I'll join the other poster in asking for a Linux version (foolish demand I know) or at least making it possible to run Affinity on Proton/Wine.
Also, please for the love of God implement paragraph wide justification. Without it Publisher is a toy (in my opinion) and not implementing it is unacceptably amateurish when it has been implemented, and open source, since 1981 [1].
I'll buy all three Affinity apps again with a Linux or Proton version. I lug around a Mac just so I can run Affinity Designer/Photo/Publisher and click OK in Xcode (or some other trivial can't-be-automated thing) from time to time. Incidentally, I do pay for quite a bit of Linux software (JetBrains, WingIDE, DaVinci Resolve)... and that is before counting all the games that I'll be buying via Steam now that I can run via Proton. Yes, I'm probably in the minority in the Linux world, but Linux (KDE desktop) is easily the most productive for me and great software is actually worth paying for. Plus, the current direction towards total lockdown of MS and Apple is going to create a lot more users just like me.
> Yes, I'm probably in the minority in the Linux world, but Linux (KDE desktop) is easily the most productive for me
Funny, I used to loathe KDE but I ended up with it by default after trying out NixOS for the first time and... I haven't left. It's great. Just fabulous. I haven't felt the need to go back to a tiling WM yet, which I still find surprising...
Same here. I used to use GNOME once upon a time, then switched to macOS, then after 5 years to Windows, and since this spring I’ve gone back to Linux, specifically Fedora with KDE. I find KDE to be fantastic. I’ve got most ergonomic setup I’ve ever used, there is really nothing to complain about it, including fantastic hidpi support. I’m really happy.
everyone ditched gnome as soon as their design head started to mandate "copy apple on everything, even the dumb things"
i wasn't even too sad with them shipping features missing 90% of the old functionality while they got the code right, but doing that just to copy apple frivolous design choices was just too much.
> Funny, I used to loathe KDE but I ended up with it by default after trying out NixOS for the first time and... I haven't left. It's great. Just fabulous.
Same here: I was a long-time xfce user but, over the years, I found myself using more and more KDE applications. For a friend I setup a Debian with the default KDE environment... I ended up using that myself - with not too many tweaks I just love it: the defaults are sane and if I want to change anything I can !
I think KDE has changed that much. A lot of work has gone into fixing the small things and making the default saner. The solid technology behind it + all the usability fixes they’ve been working on in the last years have made it really shine. I think it’s the culmination of years of work, and I think it’s finally paying off (also the fact that Valve is officially working on KDE will give it even more momentum).
There has been indeed a lot of changes in the last three years since Nate Graham started doing weekly update about all the stuff going on each week: https://pointieststick.com/
KDE has changed, and other environments have changed.
Used to be I disliked KDE for 3 reasons: 1. it made me feel like I was Doing It Wrong and stuff sometimes didn't work if I didn't use K- programs for everything (and I disliked basically all of those), 2) it was the worst-performing and heaviest (disk, memory, everything) DE around, and 3) the config was insane, in a bad way—not that you could do it, but the GUI config manager was just a damn mess.
1 has improved a ton, 3 has improved a little, and 2 isn't true anymore—Gnome is much heavier and has terrible performance by comparison (try both on a resource-constrained device if you don't believe me).
I wouldn't be surprised if XFCE has gotten a little heavier, too, so the difference between the two isn't so stark. Especially default installs of XFCE on some distros, which include a lot of extras.
But I don't even need it! Everything just works great! Super+arrow keys resize the window, I can even sequentially do super-left super-up to get a quarter tile. Alt-mouse to drag/resize, if I'm using a mouse at all. Easy to pin, shade, group, etc. It's snappy, does exactly what I expect nearly 100% of the time.
After seeing a salesman voluntarily using it and getting away with it at work, multiple influential devs using it both in my organization and at customera, meetings be held with Teams on Linux desktop at the client etc I have already declared year of Linux desktop on Oslo, Norway.
Feels exactly like when Mac broke through 15 or so years ago: all the cool kids used it and advocated it, management wanted it and several people in IT preferred it and use it whenever they can get away with it.
I've had presentations where the Macbook couldn't sync and the Kubuntu Dell rescued me. Linux video is massively better than a few years ago thanks to AMD drivers being fully open source.
