Affinity Designer Customer Beta (1.2.0.24606)

[MattP]

Purpose: Improvements, Features, Fixes

Status: Beta

Requirements: Purchased Affinity Designer

Mac App Store: Not submitted

Download: https://s3.amazonaws...stomer Beta.dmg

 

To use this beta, simply download the file from the link given above and double-click on the file to open the installer. Follow the instructions to install the beta version. The beta sits alongside the Mac App Store version and will not interfere with it.

 

 

Improvements, Features, Fixes

 

- Fix for Layer Effects dialog not working in anything other than Yosemite.

- Live blend mode on the Layer Effects dialog.

- Fix for Path Text positioning when used in conjunction with altered tracking or kerning.

- Added per-object adjustable antialiasing ramp/coverage map. Available from Blend Options.

- Fix for incorrect blend gamma on partially transparent destination pixels.

- Improved performance for objects with blend gamma set to non-sRGB (anything other than 2.2).

- Added more context menu items for the Layers panel.

- Improved support for large cursors in Accessibility.

- Exporting palletised PNG now automatically moved to 1, 2, 4 or 8 bits per pixel depending on number of colours generated in the palette - this allows for smaller PNGs in certain situations.

- Added context toolbar for multi-selections of Shape objects.

- PSD export improvements.

- Fix for rendering artefacts seen with clip objects containing groups of objects which themselves contain objects with layer effects.

 

[My Strawberry Monkey]

Is this working with the Photo beta, keep getting this message: Failed to launch Affinity Photo Beta - Application is not available when trying share a doc between the two apps.

 

 

Allan

[MattP]

This works for me? Have you got the latest beta of Photo (build version 24443 from this week?)

 

I'm sure we can get to the bottom of this! :)

[Garytagreg]

Hi Matt,

 

Following the crash report in the older beta thread, I can confirm that this one occasionally crashes in the same way using the default setting with discrete GPU. I have now toggled the "use only integrated GPU" setting and haven't had it crash yet after trying about 20 times or so. That said, it took a good few times to get it to crash with the discrete GPU so that might not mean anything. I'll run it some more tomorrow and let you know what happens.

 

By the way, I noticed that the file creation using the integrated GPU is noticeably quicker than before. Even if I max out the width and height settings the new document will pop up immediately. With the (more powerful) discrete GPU it would always give a brief but noticeable pause before coming up. I suppose this might have something to do with the GPU switch? 

[My Strawberry Monkey]

This works for me? Have you got the latest beta of Photo (build version 24443 from this week?)

 

I'm sure we can get to the bottom of this! :)

 

 

I do have the latest build of both applications. TBH I've never been able to get this to work even though the option is there.

[MEB]

Added per-object adjustable antialiasing ramp/coverage map. Available from Blend Options.

Thank you Matt. This is brilliant :) The antialiasing was one of the few things that bugged me since the beginning. Now it's one of the best features in Affinity.

[hevonen]

While custom anti-alias ramp is useful, it's hard (maybe even theoretically impossible) to get for example clean 1px width curves with it. I guess for that one had to access rendering before line gets anti-aliased and rasterize the curve without subsampling or some such?

 

As this feature modifies the hardness of the already anti-aliased curve it sometimes creates several pixels where there should only be one and omits pixels altogether if sharpness is increased enough. Would it be unfeasible to add "no-aa" check into rasterizer?

[Garytagreg]

I also get the "The application is not available" error when trying to share between apps. If the file is UNSAVED (as in, a new document not yet written to an actual file) then you get the error. If you save it first, then it works :) Maybe the option should be greyed out until its an actual file or prompt to save before sharing?

 

Also, when trying it out, when I quit Photo after successfully sharing the file, then Designer (not photo) crashed (sorry!). Heres the crash report.

 

 

 

 

Crash after closing photo.txt

[MEB]

Just one suggestion still regarding the antialiasing ramp and blend gamma: can you make the path geometry (the blue lines) disappear when we are adjusting the antialiasing ramp or the blend gamma slider? Otherwise it's complicated to see what's going on when creating profiles.

[My Strawberry Monkey]

I also get the "The application is not available" error when trying to share between apps. If the file is UNSAVED (as in, a new document not yet written to an actual file) then you get the error. If you save it first, then it works :) Maybe the option should be greyed out until its an actual file or prompt to save before sharing?

 

 

:( . Thanks Gary. Yes that clearly wasn't obvious that you had to save it first. Thanks, that has solved my issue :D .

[outdoors]

Hi,

 

I made a point in the photo beta forum which is marked as accepted and implemented for the next beta. It is the same with designer so I thought I should mention it here as well for continuity sake.

 

If you right click the top toolbar and choose "hide toolbar"; to save space on small screens; then there is no way to switch personas at all which is quite limiting.

 

Se original thread, screens and possible solutions https://forum.affinity.serif.com/index.php?/topic/7541-switch-persona-menu-item/

[ronnyb]

Wow Matt, you're just cranking them out now! Awesome, I'l test out some more this week! Hey one small bug that is still persists: When setting the UI to larger font size, most UI text labels with descenders have the lower-most horizontal line or two cropped, as if the text container is too short for the text size inside... Since the whole point of the larger UI size is to aid in legibility, and the cropped descenders hinder legibility, it's kind of a self-defeating option at this time...  Specifically I was looking at the Layer FX palette.

