10 ms·

Affinity 1.10

215 points by codeptualize 5y ago

cpfohl 5y ago
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....
lebaux 5y ago
linux version when
- lbotos 5y ago
  tbh, if they released a linux version I'd happily buy it again, and drop MacOS.
- gjsman-1000 5y ago
  They've never promised it, and said it would cost $500,000 to build it for Linux. And that was in 2014 when the codebase was much smaller.
  - spiderice 5y ago
    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.
KingOfCoders 5y ago
Hurray to Publisher, I've set two books with Publisher and performance was a nightmare (iMac Pro 32gb/ 12 core Ryzen 32gb, NVM). (Long term happy Designer Win/OSX and Photo Win/OSX user).
- JKCalhoun 5y ago
  Helped my wife use Publisher for a book. Working on one for myself ... kept running into an M1 crasher that forced me to work on a pre-M1 MacBook. Maybe it's resolved. Right now installing the updates.
vorpalhex 5y ago
I love Affinity products and am a happy user, happy to see the team continue to make strides. Would love to see Linux support happen.
ambirex 5y ago
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.
- mortenjorck 5y ago
  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.
  - ambirex 5y ago
    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.
JustFinishedBSG 5y ago
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]. [1] http://www.eprg.org/G53DOC/pdfs/knuth-plass-breaking.pdf http://www.eprg.org/G53DOC/pdfs/knuth-plass-breaking.pdf
- indymike 5y ago
  > Linux version (foolish demand I know) 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.
  - scns 5y ago
    Well, maybe if everyone drops them an email... affinity@serif.com
    - pqb 5y ago
      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. [0]: https://forum.affinity.serif.com/index.php?/topic/47502-affinity-products-for-linux/ https://forum.affinity.serif.com/index.php?/topic/47502-affi...
      - jstummbillig 5y ago
        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.
moelf 5y ago
Linux version when (sorry, but I bought their product 4 years ago because they said they were making one)
- mynameisvlad 5y ago
  I don’t think they ever said they were making one. In 2018, they explicitly said it wasn’t happening: https://forum.affinity.serif.com/index.php?/topic/72023-linux-support/ https://forum.affinity.serif.com/index.php?/topic/72023-linu... And even as early as 2014 they never explicitly committed to it: https://forum.affinity.serif.com/index.php?/topic/626-affinity-for-linux/ https://forum.affinity.serif.com/index.php?/topic/626-affini...
- gjsman-1000 5y ago
  They've never promised it, and said it would cost $500,000 to build it for Linux. And that was in 2014 when the codebase was much smaller.
bovermyer 5y ago
I have been very happy with all three Affinity products since I got them. I double-bought each one so I'd have them available on both macOS and Windows. Thanks to Affinity I'm Adobe-free.
- nodejs_rulez_1 5y ago
  It's surprising how much you can offer to customers for a once-off £50 when you don't have VCs/investors breathing down your neck.
  - pixxel 5y ago
    And 22,000 employees to pay.
- hbosch 5y ago
  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.
  - webwielder2 5y ago
    Apple's Motion is worth checking out.
    - PostThisTooFast 5y ago
      Motion is under-appreciated, for sure. The UI has some design flaws, but the product is unmatched for what it does.
  - adfm 5y ago
adamnemecek 5y ago
What GUI toolkit do they use?
- ComputerGuru 5y ago
  It’s their own.
bschne 5y ago
OT: The video really made me wonder if someone actually hand-crafted that ginormous testing file and how long it took
- gaetgu 5y ago
  oh my goodness that is an absolutely massive file! I think that at this point serif is just bored and thinking of edge cases to fix.
CoryAlexMartin 5y ago
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.
- codeptualize 5y ago
  100% agree! 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.
  - perardi 5y ago
    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.
    - codeptualize 5y ago
      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)
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
brailsafe 5y ago
Great. Publisher is one of the only pieces of software I like.
- codeptualize 5y ago
  I second that. Recently I had to use Adobe Indesign for a bit and I was honestly shocked.
  - brailsafe 5y ago
    Ya it's a bit clunky. I never hated it, but I was also not pushing it that hard. Publisher doesn't feel clunky.
  - BashiBazouk 5y ago
    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.
Mandelmus 5y ago
Love their software but Designer still (with 1.10) takes almost 30 seconds to launch on my maxed out MacBook Pro 16”.
- planb 5y ago
  I just updated and the first start definitely took less than that on my Fusion Drive iMac from 2015. Something’s not right there…
  - Toutouxc 5y ago
    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.
Chris_Newton 5y ago
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.
- overcast 5y ago
  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.
  - AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y ago
    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.
    - fouric 5y ago
intellix 5y ago
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.
- pjlegato 5y ago
  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.
intellix 5y ago
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
- jstsch 5y ago
  I force myself to use it in the same way. With time, it gets better. But the speed I had from working 20 years in Photoshop is gone.
mortenjorck 5y ago
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.
- Eric_WVGG 5y ago
  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.
  - fmajid 5y ago
    Have a look at Vectornator. I have no experience with it, but it was used to demo the M1 Macs when they were introduced.
    - Eric_WVGG 5y ago
      INTERESTING. I've been using this on the iPad for a couple years, how did the Mac version escape me…
agys 5y ago
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).
- iaml 5y ago
  >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.
- Toutouxc 5y ago
  > 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.
  - riekus 5y ago
    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.
  - agys 5y ago
    A few: - 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)”.
mitjak 5y ago
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. inappropriate feature request: "divide" layer blending mode.
mm983 5y ago
Affinity Designer is absolutely fantastic. Very polished, better UI than Illustrator imo and incredibly cheap for what it offers.
aviraldg 5y ago
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.)
car 5y ago
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?
junon 5y ago
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.
- Pulcinella 5y ago
  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.
OzzyB 5y ago
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. Thank you.
ddon 5y ago
Also use all Affinity products, and what is missing for me is a timeline tool in Photo or Designer, so we can make animations. This is off topic, but a lot of Affinity users are here, so may be anybody can give recommendations for this?
shantnutiwari 5y ago
Another "I love Affinity" reply-- in my case, I dumped Gimp, which made me cry everytime I used it (due to its poor UI/UX)
lazycouchpotato 5y ago
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.