The same open source Radeon drivers that have dropped support for my netbook APU, downgraded to GL3.3 from GL 4.1 without hardware video decoding as previously provided by fglrx, while the Windows 8 drivers keep providing GL 4.1, DirectX 11 and hardware video decoding on Windows 10, on the same hardware.
Of course there are things like my Canoscan 4400F that has refused to work for years, but that is so rare I can remember that particular piece of trash a decade later.
What are you even trying to say. You're not any better when you leave bait in every single thread even remotely connected to open source. Now go on a tangent like always and watch me not reply.
> I'll buy all three Affinity apps again with a Linux or Proton version.
Same here. I already own Affinity apps for Mac and on Windows but I don't see anything wrong with buying next Designer or Photo for Linux (with or without Wine/Proton). However, I know it is massive effort and still very complex errand to deliver even comparable experience on Linux as on Windows. I do still keep fingers crossed for Serif but it is frantic demand.
There are hundreds of "Linux requests" (most popular [0]) on their forums and they were very resistant to give although a small chance to make it happen.
The community asking for it is a good marker for a passionate community. Affinity being resistant about implementing it is a good marker for a functional company.
Thank you for the reference for "Breaking Paragraphs into Lines". I attempted to implement something like this (quite naively) a few years ago; to read something in detail makes me realize the impressive lengths people go to in order to do something as 'simple' as breaking paragraphs into lines and further realize how little I appreciate 'tiny' things like this.
Yes, I came to write this. If anyone from Affinity is reading this, I really hope they take notice of the demand for the Affinity suite on Linux. It’s really the missing bit on Linux.
I own the suite on Mac and Windows and I’ll gladly buy it a third time for Linux. Otherwise, at least better Wine support will be very welcome. I’d even take part in a Kickstarter fund raise for this.
> at least making it possible to run Affinity on Proton/Wine.
I would be overjoyed even it was unofficial/at-your-own-risk. They previously stated on their forums that they were worried that they wouldn't be able to deliver the experience that they wanted[1]... or recoup costs.
I got PhotoLine running under Wine. The interface is not as "sexy" but the capabilities of PL are great and in many ways better than PS or Affinity Photo. PL has been around almost as long as PS but is not as known. I believe two brother from Germany maintain the software. It is much better than GIMP too.
Proton/Wine support would be a great improvement over not being able to run Affinity software on Linux at all. Definitely worth another purchase if Linux is supported in some way. They could try crowdfunding development if they're not sure about the demand.
Seriously, I'd drop $100 for the effort without promises or guarantees. Just because I feel their software is amazing value and I'd love to have it on Linux.
Pragmatic people install them in a VM or inside Flatpaks and make the permissions more restrictive. Dual boot between two encrypted isolated distros is also possible. It doesn't seem so overkill when you have to use not only proprietary software but also things like npm and containers.
Many pretend they don't use proprietary software while they still install what could be called malware directly from Steam. We're all forced to use proprietary software inside our CPUs and other hardware anyway. It would be easier to fight back if more people used and supported free software and hardware to move society to a better place. By the way I'm not implying that being open source or not has something to do with software quality.
Most of us just want a choice between good desktops, 30% faster compiles, cli commands (e.g. git) that completes in milliseconds instead of seconds etc.
Most reasonable persons, even the more free software loving ones are happy to run 50 - 75% free rather than 100% proprietary :-)
It's not a consequence of that, what you're describing is a consequence of poor justification algorithms + no manual justification. For books, generally want block justified text without rivers, that's why you need a good tweakable algorithm, which is what GP is complaining about. Lack of that makes it problematic for use in professional publishing work
Even with very good justification tools (InDesign's being the obvious example, as it's a direct competitor) a professional end result still requires a lot of manual work -- adjusting tracking and kerning, actually editing the text. But without that solid basis it's entirely slow manual work.
I've been using Affinity Designer since its beta in 2014, and it has made the gradual decomposition of Illustrator CS6 (the last non-rental version, effectively unusable on modern MacOS) much easier to endure.
For my professional needs, Designer is a perfect fit, as I only use it when I need to design an icon that would be too complex for Sketch. For side projects, I've made it work – for all the effort Serif has put into improving the fundamentals, Designer remains a feature-poor Illustrator replacement for complex illustration.
