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[ADe] Select same color / fill / stroke / appearance


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Instead of just ranting, why don't you guys use the time for constructive discussion about how such a feature should or could be best implemented?

Frankly, I cringe every time I hear someone say "Select Same"; clearly a reference to Adobe Illustrator's mediocre implementation. It also was very long-in-coming, and when it finally happened, it was a face-palm disappointment to FreeHand users who for years prior had become accustomed to its Graphic Find & Replace feature.

I have yet to see its match in any mainstream 2D drawing program.

JET

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Personally I find a select similar function (when importing large documents and you have to clean them up) - or an import dwg/dxf function with maintaining layers - just very very handy for a vector software like Affinity Designer.

Don't get me wrong, I do love Affinity Designer.

But that those two essential functions are missing (knowing my industry, architecture & design) is just very weird.

Those 2 functions and maybe something similar to live trace and tons of architects will switch over from Illustrator. In my opinion.

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34 minutes ago, JET_Affinity said:

Instead of just ranting, why don't you guys use the time for constructive discussion about how such a feature should or could be best implemented?

Frankly, I cringe every time I hear someone say "Select Same"; clearly a reference to Adobe Illustrator's mediocre implantation. It also was very long-in-coming, and when it finally happened, it was a face-palm disappointment to FreeHand users who for years prior had become accustomed to its Graphic Find & Replace feature.

I have yet to see its match in any mainstream 2D drawing program.

JET

To be fair, I think if the Serif team opened up to the community and said something like:

"we messed up, we should have dealt with this request years ago but we are now focussed on delivering it ASAP. However, we would love your ideas as to how best to implement it to make it the best implementation of such a feature in any app"

That would have changed the course of this discussion and many would be enthusiastically coming up with and discussing ideas.

That's not happened though and don't think it is really the fault of the community.

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On ‎4‎/‎28‎/‎2020 at 9:04 AM, robinp said:

To be fair, I think if the Serif team opened up to the community and said something like:

"we messed up, we should have dealt with this request years ago but we are now focussed on delivering it ASAP. However, we would love your ideas as to how best to implement it to make it the best implementation of such a feature in any app"

That would have changed the course of this discussion and many would be enthusiastically coming up with and discussing ideas.

That's not happened though and don't think it is really the fault of the community.

You mean just like when Affinity devs asked those who consider an auto-tracing feature to be so 'fundamental' and 'essential' that the program is 'useless' to them without it, to post some before-and-after examples? That still hasn't happened, yet the (often rude) ranting continues.

I'm just saying: This is not just a user-to-Serif forum about desired features; it's as much a user-to-user forum for discussions of the merits of features. Otherwise, it wouldn't be a forum; it would just be a one-way 'black hole' for feature requests to be sent to the vendor, just like it was in the Adobe forums for years.

I quite agree that the ability to search and edit by attribute is a powerful feature, especially when powerfully implemented (and infinitely more important than yet another 'me, too' auto-trace feature). But it only takes one sentence in one post to tell Affinity that. It would be more productive—and probably more informative to Serif—to discuss how it could differentiate itself by exceeding the mediocrity of status-quo.

I can't speak for Serif, but I seriously doubt it's in the business of building an Adobe Illustrator clone. And that's the last thing I want to see it become. We're one-fifth into the 21st century. I want better.

JET

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Of course Affinity Designer is an Illustrator competitor.

As customers we just want some consideration of industry standards because we have to import file formats like dwg/dxf (the MOST popular vector format) or a handy selection tool which selects similar line weights/strokes/colors.

Nothing special or complicated.

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Yeah, there’s a lot of excuse making that goes on in this and other threads for why really simple features haven’t been implemented. 

Quite often they veer towards the “we should want something better than the basic solution offered elsewhere”. Except what everyone is crying out for IS the basic solution available elsewhere as a minimum.

There are, of course, obviously many ways the ‘select same’ tools in Illustrator could be improved upon. It sounds like Freehand had a much better solution for example. And probably there are much better ways that are available now than there were ~20 years ago with computing power being dramatically increased and resolution of computer screens allowing much more UI detail / info than before. 

But, it doesn’t get away from the fact that a basic feature could and should be able to be implemented very quickly. That would be sufficient for people to get their work done. If an earth shattering revolutionary solution is coming years down the line then great, but please just deliver the basic one quickly first so that we can get on. 

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40 minutes ago, robinp said:

Yeah, there’s a lot of excuse making that goes on in this and other threads for why really simple features haven’t been implemented. 

Quite often they veer towards the “we should want something better than the basic solution offered elsewhere”. Except what everyone is crying out for IS the basic solution available elsewhere as a minimum.

There are, of course, obviously many ways the ‘select same’ tools in Illustrator could be improved upon. It sounds like Freehand had a much better solution for example. And probably there are much better ways that are available now than there were ~20 years ago with computing power being dramatically increased and resolution of computer screens allowing much more UI detail / info than before. 

But, it doesn’t get away from the fact that a basic feature could and should be able to be implemented very quickly. That would be sufficient for people to get their work done. If an earth shattering revolutionary solution is coming years down the line then great, but please just deliver the basic one quickly first so that we can get on. 

