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Make toolbar and toolbox dockable in Separated Mode; force windows out from under docked UI elements so that UI chrome is accessible; make Zoom [+] (Opt.+Green Button)/Window>Zoom command adhere to HIG


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On 12/15/2019 at 10:17 PM, loukash said:

No, Keyboard Maestro can handle the document window sizes and positions just fine. You can save its macros just to affect the Affinity apps, be it via its global menu, a keyboard shortcut, whatever.

But it's everything else that's wrong with the Separated mode, starting with UI rendering bugs, unmovable palettes appearing off-screen at the top, and ending with no option to save the workspace arrangement after spending an hour to set everything up the way I like, only to accidentaly select the "reset" menu command. Been there done that…

Perhaps Keyboard Maestro can access the palettes by some means, too. I just haven't wasted my time to find out yet… ;) 

To be fair, Adobe apps also deal with my dual-monitor setup terribly. But Affinity's floating palettes are even worse, as since there's no Workspace function, I can't reset them with a hotkey. I just force-quit and reopen the app in question so that I don't lose their positions.

As for having to use third-party tools to fix UX shortcomings being unacceptable, I fully concur. I know Affinity apps are affordable, but it's a matter of basic usability and principle.

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  • 5 months later...

I completely agree with JGD's suggestions here. Separated Mode is extremely cumbersome as of version 1.8.3. As much as I hate to do so, I'll most likely be subscribing to Photoshop until Affinity Photo has a more efficient interface for working with multiple documents. This is sad considering how easy it would be to fix most of these issues.

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Yeah I agree with the OP's thoughts about the separated mode. I use it all day (tabbed interfaces just feel so restrictive) and the daily annoyances in window management are real.

I'd also like to see an application frame for separated mode making its debut to block out the desktop background. Using a neutral/dark wallpaper only helps so much I'm afraid.

 

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16 minutes ago, thomasp said:

I'd also like to see an application frame for separated mode making its debut to block out the desktop background. Using a neutral/dark wallpaper only helps so much I'm afraid.

If the whole app is contained within a frame, then it's not what most of us are asking for here. Ever since MultiFinder appeared on the Mac in 1987, the whole point was that you could run multiple apps side by side and see both windows at the same time. With further improvements over the years came things like drag and drop between apps. You lose some of those benefits when an app takes up the whole screen, so you know… some of us old-timers still prefer the old multi-window approach. If seeing your desktop is a distraction, maybe you just need to clean it up…? 😉

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10 hours ago, Kal said:

If the whole app is contained within a frame, then it's not what most of us are asking for here. Ever since MultiFinder appeared on the Mac in 1987, the whole point was that you could run multiple apps side by side and see both windows at the same time. With further improvements over the years came things like drag and drop between apps. You lose some of those benefits when an app takes up the whole screen, so you know… some of us old-timers still prefer the old multi-window approach. If seeing your desktop is a distraction, maybe you just need to clean it up…? 😉

 

Well with an application frame such as the ones Adobe is using (or every app set up like that under the sun, really) you can scale the app to easily fit other windows around it. I don't see the benefit of having the desktop peek through during color critical work - and worse - having the app interface vanish if you happen to click outside a document window by mistake. That is a usability sin IMO.

I'm old timer enough to have experienced Photoshop 3 on the SGI which also had this floaty interface. 24 years on I do recall how annoying I found using that.

Main point for me though are documents opening half obscured by the interface and the need to resize/zoom documents within the document borders all the time.

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11 hours ago, thomasp said:

I don't see the benefit of having the desktop peek through during color critical work

Fair enough. If I'm doing colour correction, I've always just switched to a neutral grey desktop. Only takes a few seconds.

 

11 hours ago, thomasp said:

and worse - having the app interface vanish if you happen to click outside a document window by mistake. That is a usability sin IMO.

Some people like being able to switch away by clicking on the desktop or another window, so that's a matter of personal preference I think. (I usually Command-Tab to switch apps these days, but sometimes it's nice to switch between apps by clicking their windows.)

 

11 hours ago, thomasp said:

I'm old timer enough to have experienced Photoshop 3 on the SGI which also had this floaty interface. 24 years on I do recall how annoying I found using that.