Serif's long-term aims with its vector package remain a mystery to me. Circa 2015, they had a public roadmap of everything they planned to add to the 1.x branch, including key illustration features such as shape blends and distortion envelopes. That roadmap has long since been deleted, and most of the features added to Designer since then have been subtle workflow enhancements (a contour tool last year was a notable exception).
The obvious explanation for this is that $50 six years ago isn't enough to sustainably develop all the functionality of a full Illustrator replacement, but to that end, I wonder why Serif hasn't made any movement toward a paid upgrade path.
I'm in a similar boat. Very happy to be out of the Adobe ecosystem, but just not seeing a lot of action feature-wise from Affinity. Notably, I've been waiting on some kind of bitmap auto-trace, a thing that's been standard in Illustrator for at least fifteen years.
Pixelmator seems to be on a much better track than Affinity Photo for bitmap editing, but I'm just not aware of a better alternative to Illustrator than Affinity Designer.
Presumably Serif is either still working on the level of improvements that would justify a v2, or simply don't think adding more income/manpower will output a better product.
I appreciate that while I know they'll inevitably launch a v2, they didn't choose to claim every possible dollar on the table on the way there.
I wonder if the market for vector tools is small compared to bitmap/photo tools. Anecdotally I know a lot of people using Photoshop but nobody who uses Illustrator.
I’d imagine one of the biggest uses of vector design tools is UI design. This market has been absolutely devoured by Figma (a web based vector design tool).
Vectorstyler is a new vector graphics app for Mac and Windows. It has more features than Affinity Designer: distortion envelopes, bitmap tracing, shape blends.. some features are even more advanced than in Illustrator. Check if it fits your needs.
I do also wonder about that. I think so far maybe they have enough revenue from the different apps they have created (Publisher/iPad apps). So far.. I have bought all haha.
But even then it's not that much.
Before I thought they might still be coasting on their old products, but afaik they discontinued those.
I wonder how much demonstrable interest it would really take to convince the management at Serif that a real Linux port of Affinity is a worthwhile exercise. Every time the software comes up in discussions, it feels like half the comments are just enthusiastic people hoping for a Linux-friendly version. I understand the hesitation, and surely Serif have had a conversation internally and maybe done some market research. Still, if the cost guesstimate for doing it that I saw someone apparently from Serif mentioning in a previous discussion was even close to realistic, I can’t help wondering if they could easily raise that much just in pre-orders if they ran a Kickstarter-style “Will it work?” campaign, and probably a lot of goodwill from the tech community as a bonus.
The Linux community is a very vocal minority when in comes to the internet. While it would be nice to have available on all platforms, the reality is the majority of people are happily working on the other two major platforms and don't care.
And Linux[0] is absolutely the worst "platform" you could ever have to port commercial software to. There is a ludicrous level of fragmentation where even individual distributions break compatibility with themselves every few years, and there is no widely accepted standard for binary application distribution[1]. That's without even getting into things like driver issues that are arguably not Linux's fault. As game developers discovered, Linux will often account for a vastly disproportionate amount of your bug reports for its share of installs.
I sympathise with people who want to be able to use their favorite software on a FOSS OS, I'm right there with you, but that will always be an uphill battle on Linux because the culture is deeply anti-platform.
[0] "Linux" here is taken as shorthand for "The GNU/Linux Desktop". The kernel itself is a fine platform.
[1] unless you lump all the different package repos, formats, and managers together. I shouldn't have to explain why this is a problem here.
> There is a ludicrous level of fragmentation where even individual distributions break compatibility with themselves every few years
Even worse, there is a vocal group of users who believe that this fragmentation is a good thing, and that software developers should target multiple distributions (or be shamed for it), as opposed to doing the sane thing and just targeting Ubuntu (or some common abstraction layer).
The vocal group you speak of overlaps significantly with the group that wants the price of all software to be voluntary donations. At some point, their desires become parasitical.
While undoubtedly true, it’s also true that Linux is nowadays the default OS for VFX, for example, and this means that a lot of commercial 3d software targets it (for example, Autodesk Maya or the Substance suite). There is a standard “platform” of reference that allows companies to have a fixed target for their software: https://vfxplatform.com
I think targeting it would be probably the best solution for a company willing to porting to Linux. Alternatively, Flatpaks/Appimages provide a very nice and user friendly solution to this problem.
