Will Designer and Photo get Studio Link?

[bgarrant]

Will Affinity Designer and Photo get Studio Link options?  It is an amazing feature when inside Publisher.  It makes it so easy to jump from one app to the other.  Can we please get these in Designer and Photo so we no longer have to use the "Edit with Designer" menu option?

[walt.farrell]

So far Serif is saying that StudioLink is a Publisher feature.

While you wait to see if they decide to add it to Photo and Designer, you could simply start your projects in Publisher

You can open .afphoto and .afdesign files there, or even save them. If you create a new document using the Designer Persona you can even create it with Artboards instead of Pages.

[Mandu]

Like Mr. Walt said, you could simply do it in Publisher. But now this begs the question, what's the point of having 3 apps if they could simple merge them in one? I mean they have been essentialy merged into one with Publisher. Is there a reason for us to open other apps beside Publisher?

[walt.farrell]

1 hour ago, Mandu said:

Like Mr. Walt said, you could simply do it in Publisher. But now this begs the question, what's the point of having 3 apps if they could simple merge them in one? I mean they have been essentialy merged into one with Publisher. Is there a reason for us to open other apps beside Publisher?

Good question.

Note that Publisher includes only the Designer Persona from Designer (not the Pixel or Export Personas), and only the Photo Persona from Photo (not the Liquify, Develop, Tone Mapping, or Export Personas). So there may still be a need to use the standalone applications if you want functions implemented only in those Personas.

Also, at this time, the Photo Persona in Publisher doesn't support plugins, nor New HDR Merge, New Focus Merge, and New Batch Job. Those may come, but only Serif will know when they might appear.

[bgarrant]

All good points. Separate apps makes more sense. 

[Cyan Cooper]

It's not practical using Publisher when you need to use multiple artboards of different sizes.

[walt.farrell]

5 hours ago, Cyan Cooper said:

It's not practical using Publisher when you need to use multiple artboards of different sizes.

Can you explain that further?

If you create the document using the Designer Persona, you have the option to create an artboard in the file creation dialog. You must first uncheck the option for "Default Master". (There is an issue with this in the beta that I will report, but it works in 1.8.0 (and probably 1.8.1 on Mac).

Then you can create additional artboards using the Artboard Tool.

[Cyan Cooper]

On 3/13/2020 at 3:54 AM, walt.farrell said:

Can you explain that further?

If you create the document using the Designer Persona, you have the option to create an artboard in the file creation dialog. You must first uncheck the option for "Default Master". (There is an issue with this in the beta that I will report, but it works in 1.8.0 (and probably 1.8.1 on Mac).

Then you can create additional artboards using the Artboard Tool.

My man. 😎🔥🙏

[R C-R]

On 3/13/2020 at 5:54 AM, walt.farrell said:

If you create the document using the Designer Persona, you have the option to create an artboard in the file creation dialog. You must first uncheck the option for "Default Master".

I was playing around with this & created a custom preset with an artboard via New in the Designer Persona. I thought that would allow me to choose that preset via New in the Publisher persona to avoid having to switch to the Designer persona, but instead it just creates a single page document the size of the artboard.

However, if I create a document with artboard(s) either in Publisher's Designer persona or in AD & export that as a custom template, I can select that template in APub's Publisher persona to create a new untitled .afpub document with the artboard(s). 

It is displayed as page 1 of 1 in the Publisher persona, which can look a little weird in the Pages section of the Pages studio, depending on the arrangement of the artboards & what is in them but aside from that it works fine.