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Affinity Designer Customer Beta (1.7.0.12)


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Status: Beta

Purpose: Features, Improvements, Fixes

Requirements: Purchased Affinity Designer

Mac App Store: Not submitted

Download: Here

 

Hello,

We are pleased to announce the immediate availability of the beta of Affinity Designer 1.7 for macOS.

Designer 1.7 is a significant change to the currently shipping 1.6 version. Files edited in this version will not be backwards-compatible with the shipping 1.6 version. As such, we would not recommend using this 1.7 version for critical or production work at this stage. It is inevitable that there were will be a number of issues with 1.7 but we hope these will be minor and aim to resolve any issues very quickly, so please use it and explore the new features, but also do keep in mind that you may find snags and we would appreciate your help with finding and reporting these to us.

If this is your first time using a customer beta of an Affinity app, it’s worth noting that the beta will install as a separate app - alongside your store version. They will not interfere with each other at all and you can continue to use the store version for critical work without worry.

It’s also worth noting that we aren’t done yet - we are still working through reported bugs from previous releases and hope to fix as many as possible before the final release of 1.7. To be notified when there is a new beta please press follow on this announcment thread

With all that said, we hope that you will enjoy the new capabilities introduced in this initial release and we look forward to any and all feedback you give to us.

Many thanks,

Matt

 

Please refer to previous beta 1.7.0.4 post where there's a list of major changes since 1.6. This latest update builds on the 1.7.0.11 changes and also includes the following changes:

  • Adopt GPU acceleration (if your Mac supports it) for brushing - automatically enabled, but can be turned off in Preferences
  • New samples! (actually, that'll be in the next build, sorry!)
  • Improved selection logic for small objects and users with tablets
  • Fixed order of palette import/export so it is not reversed!
  • Miscellaneous Metal view mode improvements
  • Fix for 'Create artboard' checkbox in the New Document dialog being incorrectly checked
  • Fix for incorrect arrowhead previews in the drop-down list
  • Restored original context menu behaviour of the Gradient Tool
  • Fix for issues with horizontal or vertical lines not acting correctly in Node Tool
  • Miscellaneous small fixes
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11 hours ago, MattP said:
  •  Restored original context menu behaviour of the Gradient Tool

Too bad...

 

11 hours ago, MattP said:

Fix for issues with horizontal or vertical lines not acting correctly in Node Tool

Indeed, these behave much better now.

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This is getting very close to what I need. But you need to solve a problem. I love that I can scale the handles of points with the bounding box and the transform origin feature. But due to the nature of the bounding box you cant use it on points that are alined vertically or horizontally because the bounding box only have a dimension in one direction. While I don’t know if it would be a problem in other situations I suggest that the bounding box always has 4 corners and in those situations the corners are slightly offset in order to make them selectable.

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Great shiny new beta. Thanks. Only issue is that the T keystroke doesn't cycle between the art text and text box tool anymore. I checked Publisher and that is still working properly but in Designer pressing T cycles between the Art Text tool and I think the text selection.  Luckily you can still right click on the text tool icon and select the text box.

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18 hours ago, abarkalo said:

Great shiny new beta. Thanks. Only issue is that the T keystroke doesn't cycle between the art text and text box tool anymore. I checked Publisher and that is still working properly but in Designer pressing T cycles between the Art Text tool and I think the text selection.  Luckily you can still right click on the text tool icon and select the text box.

This seems to be working for me - are you able to show a screen recording of what you're seeing please? Also you don't have 'Use Shift Modifier to cycle tools' enabled in Preferences > Tools do you?

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On 5/18/2019 at 2:48 AM, Claus said:

due to the nature of the bounding box you cant use it on points that are alined vertically or horizontally because the bounding box only have

If the points are vertically or horizontally aligned what effect would you expect scaling along the opposite axis to have - or what else is it that this would let you do that you cannot do just as effectively with the points already?

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4 hours ago, Sean P said:

This seems to be working for me - are you able to show a screen recording of what you're seeing please? Also you don't have 'Use Shift Modifier to cycle tools' enabled in Preferences > Tools do you?

If enable "Shift Modified to cycle tools" then what happens is that I can press shift to cycle through Art Text and Marquee Select.  When I disable then I can cycle from Art Text and Marquee Select.  See movie - I am able to cycle in Publisher (1.70.312) between Art Text and Text Box, just not in Designer (1.70.12).

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Objects still move automatically from any layer, above all artboards, they belong to into whatever artboard they touch when dragged with the mouse/trackpad, without any visible option to toggle said behaviour.

I know this is a feature request, but the default behaviour is so unintuitive that I shall be treating it as a bug, not as a feature, from now on and until it's finally addressed, on all new beta threads.

I can't stress this enough: Affinity Designer doesn't truly work for me because of this, period.

