Lorox Posted July 15, 2019 Share Posted July 15, 2019 Recently I was wondering if it might be a good idea to provide some sort of "docking option" for 3rd party addons to the Affinity products. Effectively like plugins in Photoshop or Illustrator that is. In my opinion this might be a nice way to keep the basic applications (Photo, Designer, Publisher) lean and fast by concentrating on "nice for all to have"-things and of course (and first) on the absolutely essential must-haves (some of which are – regrettably – still not implemented after several years: like saveable interface layouts, something like "smart objects" or just being able to save/export plain 1-bit picture TIFFs – and possibbly some others, too). On the other hand special features, which may, however, be extremely sought after by or useful for users working in certain fields or with special techniques, could be provided by 3rd party developers and added individually without complicating the basic program for the "average" user. This might even help creating an even more alive "scene" around the Affinity products and make them even more the first choice for all those designers who don't work in big agencies with their (supposed) need for each and every program that's in the Adobe Cloud (thus possibly making the price to pay justifiable) . If I'm in any way "typical" there may be quite a number of designers who just effectively need 3 programs like those of the current Affinity "Suite" (plus perhaps a PDF-centered app like Acrobat Pro for certain prepress-checks and edits). These type of designers might be absolutely fine with just Affinity Photo, Designer and Publisher, but would be even more happy when there'd exist ways to possibly add special interest functions to those 3 apps from 3rd parties to streamline them for their very specific needs. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
John Rostron Posted July 18, 2019 Share Posted July 18, 2019 (edited) Affinity Photo has supported many Photoshop-style plugins since I have been using it. They must be .8bf plugins, typically those that affect an entire image layer. See this list here from @MEB. Miguel's list is incomplete; many plugins are flagged as 'not tested'. If you are interested in a particular plugin, you can do a search for it to see what others have said. John Edited July 18, 2019 by John Rostron Added more information Quote Windows 10, Affinity Photo 1.10.5 Designer 1.10.5 and Publisher 1.10.5 (mainly Photo), now ex-Adobe CC CPU: AMD A6-3670. RAM: 16 GB DDR3 @ 666MHz, Graphics: 2047MB NVIDIA GeForce GT 630 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
fde101 Posted July 18, 2019 Share Posted July 18, 2019 There are already other threads discussing this scattered across the forum. An SDK for native Affinity plugins is rumored to be in the works. No idea what kind of time table or what capabilities will be accessible using this SDK, but at least it sounds like it is coming... eventually... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Lorox Posted July 19, 2019 Author Share Posted July 19, 2019 18 hours ago, John Rostron said: Affinity Photo has supported many Photoshop-style plugins since I have been using it. They must be .8bf plugins, typically those that affect an entire image layer. See this list here from @MEB. Miguel's list is incomplete; many plugins are flagged as 'not tested'. If you are interested in a particular plugin, you can do a search for it to see what others have said. John Ah yes... thanks I'd sort of forgotten... I even have the Nik plugins running in my AP. However, as you say, many plugins in Miguel's list are not yet tested or (unfortunately many interesting ones and/or the ones I actually own) don't work at all. As this is so I'd think it's all the more desirable to have a proper SDK for the Affinity apps which due to the close integration of the three will be intelligent enough to assign such plugins to their proper app(s). Also scripting addons (i.e. for Designer like open source "Scriptographer" was for Adobe Illustrator) would be highly welcome as they might lend a certain experimental "cutting edge" to the program(s). Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Lorox Posted July 19, 2019 Author Share Posted July 19, 2019 16 hours ago, fde101 said: There are already other threads discussing this scattered across the forum. An SDK for native Affinity plugins is rumored to be in the works. No idea what kind of time table or what capabilities will be accessible using this SDK, but at least it sounds like it is coming... eventually... I wasn't aware there are other like threads as a quick search that I did didn't return corresponding results. Anyway, I love to see that! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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