Haha. Okay, we're probably the same vintage then. 🙂

 

11 hours ago, thomasp said:

Main point for me though are documents opening half obscured by the interface and the need to resize/zoom documents within the document borders all the time.

Well on that we certainly agree. It's my main frustration with Affinity's 'Separated Mode' and the reason I don't use it, despite my dislike for full-screen, tabbed interfaces.

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  • 1 month later...

A heads-up everyone… Affinity has heard our cries! They have released an article, ironically titled 'Increase your efficiency with Affinity’s Separated Mode'. Therein, they extol two of the benefits of floating panels: working with multiple displays (big focus on this), and seeing two views of the same document side-by-side. At the bottom is a kind of FAQ section titled 'Separated Mode window management tips', which starts by addressing some potential confusion with the full-screen view in macOS. But they finally get to the point here…

Quote

Split the view without entering full-screen mode

To split the desktop between documents but keep them as floating windows, hold opt and double-click any corner of one window, then repeat for the second. Both will fill the desktop. Now drag one window’s left edge and the other’s right edge towards the centre of the desktop to divide the display between them.

They left out a few minor details in those instructions so I'll flesh it out for everyone:

  1. Hold down the Option key and double-click any corner of the first window.
  2. Click Command-Backtick/Tilde (`~) to reveal the second window (which will have been completely obscured in step 1).
  3. Hold down the Option key and double-click any corner of the second window.
  4. Drag the left edge of the second window to the centre of the screen.
  5. Click Command-Backtick/Tilde (`~) to switch back to the first window (which will have its right edge obscured by the second window).
  6. If the right edge of the first window is obscured by the Studio panels, press Commmand-Shift-H to hide the Studio panels (or the Tab key to hide the entire UI).
  7. Drag the right edge of the first window to the centre of the screen, until it snaps to the edge of the second window.
  8. Select the second window and drag its right edge to where you estimate the Studio panels won't obscure it.
  9. If the top edges of either window are obscured by the Toolbar, press Command-Option-T to hide the Toolbar (or the Tab key to hide the entire UI).
  10. Select the first window and drag its top edge down to where you estimate the Toolbar won't obscure it.
  11. Select the second window and drag its top edge down until it snaps to the top of the first window.
  12. Restore the visibility of the Toolbar and Studio Panels with the same shortcuts you used to hide them.
  13. If parts of your windows are still obscured by parts of the UI, repeat the above steps or tweak as required.

So there you have it folks, the official response from Affinity on the recommended way to view two windows side-by-side! I hope that's cleared it up for everyone. 🙂

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  • 2 months later...
On 9/13/2019 at 8:12 AM, velarde said:

A little exaggeration , but as I pointed it before, if Affinity would fix all things mentioned in this thread as a 1.7.5 or 1.8 update (and not touch anything else) it would really make my day (or year).

The current state of Photo Editing features we have right now available in Affinity Photo are more than  enough (pretty much)  for our daily work.

Now it's time to take a look at the UX and fix these things that may not seem important but are pretty much necessary for a smooth daily workflow. Forget about the next "cool" feature and put it on hold for a while please.

I thought I was alone on this but I see more people joining this thread....

 

P.D. And let's not forget Sticky settings in ALL the tools..

Affinity just following up on this thread. please take a read.

 

Like I mentioned before last year (and I stick by it) if you don't add any more functionalities to Affinity Photo and just improve the UX from this thread I would be more than happy.

After one year (or more) of not having to launch Photoshop these are the small details and polish that I miss. Which makes Affinity less productive for Design and Production work.

Again I'm taking about having different images open in Separate mode. Having to move the windows manually under the tools/palettes, resizing and zooming on windows... etc.

 

I'm sure there are many of us that like working on Separate Mode.

 

Thanks

------------------------

Fernando Velarde

www.velarde.com

Instagram.com/soyfervelarde

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  • 1 month later...

Developer Team:

Congratulations on quickly porting the Affinity code for the new Macs with the M1 chips.

But  could we please have some response about these interface issues?

 

I was reading the MacRumors.com news about this. Pretty much positive feedback but here's another user with the same comment....

