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Third Party Plug-in Support for Designer


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I completely agree this would be a great feature to add and would add a lot of value to the  product. Unfortunately I have also seen previously that their stance is that they will not be exposing the ability for third parties to make add-ons or extend the program. Not sure if they have reconsidered this stance in the last year or so, but I think they should. I personally would like to write a plugin or two.

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Here is a fairly recent interview with Ashley Hewson. The last part reads as follows:

  • For now, the main effort is on getting Publisher out of the door early next year. After that, Hewson says there will probably be an asset manager to organise Affinity files, perhaps in 2020. In the meantime, Serif plans to work on extensibility, to open up Affinity so third parties can write plugins and links, historically part of the appeal of Adobe’s and Quark’s success. “If everything goes well we may have that capability towards the end of next year, 12 months away,” says Hewson. “We will then be wanting to talk to people who might want to take advantage of that. There are very specific high end use cases for print.” 

Best regards!

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Hi all,

I totally agree. Support for 3rd party plugins, as they are available for sketch would definitely add a lot of value to your fine product. Almost every platform, supporting design systems as (atomize, zeplin, marvel, invision,... you name it) and therefore facilitating a designers workflow and supporting collaboration with the kind of plugins mentioned here.

I understand, that e.g. sketch files kinda automatically transform into code (css) and affinity designer does not (yet???) has this feature 9_9 but I hope it will - sometime in the future. And maybe then it will be possible to deliver an API for progammers to make such things possible.

In the meantime, it would be grate to find a way so we can directly open sketch files in affinity designer and the other way around :-) without taking a detour through svg or the like.

Best regards and thanks for keeping that good work up!

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On 1/17/2019 at 11:56 AM, jamesholden said:

Good point.

What's Sketch like for vector work, logos and illustrations?

To reiterate, though I value Affinity's entrance into the market, I think they're missing a trick here by not having it earlier. Noted though it is slated for inclusion.

All the UX apps are fairly basic when it comes to vector work but it depends what you need to do. Assuming you're talking about more than drawing some boxes and stuff then Sketch isn't too bad for icon work for example (Figma next best, XD really bad but they expect you to use and pay for AI for real drawing), even proper icons not the child like ones that seem to be everywhere. It would be fine for logos. I don't see why you couldn't use it for posters and stuff but I've not tried so not seen if there are any shortcomings. But I count Sketch as more specialised, even if you ignore prototyping, it's more to do with screens and pixel perfect drawing that can do some general purpose stuff too.

But you do really have to rely on plugins to plug gaps even for some basic functionality. For example select same you only get via a plugin. The trouble with relying on plugins is that most are by individuals and they can and do give up on them for various reasons,  fed up of the api's changing and breaking stuff, moved to another app, not enough time. Sometimes that might be the only one so then you're a bit stuck.

Here's a few things that I've noticed Sketch does that AD doesn't regarding drawing:

  • Round to Pixel, like AI's Align selected art to pixel grid button (Figma has the same option). This is a must have for me when working on pixel perfect stuff like icons or UI anything.  It's no good just snapping to pixel when you draw you also need to be able to re-snap when you scale etc. I'm not doing that manually.
  • Fills & Strokes. Like pretty much every other app you can have multiple fills and strokes (and normally effects too). Not a big deal for me but nice to have.  Plus it has a few more fill options like picture and more control over noise.
  • Effects. Like blur and drop shadow are converted to SVG filters when exporting SVG. AD exports them as raster, which sort of defeats the point in using SVG.
  • Offset Path, that's a basic tool that everyone uses except when you don't have it.
  • Locking layers, actually locks them like you'd expect. I know you can sort of do it in AD but it's clunky, it should just do what it says. 

That's also sort of my list of reasons I can't even consider using AD for icon/UI design. That plus lack of scripting and things like the much discussed select same and the expand stroke problems.

 

Marc

ArtByMarc.me

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  • 2 weeks later...
On 1/22/2019 at 10:51 AM, VectorVonDoom said:

All the UX apps are fairly basic when it comes to vector work but it depends what you need to do. Assuming you're talking about more than drawing some boxes and stuff then Sketch isn't too bad for icon work for example (Figma next best, XD really bad but they expect you to use and pay for AI for real drawing), even proper icons not the child like ones that seem to be everywhere. It would be fine for logos. I don't see why you couldn't use it for posters and stuff but I've not tried so not seen if there are any shortcomings. But I count Sketch as more specialised, even if you ignore prototyping, it's more to do with screens and pixel perfect drawing that can do some general purpose stuff too.

But you do really have to rely on plugins to plug gaps even for some basic functionality. For example select same you only get via a plugin. The trouble with relying on plugins is that most are by individuals and they can and do give up on them for various reasons,  fed up of the api's changing and breaking stuff, moved to another app, not enough time. Sometimes that might be the only one so then you're a bit stuck.

Here's a few things that I've noticed Sketch does that AD doesn't regarding drawing:

  • Round to Pixel, like AI's Align selected art to pixel grid button (Figma has the same option). This is a must have for me when working on pixel perfect stuff like icons or UI anything.  It's no good just snapping to pixel when you draw you also need to be able to re-snap when you scale etc. I'm not doing that manually.
  • Fills & Strokes. Like pretty much every other app you can have multiple fills and strokes (and normally effects too). Not a big deal for me but nice to have.  Plus it has a few more fill options like picture and more control over noise.
  • Effects. Like blur and drop shadow are converted to SVG filters when exporting SVG. AD exports them as raster, which sort of defeats the point in using SVG.
  • Offset Path, that's a basic tool that everyone uses except when you don't have it.
  • Locking layers, actually locks them like you'd expect. I know you can sort of do it in AD but it's clunky, it should just do what it says. 

That's also sort of my list of reasons I can't even consider using AD for icon/UI design. That plus lack of scripting and things like the much discussed select same and the expand stroke problems.

Thanks, this is actually helpful too.I really hope they expedite the inclusion of some of these features.

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  • 2 weeks later...

I think that supporting Photoshop plugins, the old .8bf style ones as non-destructive Live FX would be great. Internally it would convert the object to bitmap and apply the plugin then keep a cache of the result to show for the object. Then changing the settings of the applied filters is allowed. Same way that Fireworks handles .8bf plugins non-destructively on vector objects. I use lots of the KPT and Alienware plugins on vector shapes in Fireworks mixed with dropshadows and glows and transparent texture fills etc is really cool.

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On 2/10/2019 at 2:48 AM, terrox said:

I think that supporting Photoshop plugins, the old .8bf style ones as non-destructive Live FX would be great. Internally it would convert the object to bitmap and apply the plugin then keep a cache of the result to show for the object. Then changing the settings of the applied filters is allowed. Same way that Fireworks handles .8bf plugins non-destructively on vector objects. I use lots of the KPT and Alienware plugins on vector shapes in Fireworks mixed with dropshadows and glows and transparent texture fills etc is really cool.

I agree with this quite profoundly.

I live in hope.

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