Totally agree

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"Five years of intensive refinement since launch have been dedicated to our unwavering vision of a powerful, super-smooth app which improves your workflow and allows your creativity to shine."

"The engine behind Affinity Designer is built to handle huge documents so you can be confident in adding all those tiny details without any compromise to performance."

https://affinity.serif.com/en-gb/designer/ 

Every day I wish I could use Affinity Designer for its intended purpose - my design workflow cannot happen without select same functionality. I can add tiny details but there are always too many to select one by one.

I would like to see redundant requests (and likes) continue until this thread is no longer needed.

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11 minutes ago, tropilio said:

Well this is actually false advertising! Imagine having to work on that CAD drawing without "select similar😂 (even though I'm not sure how you would import it into AD...)

It's referring to the software "engine" being able to handle/draw complex documents and the software performance once created. This thread/conversation is about being able to easily manipulate those documents once created, not the drawing engine behind it. Also the example was made in Affinity Designer, not imported, though I am not sure if that is what you meant.

Select Similar is needed for all your use cases, but that wording in the screenshot is not relevant to this discussion and not false advertising

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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5 minutes ago, Patrick Connor said:

It's referring to the software "engine" being able to handle/draw complex documents and the software performance once created. This thread/conversation is about being able to easily manipulate those documents once created, not the drawing engine behind it. Also the example was made in Affinity Designer, not imported, though I am not sure if that is what you meant.

Select Similar is needed for all your use cases, but that wording in the screenshot is not relevant to this discussion and not false advertising

False advertising refers to "false, misleading, or unproven information to advertise products to consumers". I get what you mean, but if I, as a potential customer, look at that image on the website, I could be easily misled into thinking that that's an imported cad drawing that I can manipulate in AD. Or at least, that's what I thought. I also find the sentence "Optimised for documents of any complexity" quite misleading (because of the lack of the "select similar"), but again, maybe it's just me.

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3 hours ago, tropilio said:

Optimised for documents of any complexity

coud be read as “Optimised for importing documents of any complexity” to “handle 1000s of [imported] objects with no lag” because it does not say “creating” or “your”

But of course only Serif knows the answer to that feature request.

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I understand you may think it looks like an imported document, but that may be because you are used to cad applications and wire-frames.

All the artwork in our marketing website is 100% created within the application. Anything else would be misleading imho. To assume that the picture you are looking at on a page about Affinity Designer was probably created in another application and then imported to be screen shot for a page talking about our vector design software seems quite a leap. That image is advertising through a screenshot what you can do, not what you might see if you import something designed in another application. 

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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2 minutes ago, Josh Neufeld said:

I think the point was that it would be difficult to work with such a complex file using Affinity Designer because select same functionality is missing.

Yes that is the point, I 100% agree. Select Same would help with this use case and the thread should focus on that (if others feel it needs to say anything more about it)

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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On 4/28/2020 at 8:26 AM, JET_Affinity said:

Instead of just ranting, why don't you guys use the time for constructive discussion about how such a feature should or could be best implemented?

Because people are getting the point that constructive ideas are just wasting time.  Ranting is what's left when you ask for something for 5 years, and get nowhere.  Sooner or later people will understand that the feature is not going to happen.

 

On 4/28/2020 at 8:26 AM, JET_Affinity said:

Frankly, I cringe every time I hear someone say "Select Same"; clearly a reference to Adobe Illustrator's mediocre implantation.

The advantage of Illustrator's implementation is speed.  Plain and simple.  Just one tap and it finds exactly what you're looking for.  You can bind it into an action and work even faster.  Coreldraw has a similar implementation as Freehand.  Longwinded, tabbed pages of questions.  After using that just once, you never want to use it again.  That's why people created macros in Coreldraw to immitate how Illustrator works as closely as possible.  Although the macros are good, it's probably just not really possible to truly reach the level of speed and simplicity that you find with Illustrator.

On 4/28/2020 at 8:26 AM, JET_Affinity said:

I have yet to see its match in any mainstream 2D drawing program.

And I have yet to see Illustrator's simple and fast implementation in any 2D drawing program.  Both have merits.  I personally wouldn't be able to work with how Freehand does it, or Coreldraw.

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On 4/28/2020 at 9:04 AM, robinp said:

To be fair, I think if the Serif team opened up to the community and said something like:

"we messed up, we should have dealt with this request years ago but we are now focussed on delivering it ASAP. However, we would love your ideas as to how best to implement it to make it the best implementation of such a feature in any app"

That would have changed the course of this discussion and many would be enthusiastically coming up with and discussing ideas.

That's not happened though and don't think it is really the fault of the community.

I don't believe they've messed up.  I believe they're executing their own plan which doesn't necessarily match up with the wishes of some of it's userbase.  Meanwhile, tons of people declare their love for Affinity Designer and hatred of the program that actually has the features that people are begging for.

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Just now, Kuttyjoe said:

I don't believe they've messed up.  I believe they're executing their own plan which doesn't necessarily match up with the wishes of some of it's userbase.  Meanwhile, tons of people declare their love for Affinity Designer and hatred of the program that actually has the features that people are begging for.

 

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