"Love that Affinity is so quick to update. Although they REALLY need to update the way the floating interface items work. I'm constantly fighting the floating palettes. They seem to get in the way all the time, it's infuriating! Especially on a laptop that occasionally gets attached to an external monitor. They seem to be ignoring Apple's UI guidelines on these."

https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/serif-updates-affinity-apps-for-superfast-performance-with-m1-chip.2267391/page-2

The "Astrophotography Stack" from the new Photo Beta looks nice but could we have this fixed first? It's a hassle to "fight" the windows (as  this user describes it) every day we work and use the app.

 

I'm guessing this is pretty much the last 1.x update we will get. Hopefully this will not be addressed until the 2.x releases...

I would consider this to be an essential part of the program. Working correctly in Separate Mode.

Thanks

 

 

------------------------

Fernando Velarde

www.velarde.com

Instagram.com/soyfervelarde

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On 6/8/2019 at 4:09 PM, Old Bruce said:

Hold down the Option key and it doesn't go to Full Screen mode. and this disabled green button turned into Zoom would go against the Apple guidelines.

It is not 100% clear from what I am finding in the guidelines, but what is clear is that any given window or app is not required to support full screen mode - in fact the guidelines actively discourage supporting full screen mode unless it makes sense to do so (something that a user will want to focus in on).

My interpretation is that the zoom button should work the way it does if full screen mode is supported by the window, and revert to the traditional zoom behavior if it does not.  In that interpretation the apps are working correctly.

However, I do seriously wish that there were a system-wide setting in the OS to reverse this behavior, zooming by default and going to full-screen mode only when option is held down.  For my own personal workstation it is not a big deal, but in a shared system being used to present content in front of people, going full-screen with a window can in some configurations black out other screens, including a projector, making it quite distracting and interrupt the presentation if a user hits the zoom button either accidentally or without realizing that it will behave that way.

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  • 3 weeks later...
On 7/24/2020 at 1:23 AM, Kal said:

A heads-up everyone… Affinity has heard our cries! They have released an article, ironically titled 'Increase your efficiency with Affinity’s Separated Mode'. Therein, they extol two of the benefits of floating panels: working with multiple displays (big focus on this), and seeing two views of the same document side-by-side. At the bottom is a kind of FAQ section titled 'Separated Mode window management tips', which starts by addressing some potential confusion with the full-screen view in macOS. But they finally get to the point here…

They left out a few minor details in those instructions so I'll flesh it out for everyone:

  1. Hold down the Option key and double-click any corner of the first window.
  2. Click Command-Backtick/Tilde (`~) to reveal the second window (which will have been completely obscured in step 1).
  3. Hold down the Option key and double-click any corner of the second window.
  4. Drag the left edge of the second window to the centre of the screen.
  5. Click Command-Backtick/Tilde (`~) to switch back to the first window (which will have its right edge obscured by the second window).
  6. If the right edge of the first window is obscured by the Studio panels, press Commmand-Shift-H to hide the Studio panels (or the Tab key to hide the entire UI).
  7. Drag the right edge of the first window to the centre of the screen, until it snaps to the edge of the second window.
  8. Select the second window and drag its right edge to where you estimate the Studio panels won't obscure it.
  9. If the top edges of either window are obscured by the Toolbar, press Command-Option-T to hide the Toolbar (or the Tab key to hide the entire UI).
  10. Select the first window and drag its top edge down to where you estimate the Toolbar won't obscure it.
  11. Select the second window and drag its top edge down until it snaps to the top of the first window.
  12. Restore the visibility of the Toolbar and Studio Panels with the same shortcuts you used to hide them.
  13. If parts of your windows are still obscured by parts of the UI, repeat the above steps or tweak as required.

So there you have it folks, the official response from Affinity on the recommended way to view two windows side-by-side! I hope that's cleared it up for everyone. 🙂

@Kal, I like that you're paying attention to the topic, and all, but that is definitely not what this request was about.

Tiling windows was never something we were clamouring for here, and recent macOS versions are great for that by default even in non-fullscreen mode, in that they automatically snap edges in a very elegant way.

Sure, it works for that use case, even if it looks a bit kludgy (and I believe it is; the combination of Separated Mode and macOS's default fullscreen mode, whether with tiled windows or not, is still a bit of a disaster – and there's a reason why Adobe doesn't support it –, as the toolbar will obscure important UI elements like the rulers), but it doesn't address the impracticality of not having dockable toolbars, toolboxes and palettes, and windows smart enough to avoid them if they can.