>While undoubtedly true, it’s also true that Linux is nowadays the default OS for VFX
That's mainly because it's cheap and VFX is like a "factory production line" style job. But VFX is also very much a niche compared to vector graphics and DTP (and even more so, compared to bitmap graphics).
In other words, if Affinity's concern is that the Linux market for their stuff if small, then the intersection of "the Linux market for their staff" that "has the standard platform for VFX" is much much smaller.
Except there is a widely accepted standard for binary application distribution: AppImage (https://appimage.org/). It's a fire-and-forget solution: You download the AppImage and run it. No need to install anything.
AppImage was created for precisely this scenario: When you want to distribute a proprietary application without worrying about packaging it for different Linux distributions.
And for the driver issues: This is being brought up now and then, but comparing the amount of issues I've had with my AMD graphics card on Linux (essentially none) [1] with the amount of anecdotes of Windows driver issues I regularly see in certain forums, I'd say driver issues are a myth by now (to a certain extent of course, please don't bring up how you had to install a firmware package for your Broadcom wireless chipset...).
[1] I'm not saying there aren't ever any driver bugs now and then, but just a food for thought: My graphics card works perfectly out of the box, without any configuration or driver installation at all, on most recent (read: not ancient) Linux versions. On Windows I'd have to look for whatever piece of ad-laden "graphics management suite" I need and then install it as well as regularly update it.
> Except there is a widely accepted standard for binary application distribution: AppImage (https://appimage.org/)
Oh, if only AppImage was widely accepted. Very few developers distribute via AppImage and basically no DEs understand what they are. Not that AppImages need them to, but it'd be nice.
> AppImage was created for precisely this scenario: When you want to distribute a proprietary application without worrying about packaging it for different Linux distributions.
Yes, and it does about as well as could be expected. Which is to say, it kinda mostly works for most distributions that have some level of sanity.
> And for the driver issues: This is being brought up now and then, but comparing the amount of issues I've had with my AMD graphics card on Linux (essentially none) [1] with the amount of anecdotes of Windows driver issues I regularly see in certain forums, I'd say driver issues are a myth by now [...]
Consider that there are an order of magnitude more Windows Desktop users than Linux Desktop users. And I know plenty of people experiencing frequent driver regressions who'd disagree with you.
> On Windows I'd have to look for whatever piece of ad-laden "graphics management suite" I need and then install it as well as regularly update it.
Incorrect. Windows quite often has a driver available via Windows Update, sans overengineered bullshit control panel. It is usually a bit behind the latest-greatest though.
> Oh, if only AppImage was widely accepted. Very few developers distribute via AppImage and basically no DEs understand what they are. Not that AppImages need them to, but it'd be nice.
To clarify: Not many FOSS developers distribute via AppImage, or not many proprietary software developers distribute via AppImage? Since the former is to be expected, but I'm curious about your experiences with the latter. To be honest, I haven't seen that many AppImages in the wild either, but I'm also not using a lot of proprietary software on my system at the moment.
> Incorrect. Windows quite often has a driver available via Windows Update, sans overengineered bullshit control panel. It is usually a bit behind the latest-greatest though.
That's good to know. Do you happen to have a document or some other resource explaining the Windows Update graphics driver distribution system? IIUC Windows a) configures some sort of "Windows Basic Display Adapter" on first boot, before b) installing basic IHV-specific drivers via Windows Update. But I understand the IHV drivers installed by Windows Update support all graphics card features, only without the control panel? I always thought there is no alternative to the separately installed IHV graphics driver, especially if you need OpenGL/Vulkan/CUDA/etc. support. But if Windows manages to provide that functionality automatically through Windows Update, that sounds like a good alternative.
They're pushing very hard to have the actual standard manufacturer drivers available via Windows Update, and shipping the control panel as an optional download via the Windows Store.
I had to do a Windows 10 reinstall recently after I broke something severe in the networking stack (entirely on me, I was playing with something I knew I shouldn't have been playing with) and I had the NV 2060 drivers back on my machine pretty much immediately as part of the update installation chain. I just had to go back into the Windows Store to redownload the control panel since it's a hybrid video laptop and I wanted more control over settings.
I wrote up an edit for my comment but then barely missed the edit deadline, so I'll have to do it this way: I realized my comments on driver issues are a little snarky, sorry for that. Please ignore that part of my comment.
