Faster (agile) point release development

[LCamachoDesign]

I've searched this topic but couldn't find anything going into the point I'd like to make, at least not directly.

I feel the development cycle of Affinity products is unreasonably long. Version 1.6 was released on November 2017, version 1.7 was released June 2019. That's 1 year and 7 months!

I think it's a lot more reasonable and useful to everyone involved to release one new feature or improvement every month or two months at latest. I understand that larger features take a lot of time to develop and sometimes require changes to the underlying architecture, these can't be pushed out monthly obviously. But a lot of the pain points of Affinity suite are often small naggy things that could be fixed/changed/added within a month.

Take the Swatches panel for example. Renaming, editing colour value, changing global/overprint/spot status, are all done with different right click menus and dialogs... but Affinity already has a near perfect unified dialog for this, just go to Swatches > Add Global Colour. The finish dialog would need a toggle defining the colour as global/regular at the bottom, and a toggle to name with swatch with the colour value at the top. Then a very quick fix for this pain point would be showing this dialog when double clicking a swatch and get rid of all other menus and dialogs.

Let's say Affinity replies "great idea, we'll do it!" … right next to "we'll show it to you in a year and half! Talk to you in 2021!"... Thanks I guess? I'm pretty sure this feature could be pushed in a 1.7.2 release instead since most of the work is already in place, it's just a tweak to the interface.

Another confusing choice in the Swatches panel is this, create a global colour then right click it and do Add Chord to Swatches > Tints. All tints added are regular colours... if I right clicked a global colour and asked for tints, there's a very good chance I actually want all these as global colours too... I now have to right click and Make Global each and every single swatch...

The fix for this is making the chord swatches the same type as the origin right clicked swatch. Again an easy fix. Affinity might think I'm some sort of brilliant UI engineer (as if...) and implement this, but if it takes waiting until 2021 to see it then it's not so great. This could be included on 1.7.3 instead. And so on with all the small fixes and changes here and there.

This does not stop big features coming out as major point releases, these can still happen obviously. But bringing QOL improvements every month is a much better approach to deal with issues and difficulties that manifest on day to day work.

Thanks!

[Pšenda]

On 7/22/2019 at 4:33 PM, LCamachoDesign said:

to release one new feature or improvement every month or two months

You can use beta versions. There are new features and repairs quite often.