 10.15.7
Affinity Photo 
1.10.8; Affinity Designer 1.108; & all 3 V2 apps for iPad; 6th Generation iPad 32 GB; Apple Pencil; iPadOS 15.7

Link to comment
Share on other sites

8 minutes ago, R C-R said:

It would be an even bigger problem if they did not take the time to work out the issues in the beta that make it unsuitable for production use & at some point in the beta cycle just released it 'as is' as a retail product.

Exactly.

Releasing it now would result in a lot of bad and angry reviews as Publisher gets unstable and unreliable at a certain point.

This would only result in refunds and image loss.

During beta you are told to expect that and you paid nothing. You fill a bug report instead of write a bad review. Total different situation.

 

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

Link to comment
Share on other sites

1 minute ago, Muadib24 said:

I did not make a bad review, I just wanted an estimate of the release date. stay zen ...

I did not mean you.

With "reviews" I really think of that what magazines / blogs like Macworld, TopTenReviews, dpreview and others write. People will listen to that.

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

Link to comment
Share on other sites

4 minutes ago, Michail said:

What it looks like when unfinished software is thrown onto the market can currently be observed with "Luminar 3" !

Which review do you refer to? I do not use that software, but quick googling shows up many 4 star ratings. Not too bad I think.

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

Link to comment
Share on other sites

33 minutes ago, Steps said:

Which review do you refer to? I do not use that software, but quick googling shows up many 4 star ratings. Not too bad I think.

Stars back and forth. Luminar 3 wants to be a serious alternative for Lightroom. But functionality, speed and reliability of the image management correspond at best to a beta version.

But this is not about Luminar. We shouldn't keep pulling the chain again and again. We should let Serif do his work.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

On 1/11/2019 at 5:12 PM, janndk said:

Yes, it's great already, but...

"As this is a beta it is 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 where you may be adversely affected by the application failing, including the total loss of any documents."

And the other - and more serious - problem is that you can't yet change between the applications (Affinity Designer & Affinity Photo) when working on an Affinity Publisher document.

Not to sound like an old fart, but I'd say that that “other more serious problem” you've mentioned is the least of Serif's worries, and not very serious at all if you really think about it.

The whole Designer/Photo Persona thing *is* quite overrated in Publisher, especially for professional users who own Macs and PCs powerful enough to have all three apps loaded simultaneously and are already used to have their linked stuff on a separate folder and to open it up manually. In fact, I don't even know how those Personas will behave; kind of like a “lite” version of each of the other apps, and also like how when you double click on an embedded or linked file in later versions of CS and CC the corresponding app loads up?

As for the other apps, I personally use Designer and Photo, sometimes in the same project, and I rarely if ever use the Pixel persona in Designer. Yes, it surely can come in handy for illustrators, but it really wouldn't bother me personally if that feature wasn't there… As a regular old graphic designer, I like keeping my vector and pixel editing apps as separate as possible, thank you very much. On the other hand, I can appreciate the fact that said Persona exists probably segregates pixel editing features further than in Illustrator, thus simplifying the main Vector Persona by comparison, which is a great thing in my book, so I know I'm definitely reaping the benefits of a feature I don't even actively use that much.

I know I may be in the minority here when it comes to Designer, but I can assure you that when it comes to Publisher, an app squarely aimed at the InDesign and QuarkXPress camp, I'm not. Editing stuff inline or having a nice little shortcut is most definitely *not* a serious omission, and it's not what's holding Publisher's release back, either. I'd gladly trade that feature over the other missing ones I've mentioned time and time again (proper master page support, anchored object support, global layers, etc. – not to mention a multi-line composer clone, but I fully accept that to take multiple years to be available), because being able to do your projects in a less-than-super-elegant but timely way beats not being able to do them at all in a cutthroat environment with crazy deadlines, stupid clients who drag their feet and whatnot, and I'm betting the Serif guys are hard at work on those features as we speak.

That doesn't mean that said marquee feature, a seamless and elegant continuum between apps and file formats, won't come to pass sooner rather than later. But yeah, if they quietly dropped it, no one in the DTP community would bat an eye. As long as the files were fully compatible and rendered correctly (and I believe they already are), we would be just happy.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

3 hours ago, JGD said:

The whole Designer/Photo Persona thing *is* quite overrated in Publisher, especially for professional users who own Macs and PCs powerful enough to have all three apps loaded simultaneously and are already used to have their linked stuff on a separate folder and to open it up manually. In fact, I don't even know how those Personas will behave; kind of like a “lite” version of each of the other apps, and also like how when you double click on an embedded or linked file in later versions of CS and CC the corresponding app loads up?

I don't think it has something to do with the computers performance. I suspect even low end computers to be able running all three apps in parralel as I find Affinity apps to be quite efficient on resources (with the little exception of Publishers current memory problem).