Using more neutral language, my main point is that Linux drivers nowadays are better than their historically bad reputation would suggest, and that they often offer a better or at least comparable out-of-the-box experience compared to Windows drivers. An important caveat is that free software-oriented distributions often make it somewhat more difficult to enable on-free firmware or drivers.
Yep, those folks engaged in "performative commenting" upvoting and agreeing that they would all buy small phones if only Apple would make them. Then Apple made the small phones... and crickets.
As does the current budget phone. The thing is people were regularly complaining that they couldn't get a high end device in a small package. Yet when Apple delivered that it didn't sell in large enough volumes.
So they sold really well, but not in large enough volumes. The only way both can be true is if it was at different times. I can believe that, maybe there was a significant market, but then after a few years it got saturated.
And the 1st Gen SE provided that, it had the same internals as the then-current flagship phones.
Note that Apple's small form factor phones have very often been released out of sync with the main launches in the Autumn. Just because there won't be a new one this autumn doesn't mean the current version will be dropped, and doesn't mean a new small form factor phone won't come along next year, possibly early next year.
There is an SE in the current range and a mini. They are clearly targeted at different audiences.
I'll not that all the complaints I read were during the period when the SE (or equivalent) was available. People were clearly calling for something else yet when it was offered they didn't take it up.
> I wonder how much demonstrable interest it would really take to convince the management at Serif that a real Linux port of Affinity is a worthwhile exercise.
Probably more than is demonstrable. It will never be a money maker. It might still happen for other reasons.
I love Affinity a ton, too, and have more or less ditched Adobe for all my creative needs. Affinity Designer/Photo/Published easily fills the Illustrator/Photoshop/InDesign toolkit for almost any designer's needs. I am satisfied with Figma for UI and UX design, and it seems to be the enterprise solution du jour as well. The only tool missing for me is a comprehensive motion design tool, for which I have only dabbled in alternatives to After Effects (which is amazing software).
If anyone's interested, I've found Cavalry to be really good so far but not really intended for footage if that's your use case. Really great for UI motion, however.
I always appreciate when companies take the time to focus on performance. Performance optimizations aren't as flashy as new features and senseless UI refreshes, but they save users time and probably also increase the amount of time users can stomach using the software in any given day.
I was kinda surprised by this performance focused update, I have not had any performance issues whatsoever, even in big documents.
For this reason I can not use Sketch. It's just painfully slow compared to Designer (and Figma). When everything is "sticky" it really messes with my productivity.
I swear Sketch has gotten slower. (Or perhaps my documents have gotten more involved.)
Still, it churns and grinds to a shocking degree sometimes. In your experience, Figma is faster? That’s good to know, as we’re on Sketch at work, but consider other options.
Might be my machine or whatever but Figma is significantly more pleasant to work with for me. Sketch is just "sticky" to the point that I really hate to use it.
Btw you can import Sketch files in Figma, so you can quite easily compare the two.
As a side note: I also really like the Figma design, auto layout is a game changer imo, component variants are also very nicely done. For UI it's really good, makes me very productive.
(For graphics I do still prefer Affinity Designer)
I switched to Affinity almost immediately and it was liberating to free my machine from the Adobe Cloud bullshit…
Unfortunately I have to say that Affinity Photo is still not good enough for my use cases: the difference lies mainly in the many tiny details which make the workflow an efficient workflow.
Publisher is a toy for now and has a lot to catch up to be on par with XPress or Indesign, especially if you want to do some serious type setting or design complex layouts.
I don’t have much to say about Designer as I work with extremely simple vector shapes and it’s good enough for me.
I’m looking forward to the evolution of the products but I wonder if the strategy to 'clone' Adobe was a good one instead of trying a revolution (like for example Figma).
>Unfortunately I have to say that Affinity Photo is still not good enough for my use cases: the difference lies mainly in the many tiny details which make the workflow an efficient workflow.
I've seen people say that this awkwardness is not for a lack of trying, instead adobe is just sitting on a pile of patents preventing other companies from implementing the same flows.
> Affinity Photo is still not good enough for my use cases: the difference lies mainly in the many tiny details which make the workflow an efficient workflow
Could you please provide an example? I mostly use Affinity Photo for simple photo development stuff and I'm curious where its limits really lie.