 

Great work and pace of improvements! Looking forward to playing with custom anti-aliasing ramp :)

 

This works for me? Have you got the latest beta of Photo (build version 24443 from this week?)

 

I'm sure we can get to the bottom of this! :)

[ronnyb]

Bugs in color picker:

 

1. Color sampler doesn't accurately pick color from AD's UI, only from image area. This includes picking colors from the color picker's UI.

2a. Sample a color from the image using the eye-dropper tool.

2b. Change the noise and opacity settings for the color.

2c. Pick another color, this time from AD's color picker UI, not using the color sampler.

2d. Notice the preview swatch for opacity and noise doesn't update to reflect the newly chosen color.

 

This works for me? Have you got the latest beta of Photo (build version 24443 from this week?)

 

I'm sure we can get to the bottom of this! :)

[smokie1019]

Thank you so much for the PDF export fix. This really helps a lot!

 

(I was holding back from posting, "You people really bust your butts working on this, don't you?" and then I thought, why not?)

 

You people really bust your butts working on this, don't you?

[Andrew Tang]

Hi,

 

I made a point in the photo beta forum which is marked as accepted and implemented for the next beta. It is the same with designer so I thought I should mention it here as well for continuity sake.

 

If you right click the top toolbar and choose "hide toolbar"; to save space on small screens; then there is no way to switch personas at all which is quite limiting.

 

Se original thread, screens and possible solutions https://forum.affinity.serif.com/index.php?/topic/7541-switch-persona-menu-item/

 

This should already be in your current beta in the 'Affinity Designer Beta' menu. They don't currently have shortcuts yet as we figure out what is available.

[Garytagreg]

I've run into this before in previous betas but could never remember much about what I was doing at the time, but sometimes I lose the ability to move layers around in the layer panel. I can select them and edit the objects in them but can't actually rearrange the layers in the layer panel by dragging them around (I think I could use the toolbar buttons to do it, though).

 

Today, I had some vector objects that I wanted to add some pixel data to, so I went to the pixel persona, added a pixel layer and put down a few brushstrokes. I wasn't happy with what I did so undid the brushstrokes. Then I wanted to move the pixel layer elsewhere to mask it and found that I couldn't move it. I closed and reopened the document but it still didn't work. I needed to restart the app to get the regular behaviour back. Since then, it has worked fine. If I can nail down re-producable steps I'll follow up on it here, but I thought I'd post it so you know there is a problem "somewhere"...

[MattP]

@Gary - Thanks for that - we'll try to keep an eye out too :)

 

@Miguel - Done the outline hiding while changing the profile, it'll be in the next beta :)

[Garytagreg]

Another crash report (Why do they keep on happening to meeeeeee......!!! ;) ):

 

I tried to save over an existing afdesign file (not an export) and it crashed (although the save seems to have been successful as the file was updated).

 

Here's the crash report

Crash on Overwriting Existing afdesign File .txt

[Garytagreg]

Matt,

 

I can quite easily reproduce the save over crash mentioned above : it seems really like my export issue. Is it reproducible on your side?

 

1. Open beta
2. create new document (photo type)
3. place a shape (e.g. circle)
4. cmd-s to save
5. save with default name  ("Untitled") to desktop
6. cmd-w to close the file
7. create another document (photo type)
8. place a different shape (e.g. triangle)
9. cmd-s to save
10. select the previously saved file ("Untitled")
11. confirm overwrite
12. it thinks about it for a second or two and then crashes

 

Note: I am running with the "only use integrated GPU" option set as per your previous request (BTW: no crashes on new document creation today with this setting yet, so that might well be what you suspected)

Crash on overwriting file 2.txt

[MattP]

Hi Gary,

 

No, I'm not able to reproduce this... it works fine for me... It seems to be something specific to your system - we've got a MacBook Pro with the same hardware as yours so I'll ask to see if we can try to reproduce the problem on that one... Sorry about this :(

 

Matt

[A_B_C]

First of all: thanks a lot for this update … everything works great now …  :)

 

Just a minor bug: it seems you forgot to add the "extra handle" of the text frames (created by Frame Text Tool) to the set of controls honouring the user defined constrain settings … please have a look at my video.

 

Cheers,

Alex

Shift.mov

[MEB]

Hi A_B_C,

Thanks for reporting it. Issue logged to be looked at.

[A_B_C]

And another one … but I must confess, that am not quite sure what to make of this. When I draw a perfect circle and put some text on the path, I would expect that the baseline of each character touches the circle exactly at the point marking the *half* of the character width. But this is obviously not the case, as my first screen shot proves. 

 

So I created a custom font to investigate this issue further. This font contains just a single character (or glyph as you like) shaped like a cross (A.). The crossbar sits on the font baseline and is just as long as the character width. In (B.) you can see the result of typing the character three times. When putting various tokens of that character on a perfect circle, I would expect that the crossbars create a part of a perfect polygon, while the stems of the crosses meet in a single point. But this is not the case (C.). So I am not quite sure, where my error starts … is this a bug or is there a reason for this behaviour?

 

Thanks in advance for clarifying things a bit,

cheers, Alex

[MEB]

That's weird... theoretically it should create a perfect polygon. 

[ronnyb]

Perhaps the glyph's spacing, kerning, or tracking tables are offset?