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18 hours ago, fde101 said:

If the points are vertically or horizontally aligned what effect would you expect scaling along the opposite axis to have - or what else is it that this would let you do that you cannot do just as effectively with the points already?

As in several other threads I'm trying to get the bounding box concept to work as Illustrators scale and rotate tools. In this side by side demo you see on the left that Designers "Transform origin" seems to be broken when working with nodes. It also shows that you cant use the bounding box transform if points are aligned. On the right side I'm using Illustrators scale and rotate tools to work on selected nodes. The tools work on everything, even on a single node, click to set origin and drag to transform. The Affinity transform bounding box could be tweaked to do this if the developers feel strongly against adding a dedicated scale tool. It would first of all need to respect the Transform Origin, secondly I need a proper bounding box so I can scale the node handles.

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16 hours ago, abarkalo said:

If enable "Shift Modified to cycle tools" then what happens is that I can press shift to cycle through Art Text and Marquee Select.  When I disable then I can cycle from Art Text and Marquee Select.  See movie - I am able to cycle in Publisher (1.70.312) between Art Text and Text Box, just not in Designer (1.70.12).

T.mov

Have you checked Preferences > Keyboard Shortcuts and ensured that 'Artistic Text Tool' and 'Frame Text Tool' both have the T shortcut listed? If so could you try resetting the shortcut and see if that helps any.

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59 minutes ago, Claus said:

As in several other threads I'm trying to get the bounding box concept to work as Illustrators scale and rotate tools. In this side by side demo you see on the left that Designers "Transform origin" seems to be broken when working with nodes. It also shows that you cant use the bounding box transform if points are aligned. On the right side I'm using Illustrators scale and rotate tools to work on selected nodes. The tools work on everything, even on a single node, click to set origin and drag to transform. The Affinity transform bounding box could be tweaked to do this if the developers feel strongly against adding a dedicated scale tool. It would first of all need to respect the Transform Origin, secondly I need a proper bounding box so I can scale the node handles.

Hi Claus,

In your Designer example, just hold Command to make the scale act about the origin - same as the Move Tool :) Does that help any?

Thanks!

Matt

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1 hour ago, Sean P said:

Have you checked Preferences > Keyboard Shortcuts and ensured that 'Artistic Text Tool' and 'Frame Text Tool' both have the T shortcut listed? If so could you try resetting the shortcut and see if that helps any.

yes that fixed it. thank you. I never replaced that but now I know to check there.

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4 hours ago, MattP said:

just hold Command to make the scale act about the origin - same as the Move Tool

I believe that covers the case of "respect the Transform Origin", but his request to be able to "scale the node handles" is apparently a reference to a prior discussion on another thread, in which he was actually trying to get the control points of all selected nodes (not the actual handles) to change simultaneously while dragging them, instead of just one at a time:

 

He shows a video in which he is performing an action that adjusts control points of multiple nodes simultaneously.  I don't know where the concept of "scaling node handles" comes from, as that is clearly not what is happening (and actual scaling of the node handles I believe you can do in preferences), but it is a valid request and I don't see a way to do it right now other than to adjust each one individually, which shouldn't be necessary.

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21 hours ago, MattP said:

Hi Claus,

In your Designer example, just hold Command to make the scale act about the origin - same as the Move Tool :) Does that help any?

Thanks!

Matt

Got it! Sorry for missing that part. Why the extra key press though? If I choose to display the transform origin it’s because I want to use it.

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1 hour ago, Claus said:

Got it! Sorry for missing that part. Why the extra key press though? If I choose to display the transform origin it’s because I want to use it.

It's an interesting question... and to be honest I'm not sure our argument for the current behaviour is any stronger than the argument for the notion that displaying the transform origin should imply that transforms should now be performed about it, so we'll certainly think about it. :)

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1 hour ago, zimmt said:

Where can I download the previous beta? All links seem to only point to the latest.

We are not currently serving the previous beta, do you happen to still have it in your downloads folder? (Size 389 MB (408,711,741 bytes) , dated somewhere between 4th May and 17th May)

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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4 hours ago, MattP said:

the notion that displaying the transform origin should imply that transforms should now be performed about it

This would make for a good preference, to invert the behavior of the modifier key when the transform origin point is visible.

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27 minutes ago, Sean P said:

Hi Bagmetv,

Does your document contain any embedded objects? I've been able to reproduce on a document that contains embedded objects.

Me too, but on a document that doesn't have any embedded document i can switch between rgb and cmyk and vice versa without any problem.

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On 5/24/2019 at 11:17 AM, Sean P said:

Hi Bagmetv,

Does your document contain any embedded objects? I've been able to reproduce on a document that contains embedded objects.

Sorry for late reply. Yes, there were embedded objects.

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