- Many dialogs (like “Resize canvas”, “Transform”…) don’t hold the values when re-opened for a second time
- No “trim” function
- Crop tool is imprecise, no snapping, no numeric input
- Quick masking is strange
- Macros don’t allow copy/paste operations but keep the initial buffer (?)
- Not so good as tool for tiny bitmaps like icons (for many reasons)
- No bitamp / indexed color mode
- etc.
As said, -many- smaller imprecisions and limitations don’t allow for an efficient workflow in my case, but I can work with it…
But there are also interesting features which are well implemented: for example the Perspective tool is very good and “Impaint” works surprisingly well!
The file exporters are much cleaner than the combination of Photosop’s “Export”, “Quick Export” and “Export for Web (Legacy)”.
I was really hoping to hop over to affinity photo couple months ago, but there was something essential missing with masking in multiple exposures, can't remember what exactly but everyone on the forums were complaining about that missing feature.
Really liked the rest of affinity photo but it was a deal breaker for me.
Super happy I took advantage of the sale they had a few weeks ago -- bought both Photo/Designer and now can finally say goodbye to the Adobe Subscription shackles.
I've used Affinity products a lot over the last few years - Photo and Designer specifically (moreso Designer). Sorry in advance for what will be a negative comment.
For those unaware, these are $50 USD one-time payment alternatives for Adobe products; Photoshop -> Photo, Illustrator -> Designer.
I think Photo is the more developed product, but Designer is what I really need on a day to day basis and it lacks a LOT of the basic features that Illustrator has.
The rendering engine is pretty poorly implemented. Rotating an object oftentimes fills the entire AABB of the rotated shape with black, which also persists into the layer previews as well. Rotating around causes this black box to flicker. It's been reported before and they do little about it.
Exports are rough too. Exporting to raster formats causes insane amounts of blur that are not present in other editors. The developers tell you to increase resolution, as if I don't know what I'm doing. Increasing the resolution is not the solution to everything, and it seems like crisp edges are not well handled in either product when dealing with vector objects.
The constraint system is entirely bugged out and doesn't work for more than a few trivial (and thus useless) cases.
Some of the panes (e.g. the guide pane) cause crashes when opened. Reproducible every time, reported more than a year ago, to my knowledge hasn't been fixed.
People posting bugs or feature requests on the forums are met with "come on guys stop being so mean"-type comments when we're all paying customers too and are a bit miffed about simple things causing our projects to crash, cause rendering issues, or waste time in other ways.
Further, some of the devs' responses have been lackluster, vaporous promises or, in some cases, outright rude and dismissive.
Looking at the glassdoor and some other review sites, it seems the company has a real problem with project management and directional focus, which seems to all fall in line with how the product is perceived after doing some pretty extensive work with it.
Overall, sure, you'll get your money's worth, but I would have happily paid more if it meant getting a more stable product, honestly.
Use if you're in a pinch, but don't think it'll be a cheaper, more grassroots drop-in replacement to CS (even if you don't need e.g. content-aware capabilities and the like, which of course Affinity doesn't have). Even basic usage can be a real PITA.
Beats GIMP and Inkscape any day of the week, though.
I’m sorry to say I agree. I was hoping Affinity could offer a real alternative to Adobe, and for a while it seemed like they would. But in the last several years it really seems like they have stagnated. Sure they put our Publisher, but it just feels like they can barely focus on one thing at a time. Photo and Designer were left stagnate in that time, especially on iPad.
It really feels like Affinity does not dog food the iPad apps where UI bugs and awkwardness have persisted for years. E.g. They use a radial slider UI element in a lot of places (e.g. representing 0-100% of some blur effect) that is just awkward as hell to use. The element is circular but you can't move your finger in a circular pattern to change it like you would if it was a knob or slider on a physical circular track. Instead dragging from left to right or bottom to top will increase the value. This leads to the user having to remember to drag from bottom right to top left. Otherwise if you drag from bottom to top, but also move slightly from right to left, the two behaviors fight each other and what happens is undefined.
As you said there also haven’t been many feature improvements over the years. While I don’t expect complete feature parity with Adobe, the gaps between the apps and their Adobe counterparts seems to have only widened over the years and their is no road map for improvement.
I just hope they don’t turn out like the OmniGroup where an initially strong company with strong software stagnates over years.
