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


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20 minutes ago, robinp said:

Maybe, but it does seem like it should be a fairly straightforward feature to implement. Obviously I don't actually know how Designer is structured, but it would seem unthinkable to me that the attributes of each element cannot be interrogated in some fashion. Surely it is then a question of providing the UI for doing it.

I cannot answer on the ease of integration but as stated Serif have a roadmap, and appear to be quite dogged about it's implementation.

It's likely therefore that the implementation of this and/or other highly requested features are dependent only on their place in Serif's vision for Designer, as opposed to the feature's relative complexity and even level of demand (as this thread may highlight).

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6 minutes ago, jamesholden said:

I cannot answer on the ease of integration but as stated Serif have a roadmap, and appear to be quite dogged about it's implementation.

It's likely therefore that the implementation of this and/or other highly requested features are dependent only on their place in Serif's vision for Designer, as opposed to the feature's relative complexity and even level of demand (as this thread may highlight).

Is it published anywhere?

I just can't comprehend why they are dragging their feet on this one. You'd never make a text editor without a find tool. It's just simply dumb.

 

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Is anyone from Serif following this thread? From what I can see they aren't.

I really really want to be fully enthusiastic about the Affinity apps but things like this really wind me up. It's been a basic and obvious feature request since 2014 and seemingly there isn't even a prediction as to when it might be implemented.

Are they holding back for v2 so that they can charge more / charge again? If that's the reason at least I could kind of understand; they've got to pay the bills but it would be good to be told if that is the reason.

 @MEB

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1 minute ago, jamesholden said:

PS I am not familiar with Serif's style of roadmaps, but hopefully this is what you meant

 

 

Thanks, I saw that but its date is from 2014 so I thought it must be really very out of date. This is a really bad effort at a roadmap... to the point where I don't actually believe it. There must be something more sophisticated somewhere.

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5 minutes ago, robinp said:

Is anyone from Serif following this thread? From what I can see they aren't.

I really really want to be fully enthusiastic about the Affinity apps but things like this really wind me up. It's been a basic and obvious feature request since 2014 and seemingly there isn't even a prediction as to when it might be implemented.

Are they holding back for v2 so that they can charge more / charge again? If that's the reason at least I could kind of understand; they've got to pay the bills but it would be good to be told if that is the reason.

Hi robinp,
All I know is that we plan to implement this feature at some point, however this feature never was in the roadmap which means there's no guarantees it will be here before v2.0. Features we already implemented were simply removed from the roadmap. The remaining ones should be added before v2. I understand people are a little frustrated with the long cycle/testing phase required for v1.7. This was mostly due to the integration with the upcoming Affinity Publisher which required quite a few adjustments to the whole suite of apps (file format compatibility, Personas, linked/embedded adjustments files etc etc). Now that we are approaching its release I think things will return to the initial pace with more frequent updates/new features. Hopefully this one may be one of them.

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14 minutes ago, robinp said:

Thanks, I saw that but its date is from 2014 so I thought it must be really very out of date.

Nope, this apparently is it.

14 minutes ago, robinp said:

This is a really bad effort at a roadmap... to the point where I don't actually believe it. There must be something more sophisticated somewhere.

Several may indeed agree, but sadly there is not anything more sophisticated elsewhere.

 

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5 minutes ago, MEB said:

Hi robinp,
All I know is that we plan to implement this feature at some point, however this feature never was in the roadmap which means there's no guarantees it will be here before v2.0. Features we already implemented were simply removed from the roadmap. The remaining ones should be added before v2. I understand people are a little frustrated with the long cycle/testing phase required for v1.7. This was mostly due to the integration with the upcoming Affinity Publisher which required quite a few adjustments to the whole suite of apps (file format compatibility, Personas, linked/embedded adjustments files etc etc). Now that we are approaching its release I think things will return to the initial pace with more frequent updates/new features. Hopefully this one may be one of them.

Given the lack of concern about this feature, maybe you can tell me how I should go about changing the stroke thicknesses of hundreds of lines in a single file when there are many others that I do not want to change?

My impression is that currently this is essentially impossible? Unless there is another tool that would allow it? If not, then Designer basically doesn't do the job and a most basic one at that.

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I feel I should probably elaborate as to why I find this funny.

A map shows you a full picture of what is in all directions, near and far.

This is the equivalent of the next turn on a turn by turn GPS. It is not a road map. If this feature (find by attribute) is on a list somewhere, then it should be on the roadmap, even if it does not have an implementation date so be it (much as though it is dumb) but this isn't a roadmap.

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Hi robinp,
This feature is not on the official roadmap. Sometimes we add additional features not listed there - mainly users requests - but since some of them require quite a few changes to the code or are waiting for something else to be finished before we can move forward (or for other reasons) they are not listed anywhere. Adding them to the list or giving estimates will not help anyone: it just raises expectations and frustration if they end up not implemented as planned. Sometimes things are not as straightforward as they seem looking from outside. Please bear with us.