I think the Personas and their tight integration will speed up the workflow.

Think of this... I look through a nearly finished photo book and spot a blemish on one photo I missed before. Can I get with two clicks (one on the Persona, another on the tool) to my Inpainting brush to fix that or will I have to look up the linked resource out of a folder with 200 of it, fix it there and update it in Publisher?

In the same way it's hard with linked resource updating if I want all photos on a page to match a specific style/theme. Change outside and update in a loop until ready.

With the "Edit in Photo" option I can at least do the latter in an easier way, but it forces Publisher to close the file for the hand over. This is not a solution, it's at best a workaround.

YMMV

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

Link to comment
Share on other sites

4 hours ago, Steps said:

I don't think it has something to do with the computers performance. I suspect even low end computers to be able running all three apps in parralel as I find Affinity apps to be quite efficient on resources (with the little exception of Publishers current memory problem).

FWIW, I sometimes have Safari plus all three betas & both retail apps running at the same time on my old iMac (specs below in my sig). I don't usually have projects open in all five Affinity apps at the same time, & none of my Affinity Publisher projects are very large, but aside from some things taking a little longer than usual, it all works surprisingly well.

All 3 1.10.8, & all 3 V2.4.0 Mac apps; 2020 iMac 27"; 3.8GHz i7, Radeon Pro 5700, 32GB RAM; macOS 10.15.7
Affinity Photo 
1.10.8; Affinity Designer 1.108; & all 3 V2 apps for iPad; 6th Generation iPad 32 GB; Apple Pencil; iPadOS 15.7

Link to comment
Share on other sites

19 minutes ago, R C-R said:

FWIW, I sometimes have Safari plus all three betas & both retail apps running at the same time on my old iMac (specs below in my sig). I don't usually have projects open in all five Affinity apps at the same time, & none of my Affinity Publisher projects are very large, but aside from some things taking a little longer than usual, it all works surprisingly well.

It's number one of their mission statements. :)

Affinity apps truly have a very good performance. Photo does match PSE 12 in speed on my computer. Sadly the same cannot be said about PSP 2019.

Even if Publisher is Beta on my computer is performs really well. It's super fast in all actions I perform and absolutely realieable until you hit a certain project size. Then it starts to fail badly. But once you get below this limit again it works like a charm.

So in regards of performance and stability I have nothing to complain. *praise* :)

And I just got my ordered a print of my very complex 86 page photobook project at Saal Digital using the PDF export.
Mission accomplished! Publisher is very capable of doing this. And for the upcoming project later this year I guess the crashing problems will be solved so that I have not to rasterize everything half way to keep the project size low.
And if they fix some of the usability issues it's getting even better.

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

Link to comment
Share on other sites

@Steps, I have not tried adding lots of images to an Affinity Publisher beta document on my Mac, which seems to be (one of?) the causes for the instability/crash issue. Time permitting, I will try to do that to see if this might be a Windows-only issue or a more general one affecting both versions. 

Since my old & slow iMac has only 8GB of memory, I suspect that if it is a memory related problem, I will see signs of it starting to appear fairly quickly.

All 3 1.10.8, & all 3 V2.4.0 Mac apps; 2020 iMac 27"; 3.8GHz i7, Radeon Pro 5700, 32GB RAM; macOS 10.15.7
Affinity Photo 
1.10.8; Affinity Designer 1.108; & all 3 V2 apps for iPad; 6th Generation iPad 32 GB; Apple Pencil; iPadOS 15.7

Link to comment
Share on other sites

@R C-R Good idea, thank you. Everything that creates some insight on that will be helpful.

I invested a lot of time in this issue because I really want help to rule that out.

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

Link to comment
Share on other sites

14 minutes ago, Steps said:

Good idea, thank you. Everything that creates some insight on that will be helpful.

FWIW, I just started testing this & ran into a bit of a snag: I do not have that many large image files to test with. For now, to keep things simple I am making do by embedding photos from my Apple Photos library in a one page, one Master page Affinity Publisher document, but they are all JPEGs that come from either a Nikon point & shoot model or an iPhone 5s, so they are all mostly in the 5-6 MB range.

So far, I have only placed 71 library photos on the page. Surprisingly, everything I have done in APub is still buttery smooth, even though the Mac Activity Monitor app shows 'memory pressure' is (for the first time in a long time) in the yellow zone, indicating more memory would improve performance:
1449702957_MempressureAPubcrashtest.jpg.493ac35764f6694ca7308088c7523ca5.jpg

As shown, it even dropped back into the green zone after the first save. What it not surprising is when running 'in the yellow' the other apps I have open are slow to respond to user input, take longer to launch, & so on -- but when frontmost the beta is still performing well. Some of this is probably because of how the MacOS manages memory (like by compressing some stuff in memory to reduce the need to swap it out to VM pages on the drive) but considering that I only have 8 GB of real memory for everything & my startup drive is a very basic lackluster 1 TB WD Caviar Blue, I have nothing to complain about so far.