Out of curiosity, what platform are you on? I run Designer on a Mac and on an iPad, and haven't had any crashing issues.
I see bugs in the boolean operations, and some of the vector exports are less-than-ideal. I'm looking forward to getting this update to see if the SVG export is better.
This looks exciting. Still waiting on the ability to write plugins... We currently export to SVG and have an over complex pipeline to clean and transform. Figmas plugins are great, but the storage is lossy in terms of precision, making Affinity our only choice for now....
I am so glad this exists, and take every opportunity to encourage friends and family to switch to it and avoid alternatives from companies with exploitative and unfair business models (like Adobe.)
What strikes me with the performance is the potential to use the engine for a motion graphics app. Think somewhere in-between After Effects and Apple Motion. This might be wishful thinking, but I would love to see it and would purchase it in a second.
I wanted a non-Adobe alternative to After Effects (that also wasn't quite as Final Cut-focused as Motion) for years until I discovered Blackmagic Fusion (now part of Da Vinci Resolve).
If you're not in the VFX industry (I'm not), it's probably completely off your radar, but Blackmagic has taken Apple's "take a loss on software to sell hardware" model to the next level and distributes Resolve for free. The workflow is different from After Effects, but it took me only a few days to adjust from pre-comps to box-and-pin, and its power and flexibility is incredible.
Totally, I too am not in a pro vfx type person. But I have been slowly learning Da Vinci Resolve (which is really nice). I'm just a real fan of Serif, which as been producing solid apps for a reasonable price.
I wished they announced this before their 50% off sale ended. I gave the trial a try and Photo Affinity Photo could not handle my RAW files with a few edits on it. It would crash on the default sample images after hiding and unhiding the layers a few times.
Really like the Affinity products, but Designer still does not support hatch fills. This is a real deficit, as it’s required for technical drawings, e.g. for patent images. Does this new version offer this feature?
Affinity Photo has already been my go to for performance reasons (how is it so usable and snappy on an old iPad???). exciting to see it get faster yet.
I don't know what happened with InDesign. Coming from pagemaker and Quark it was somewhat revolutionary and now it's as the other poster commented, clunky. Illustrator certainly has added bloat but generally works better with each update and Photoshop has added lots of useful tools but not InDesign. Actually they probably add tons of new stuff to InDesign but nothing that I have found useful.
I haven't used Affinity Photo since the last boot and it took 15 seconds just now on a M1 MacBook Air with 16 GB RAM and nothing except two Safari tabs running. Subsequent runs are much faster, around 3 seconds, but I believe that's mainly thanks to macOS' caching.
Worth pointing out that GP edited their comment after this comment was made. Before GP said they bought the software because Serif promised that Linux was coming.
As a long time Photoshop user who knows all the hotkeys I really really hate using Affinity Photo. I refuse to pay monthly for an app I only have to use every so often so bought Affinity.
I just can't use it. The hotkeys are different and none of the UI makes any sense to me.
If you could just enable a "photoshop mode" that changed all the hotkeys and UI then I could be useful in it.
I'm even reconsidering just taking the dive and paying monthly for Photoshop again.
I'm another long time but occasional Photoshop user who doesn't know all the Photoshop hotkeys very well. I've been quite happy with Affinity as a replacement so far, and haven't looked back.
The controls are a little different, which I imagine would be annoying to a hardcore Photoshop user who has used it every day and developed deeply ingrained muscle memory. For a more casual user such as myself, it's not a big deal. I have to look things up in the (well written, comprehensive) documentation sometimes, I learn the new Affinity equivalent command, and it's fine. The learning curve has overall been much better than I anticipated.
As a long time Photoshop user who knows all the hotkeys I really really hate using Affinity Photo. I refuse to pay monthly for an app I only have to use every so often so bought Affinity.
I just can't use it. The hotkeys are different and none of the UI makes any sense to me.
If you could just enable a "photoshop mode" that changed all the hotkeys and UI then I could be useful in it.
I'm even reconsidering just taking the dive and paying monthly for Photoshop again.
I'm sure if you never used anything else before it'll be great
Also, please for the love of God implement paragraph wide justification. Without it Publisher is a toy (in my opinion) and not implementing it is unacceptably amateurish when it has been implemented, and open source, since 1981 [1].
[1] http://www.eprg.org/G53DOC/pdfs/knuth-plass-breaking.pdf