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2 minutes ago, MEB said:

Hi robinp,
This feature is not on the official roadmap. Sometimes we add additional features not listed there - mainly users requests - but since some of them require quite a few changes to the code or are waiting for something else to be finished before we can move forward (or for other reasons) they are not listed anywhere. Adding them to the list or giving estimates will not help anyone: it just raises expectations and frustration if they end up not implemented as planned. Sometimes things are not as straightforward as they seem looking from outside. Please bear with us.

I can say from personal point of view, I’d much rather know it is coming at some point than be 5 years later and it still not be there and with no official position on it. Now THAT is frustration. 

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If I had known AD lacked a core feature like this (and then it be ignored for 5 years) I wouldn't have bought it; AD is virtually unusable to me in this state. To be completely fair though, that's on me, I shouldn't have assumed what appeared to be a "serious Illustrator contender" would have a staple feature like this. It's like if your favourite code editor didn't have a Find & Replace feature. Sure, you can use it but inevitably you're in for a world of pain that just isn't worth suffering through for the other good features.

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52 minutes ago, Sheri Schwarzweller said:

I thought I was going nuts when I couldn't figure out how to select similar colors in Affinity Designer. This is a BASIC tool for the professional. No one has time to hand select each item they want to color change.

Yeah, for what I use a vector art editor for, it would probably be one of the 1st on my list of features that I need. Ahead of layers, ahead of even basics like the eye dropper tool.

It’s just simply essential.

And yet it’s been requested for 5 years and it doesn’t even make it on to the so-called ‘roadmap’. 

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On 6/10/2019 at 6:34 PM, MEB said:

Hi robinp,
This feature is not on the official roadmap. Sometimes we add additional features not listed there - mainly users requests - but since some of them require quite a few changes to the code or are waiting for something else to be finished before we can move forward (or for other reasons) they are not listed anywhere. Adding them to the list or giving estimates will not help anyone: it just raises expectations and frustration if they end up not implemented as planned. Sometimes things are not as straightforward as they seem looking from outside. Please bear with us.

On that subject I will suggest, once again, that instead of having your roadmap here in the forums, with the upcoming features du jour, you use a Trac-like system and break them all down (both the ones you're currently working on and the upcoming ones in the mid- and long-term) across the releases where it's predictable they may appear. Even if you have to readjust that timeline down the road (as you did with Publisher, in fact; it wasn't a completely nice wait, but at least we were somewhat kept on the loop).

I take it that for business reasons you'd wish to keep novel features completely secret, but at least put the most requested and predictable, industry-standard ones in there. And put that official, extended roadmap front and centre in your website, so that prospective buyers cannot miss it. Sure, you may lose some sales because of that transparency, but you'll recoup them eventually, with the added goodwill that comes from that degree of honesty. Explaining those dependencies here on the forums after the fact and just saying “trust us” just doesn't cut it, especially when the wait extends into the rather unreasonable multi-year range. Users may wait years for an entirely new app (see above) but, unless they understand why they are waiting for a feature (and an essential one at that), they may understandably become a bit pissed off.

This system, for all your commendable transparency, is still too opaque, I'm afraid. The masses are uneasy, if not downright unhappy. I know I've been uneasy for four years (not over this feature in particular, but I hadn't noticed it wasn't there, either… and I've since added it to the list of essential features which prevent me from using Designer as my main vector app, obviously). You indeed have a lot of very happy customers, but quite a few disgruntled ones, too, it seems. It's better not to have some people as customers at the wrong time and make them wait or, worse even, spend their money unnecessarily. They'll respect you much more for that in the long run.

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45 minutes ago, B4ttleCat said:

@JGD I'm saddened I have but only one heart to give to this.

I'm even more saddened that I had to write that in the first place.

You see, shortly after Adobe's infamous CC announcement, I wrote Serif's PR team a heartfelt e-mail on June 20th, 2013 (so, almost 6 years ago) encouraging them to port their Plus suite to then Mac OS X, when apparently they were already developing the early alphas of Affinity.

I basically GUESSED that Serif was betting the farm on a cross-platform suite to go head-on with Adobe. The only recommendation I made to Serif was that they added baseline grids to PagePlus. Oh, how naïve I was back then. If the Plus suite was lacking some pro features, Affinity had to catch up with both the Plus suite and CC from a brand new codebase and their strategic decisions on how to do that have been… debatable, at the very least.

They did implement baseline grids from the get-go in Publisher (I mean, they would've been eaten alive by prospective users and the specialised press if they didn't), and then they accidentally made them customisable in Designer and Photo, only to take that functionality back with the latest v. 1.7.1 update without even acknowledging their usefulness, or my calls for them to be tested in real scenarios (I would even gladly volunteer to do so).

But that was the straw that broke the camel's back; if taking that relatively harmless and actually useful feature out (I mean, no one in their right mind would do entire complex publications in Designer instead of in Publisher) wasn't bad enough, even after I proposed that it might be accessible only to Publisher users right on the opening comment, my intelligence was basically insulted by head of QA @Patrick Connor.