I will try to do more testing later on with more files & see what happens, but for now I have other things to do that take priority.

All 3 1.10.8, & all 3 V2.4.0 Mac apps; 2020 iMac 27"; 3.8GHz i7, Radeon Pro 5700, 32GB RAM; macOS 10.15.7
Affinity Photo 
1.10.8; Affinity Designer 1.108; & all 3 V2 apps for iPad; 6th Generation iPad 32 GB; Apple Pencil; iPadOS 15.7

Link to comment
Share on other sites

@R C-R Yes, up to a certain point somewhere above 200 high-res photos everything runs really smooth and than it turns all the sudden. Keep on. :)

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

Link to comment
Share on other sites

13 hours ago, Steps said:

I don't think it has something to do with the computers performance. I suspect even low end computers to be able running all three apps in parralel as I find Affinity apps to be quite efficient on resources (with the little exception of Publishers current memory problem).

I think the Personas and their tight integration will speed up the workflow.

Think of this... I look through a nearly finished photo book and spot a blemish on one photo I missed before. Can I get with two clicks (one on the Persona, another on the tool) to my Inpainting brush to fix that or will I have to look up the linked resource out of a folder with 200 of it, fix it there and update it in Publisher?

In the same way it's hard with linked resource updating if I want all photos on a page to match a specific style/theme. Change outside and update in a loop until ready.

With the "Edit in Photo" option I can at least do the latter in an easier way, but it forces Publisher to close the file for the hand over. This is not a solution, it's at best a workaround.

YMMV

That's all fine and dandy, but that should not be their #1 priority, sorry. The extra few seconds it takes to open that one file externally are negligible in comparison with the extra seconds, multiplied by whatever number of objects you have (at which point they would become minutes, if not hours), it would take to reposition them all in case you made some change just because there wasn't an inline/anchored object functionality in Publisher yet. The same goes for having to redo an entire project because you can't fill master page text frames with content, resize or reposition them after the fact and have the corresponding pages and content reflect those changes.

That's how professional DTP apps work, and the whole point of using a DTP app instead of WordPad or TextEdit.app (i'm not even comparing DTP apps with Word or Pages, because those two can do that, too, and produce very decent results if you take your time to learn how to get them to do it). Nobody with more complex workflows and projects will even give Publisher a serious go if those features aren't there, and if they inadvertently jump right in and buy it outright because Photo and Designer are indeed awesome, some may even get pissed, ask for a refund and even drop a bad review. With all due respect for Serif devs, I know I would, and I'm hopeful I will instead buy it on day one and be happy that it works for at least some of my more complex projects, and not just for four-page inserts… Just my €0,02, which by now must be adding up to a €10 bill or two as I've been hammering this point here for quite a while now.

Objectively speaking, the time savings brought by said novel feature, which they put front and centre on their website and InDesign kind of lacks, are vastly outweighed by the time savings (or lack thereof) brought by those super, super basic and essential features I've mentioned, hence my comment about which features Serif devs are probably working on right now. We all assumed that said marketing choice meant that the other basic features would be there, you know? As in, “look at how our app is actually superior to InDesign”… Except it isn't, because that feature doesn't make enough of a material difference in the grand scheme of things. It's kind of like selling you a boat with tire chains and expect you to use it as a snow vehicle; yes, it has a feature indeed useful for the use case it's meant for, but the core package is completely inadequate (even if you could, in theory, throw it off a snowy hill and have it slide halfway through :P ).

Link to comment
Share on other sites

5 hours ago, JGD said:

The extra few seconds it takes to open that one file externally are negligible in comparison with the extra seconds, multiplied by whatever number of objects you have (at which point they would become minutes, if not hours), it would take to reposition them all in case you made some change just because there wasn't an inline/anchored object functionality in Publisher yet.

This is highly dependent on what you are doing.  For some types of projects one of those features will save more time than the other, and for other projects it will be the reverse.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Join the conversation

You can post now and register later. If you have an account, sign in now to post with your account.
Note: Your post will require moderator approval before it will be visible.

Guest
Reply to this topic...

×   Pasted as rich text.   Paste as plain text instead

  Only 75 emoji are allowed.

×   Your link has been automatically embedded.   Display as a link instead

×   Your previous content has been restored.   Clear editor

×   You cannot paste images directly. Upload or insert images from URL.

Loading...
×
×
  • Create New...

Important Information

Terms of Use | Privacy Policy | Guidelines | We have placed cookies on your device to help make this website better. You can adjust your cookie settings, otherwise we'll assume you're okay to continue.