5 ms·

First grats to the devs and hurray for high quality open source. My impression though for OS X, that with Affinity Designer a lot of need for a cheaper Illustr

First grats to the devs and hurray for high quality open source. My impression though for OS X, that with Affinity Designer a lot of need for a cheaper Illustrator has vanished (if you need it to be free/open source/on principle then Inkscape is great)

dangom 7y ago
As a researcher who composes a figure or two every now and then, I find Inkscape to be far more intuitive than Affinity Designer. Affinity makes simple things hard. Creating arrows was not a feature until recently, resizing multiple selections would mess text objects, and changing the size of the canvas requires copying all content to clipboard and creating a second, separate canvas. Not to mention that exports, which should be simple, are also hard to understand for beginners / non-designers, and the gazillion of menus makes it impossible to ever find what you need. After many years of waiting, I'm happy to see Inkscape jumping to MacOS too. Kudos to all devs and contributors that made this possible.
- KingOfCoders 7y ago
  I would agree, for arrows I still use OmniGraffle.
- tasogare 7y ago
  As a researcher who draw figures quite often... I use PowerPoint. That sounds like a joke, but the ratio features/learning curse is perfect. On the contrary I was never able to draw anything with Inkscape, and I give it a try every few years or so.
  - benibela 7y ago
    As a researcher ... I use tikz
  - lookdangerous 7y ago
    I assume you meant ‘learning curve’ but learning curse is hilarious here in the context of PowerPoint.
- oefrha 7y ago
  > Not to mention that exports, which should be simple, are also hard to understand for beginners / non-designers That’s strange, I’m not a designer and I found it very easy to understand, and very powerful too — that is unless you don’t know there’s a separate Export Persona. Guess a tiny amount of prior experience with Sketch helped a bit in my case.
  - KingOfCoders 7y ago
    The only thing I don't like with exports is it doesn't remember the last export settings, e.g. "Export whole document" is reset every export.
virtualritz 7y ago
Inkscape is a lot more versatile than Affinity Designer. So it all depends what you need to do. But also how you like to or are used to work. Inkscape is more of a CorelDRAW than an Illustrator clone. People who come from CorelDRAW, like me, usually disrelish the way curves are edited in Adobe products. As much as I like Affinity products (I own both Photo & Publisher), I prefer Inkscape any day over Designer (or Illustrator) for this reason. The other reason I simply couldn't use Designer at all until approx. six months ago was that is lacked snapping of curve handles to grid intersections. It took Affinity years to implement this essential feature for people who do typography or logotypes[1]. As others mentioned: the Carbon native Inkscape (beta and now release) are even slower than the XQuartz version. Which was already slow, compared to running Inkscape on Linux on the same MBP. For this reason I now use Vectornator[2] (free) as much as I can. For the missing bits I go back and forth with Inkscape. Not ideal but it's only recent that the macOS version of Inkscape has seen more love from the developers. I hope that soon performance will improve and I can do everything in one app. [1] https://forum.affinity.serif.com/index.php?/topic/38389-feature-request-snap-anchor-handles-to-grid-option/page/4/ https://forum.affinity.serif.com/index.php?/topic/38389-feat... [2] https://www.vectornator.io/ https://www.vectornator.io/
- mortenjorck 7y ago
  A tangent, but Vectornator is completely mystifying to me. Not the application itself, which is a very accessible vector illustration tool, but the company. It’s a Berlin-based startup with $5 million in venture funding, and they don’t have any kind of externally-visible business model for their free, no-IAP apps for MacOS and iOS. (Further muddying the waters is a recent update to the iOS app that adds achievement badges. I don’t know what kind of product roadmap for a creative tool ends up prioritizing that, but that’s where they are.)
  - lallysingh 7y ago
    Yeah, they're showing 31 people and a bit over 5MM EUR as their funding. But their job ads are ~60 EUR/year, so that's what, maybe 1-2 years of funding? Not exactly long-term as they're claiming. There's something else going on. Perhaps training an AI?

dangom 7y ago

As a researcher who composes a figure or two every now and then, I find Inkscape to be far more intuitive than Affinity Designer. Affinity makes simple things hard. Creating arrows was not a feature until recently, resizing multiple selections would mess text objects, and changing the size of the canvas requires copying all content to clipboard and creating a second, separate canvas. Not to mention that exports, which should be simple, are also hard to understand for beginners / non-designers, and the gazillion of menus makes it impossible to ever find what you need. After many years of waiting, I'm happy to see Inkscape jumping to MacOS too. Kudos to all devs and contributors that made this possible.

KingOfCoders 7y ago
I would agree, for arrows I still use OmniGraffle.
tasogare 7y ago
As a researcher who draw figures quite often... I use PowerPoint. That sounds like a joke, but the ratio features/learning curse is perfect. On the contrary I was never able to draw anything with Inkscape, and I give it a try every few years or so.
- benibela 7y ago
  As a researcher ... I use tikz
- lookdangerous 7y ago
  I assume you meant ‘learning curve’ but learning curse is hilarious here in the context of PowerPoint.
oefrha 7y ago
> Not to mention that exports, which should be simple, are also hard to understand for beginners / non-designers That’s strange, I’m not a designer and I found it very easy to understand, and very powerful too — that is unless you don’t know there’s a separate Export Persona. Guess a tiny amount of prior experience with Sketch helped a bit in my case.
- KingOfCoders 7y ago
  The only thing I don't like with exports is it doesn't remember the last export settings, e.g. "Export whole document" is reset every export.

virtualritz 7y ago

Inkscape is a lot more versatile than Affinity Designer. So it all depends what you need to do. But also how you like to or are used to work. Inkscape is more of a CorelDRAW than an Illustrator clone. People who come from CorelDRAW, like me, usually disrelish the way curves are edited in Adobe products. As much as I like Affinity products (I own both Photo & Publisher), I prefer Inkscape any day over Designer (or Illustrator) for this reason. The other reason I simply couldn't use Designer at all until approx. six months ago was that is lacked snapping of curve handles to grid intersections. It took Affinity years to implement this essential feature for people who do typography or logotypes[1]. As others mentioned: the Carbon native Inkscape (beta and now release) are even slower than the XQuartz version. Which was already slow, compared to running Inkscape on Linux on the same MBP. For this reason I now use Vectornator[2] (free) as much as I can. For the missing bits I go back and forth with Inkscape. Not ideal but it's only recent that the macOS version of Inkscape has seen more love from the developers. I hope that soon performance will improve and I can do everything in one app. [1] https://forum.affinity.serif.com/index.php?/topic/38389-feature-request-snap-anchor-handles-to-grid-option/page/4/ https://forum.affinity.serif.com/index.php?/topic/38389-feat... [2] https://www.vectornator.io/ https://www.vectornator.io/

mortenjorck 7y ago
A tangent, but Vectornator is completely mystifying to me. Not the application itself, which is a very accessible vector illustration tool, but the company. It’s a Berlin-based startup with $5 million in venture funding, and they don’t have any kind of externally-visible business model for their free, no-IAP apps for MacOS and iOS. (Further muddying the waters is a recent update to the iOS app that adds achievement badges. I don’t know what kind of product roadmap for a creative tool ends up prioritizing that, but that’s where they are.)
- lallysingh 7y ago
  Yeah, they're showing 31 people and a bit over 5MM EUR as their funding. But their job ads are ~60 EUR/year, so that's what, maybe 1-2 years of funding? Not exactly long-term as they're claiming. There's something else going on. Perhaps training an AI?