To say that I'm saddened by the current state of affairs is a bit of an understatement, as you may imagine. PR should definitely start reining in all the other departments. Transparency is good, and so is direct contact with customers, but Serif is in dire need of some internal training or something.

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Crikey, what a story.

I'm in the same boat as you; I desperately want Serif to take a chunk of Adobe's pie but without a core features like this I cannot in good faith recommend Designer nor is it fit for my purpose. That's a shame because it has a lot going for it and has potential to be massive. Instead, in its current state it's gathering dust in my Applications folder.

Anyway, we digress and should keep it on topic.

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1 hour ago, B4ttleCat said:

Crikey, what a story.

I'm in the same boat as you; I desperately want Serif to take a chunk of Adobe's pie but without a core features like this I cannot in good faith recommend Designer nor is it fit for my purpose. That's a shame because it has a lot going for it and has potential to be massive. Instead, in its current state it's gathering dust in my Applications folder.

Anyway, we digress and should keep it on topic.

Indeed. I'm doing my part, and I fired up a polite e-mail at Serif, mostly about the aforementioned, err, exchange, but in which I also took the opportunity to link to this thread.

10 pages, spanning five years, on a feature that didn't even have to be implemented in a fully fleshed manner – i.e. like in FreeHand – in version 1 (that behemoth of a selection dialog could very well be a v. 2, 3 or even 4 thing, really; for v. 1.x, some simple menu items commands like in Ai would do just fine) is truly a thing to behold. I hope upper management wakes up to the dire reality that no matter how many happy new users they gather, this kind of oversight is a bit of a dark spot in their reputation among vast groups of professionals.

They just don't see it yet, because maybe Affinity, for all its massive success, hasn't reached enough critical mass in the prosumer and amateur market, but after doing so they risk ending up like Corel: the laughingstock of an entire elitist (but undoubtedly elite) group of designers. :\ Affinity apps, at their core, are better and deserve better than that. I still haven't seen that phenomenon in any serious fashion because the components of the suite still feel a bit “incomplete” and are, thus, given a pass for their omissions. But come version 2 or 3, these failings will be untenable and expectations will be crazy high. Kind of like with the second album of a potentially one-hit-wonder pop band.

But even now these endless delays, and/or lack of transparency, aren't doing them any favours and don't bode very well for the future, and if that scenario comes to pass and certain users – especially young, easily influenced students – are shamed into using Adobe apps (and if the increased pressure pushes Adobe to get their act together) like I personally was at my Uni, even when FreeHand was still available (I held up strong until it was killed off by Adobe but, just in case, I did do a few projects in Ai back then just to get my feet wet… And guess what, I was still taught how to use QuarkXPress in 2003-2004!), it's game over for Serif. Not “game over” as in outright bankruptcy, but “game over” as in “they won't pull an ‘InDesign’ to Adobe's ‘Quark’”-like failure. So much promise, and so little relative success.

I know that, much like Apple vs. Microsoft during the early Steve Jobs days, “for Serif to win Adobe doesn't have to lose”, but it kinda does. For Serif to gain reach critical mass, and for the good of the entire industry, Adobe would have to cease being the only “standard” in town, and lose a lot in the process. A lot of customers, and a lot of money. Nothing less than an ≈50-50 marketshare split, like in the Macromedia days, is really acceptable. Adobe took us FreeHand, and now we want blood. And while on the subject of Apple vs. Microsoft, do you seriously believe Apple would be where it is today if it wasn't for the iPhone, the demise of Microsoft in the mobile arena and the relative success of Google (as they're not really in the market of selling hardware, or not seriously at least, much less of selling operating systems or software)? In the end, Microsoft did have to lose, and another competitor with more than 50% of the marketshare but less than 50% of the profit share had to arise for things to finally even out and technology to progress at a decent pace once again. Because of course it did. And all the other little players died along the way.

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I'm just getting acquainted with my new Affinity software, I'm still using Illustrator/Corel for production, but I'm coming up against a lot of "where is such-and-such"  issues and searching this forum for answers. Selecting by colour is pretty important, as are all sorts of other selection criteria. I wanted to add a colour to a palette and make it "global" so I can adjust colour schemes, but adding a colour swatch from an existing document means it's only linked to the source object. Hence, to make it truly "global" it needs to be linked to all objects with the same RGB/CMYK/Whatever values so that changes to the swatch are relected in the design. Without being able to select objects by their fill/stroke colour as colour values this means having to individually select all the critters....which can get out of hand. I do understand this is a great app for the price, but maybe I need to keep paying more?

Windows 7 & 10 64-bit, Dual Xeon workstation(s) 64gb RAM, and single i7 laptop 32gb RAM

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Responding to JGD above, did you even get a response from Serif?

I just don't see how they expect AD to be a successful product, unless they are willing to address some (most) of these shortcomings. Unless it's a Ponzi-like scheme, where they continuously try to impress and attract new users, naive to the app's lack of full functionality (I'm looking at me...) and just never get around to the things that are important in a production environment.

Now, that would be a big disappointment.

Thanks, JGD, for being so articulate and persistent. 

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