The large majority of Mac apps got these very basic concepts just right since the late '80s, and many modern ones still do, so why the heck should we cut Serif devs any slack here? We're talking about decades upon decades of accrued, tried and tested UX knowledge here.

In any case, I will just say this: if you need fo perform 13 steps – if you just added two more, it would've been a nice nod to Radiohead, har – in Affinity apps to achieve something that can be done in both Photoshop 2021 and FontLab 7 – two currently shipping apps with a decent classic Mac palette model – in just one step (i.e. respectively turning off Application Frame, or tearing off the toolbars and palettes you wish to have in floating mode and snapping/docking them to the screen edges instead), clearly their entire UX underpinnings are broken/wrong by design and need more work.

I said it before and I'll say it again: Separated Mode was, and still is, an afterthought. The fact that it has glaring cosmetic bugs in Big Sur, both on the latest stable release and the latest betas makes me even more certain that a) nobody at Serif tested something as basic as Persona switching in Separated Mode because nobody uses it at all, and it wasn't detected by beta testers either because anyone who cares for it doesn't use it much, as it's so sucky.

I finally got around to it (and ended up running into several other issues, because of course I did), as I did some outside-of-the-box thinking and realised that if I just chucked the toolbar to the bottom and lined up the toolbox to the bottom-left corner, like in the enclosed screenshot, I could at least work with it without being constantly enraged at these shortcomings.

1528300834_Capturadeecr2020-12-02s15_45_53.thumb.png.b9d4cc57b34d386785f634d3e7d89a7a.png

Sure, having a different Studio layout in Affinity Photo isn't great for muscle memory, and having toolbars next to the menu bar also makes more sense from a Fitt's Law perspective (having the Dock constantly pop up by accident is a bit intrusive, and I may end up pruning it and putting it on the left screen edge if I end up working with AP a lot, but then I won't be able to summon it on my secondary screen), but being able to compare photos, quickly switch between several ones just by picking them on a visible stack, etc., is absolutely invaluable.

As you can see, I found a much better workaround, so this is no longer a hill I'm willing to die on… But I still feel that the very existence of a thread that is now more than a year old, regarding a glaring shortcoming that has been plaguing an important feature since its very inception and which hasn't been addressed at all (I mean, have any devs chimed in here yet?), is a bit concerning.

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6 hours ago, JGD said:

@Kal, I like that you're paying attention to the topic, and all, but that is definitely not what this request was about.

[yada yada yada]

@JGD, try rereading my comment with your irony detector turned on!

 

6 hours ago, JGD said:

In any case, I will just say this: if you need fo perform 13 steps … clearly their entire UX underpinnings are broken/wrong by design and need more work.

My point exactly.
 

I was clearly too subtle for some readers, so here's my irony-free summary… I find it concerning that Affinity published that article. The title implies that Separated Mode works just fine, offering increased efficiency. The FAQ section titled 'Separated Mode window management tips' appears to be their response to user frustration, which doesn't address our concerns at all. It leads me to think that fixes to Separated Mode aren't coming soon, if ever, and that's disheartening.

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On 12/2/2020 at 9:07 PM, Kal said:

@JGD, try rereading my comment with your irony detector turned on!

 

My point exactly.
 

I was clearly too subtle for some readers, so here's my irony-free summary… I find it concerning that Affinity published that article. The title implies that Separated Mode works just fine, offering increased efficiency. The FAQ section titled 'Separated Mode window management tips' appears to be their response to user frustration, which doesn't address our concerns at all. It leads me to think that fixes to Separated Mode aren't coming soon, if ever, and that's disheartening.

Hah, my bad. 😅 Ok, I see we're all on the same page… Yes, it's disheartening indeed, but we shouldn't let the foot off the pedal anyway.

And more than disheartening, it's frustrating just to think just how easy some of these would be to fix. Or maybe not exactly easy, but easier than creating entirely new features from scratch. And, at this point, with so many people complaining about absolutely basic stuff like this, that just looks to have been put out there in a rushed and incomplete fashion, it's high time the Serif management team rethinks their priorities.

Yes, competing with Adobe on features (either by upstaging them with innovative ones or just achieving some semblance of parity) is important and all, but come on… They really could and should do much better. It's just a matter of basic respect (or, in this case, lack thereof) for Apple's HIG or just established UX principles.

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