215 points by codeptualize 5y ago

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....

lebaux 5y ago

linux version when

lbotos 5y ago
tbh, if they released a linux version I'd happily buy it again, and drop MacOS.
gjsman-1000 5y ago
They've never promised it, and said it would cost $500,000 to build it for Linux. And that was in 2014 when the codebase was much smaller.
- spiderice 5y ago
  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.

KingOfCoders 5y ago

Hurray to Publisher, I've set two books with Publisher and performance was a nightmare (iMac Pro 32gb/ 12 core Ryzen 32gb, NVM). (Long term happy Designer Win/OSX and Photo Win/OSX user).

JKCalhoun 5y ago
Helped my wife use Publisher for a book. Working on one for myself ... kept running into an M1 crasher that forced me to work on a pre-M1 MacBook. Maybe it's resolved. Right now installing the updates.

vorpalhex 5y ago

I love Affinity products and am a happy user, happy to see the team continue to make strides. Would love to see Linux support happen.

ambirex 5y ago

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.

mortenjorck 5y ago
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.
- ambirex 5y ago
  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.

JustFinishedBSG 5y ago

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]. [1] http://www.eprg.org/G53DOC/pdfs/knuth-plass-breaking.pdf http://www.eprg.org/G53DOC/pdfs/knuth-plass-breaking.pdf

indymike 5y ago
> Linux version (foolish demand I know) 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.
- scns 5y ago
  Well, maybe if everyone drops them an email... affinity@serif.com
  - pqb 5y ago
    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. [0]: https://forum.affinity.serif.com/index.php?/topic/47502-affinity-products-for-linux/ https://forum.affinity.serif.com/index.php?/topic/47502-affi...
    - jstummbillig 5y ago
      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.

moelf 5y ago

Linux version when (sorry, but I bought their product 4 years ago because they said they were making one)

mynameisvlad 5y ago
I don’t think they ever said they were making one. In 2018, they explicitly said it wasn’t happening: https://forum.affinity.serif.com/index.php?/topic/72023-linux-support/ https://forum.affinity.serif.com/index.php?/topic/72023-linu... And even as early as 2014 they never explicitly committed to it: https://forum.affinity.serif.com/index.php?/topic/626-affinity-for-linux/ https://forum.affinity.serif.com/index.php?/topic/626-affini...
gjsman-1000 5y ago
They've never promised it, and said it would cost $500,000 to build it for Linux. And that was in 2014 when the codebase was much smaller.

bovermyer 5y ago

I have been very happy with all three Affinity products since I got them. I double-bought each one so I'd have them available on both macOS and Windows. Thanks to Affinity I'm Adobe-free.

nodejs_rulez_1 5y ago
It's surprising how much you can offer to customers for a once-off £50 when you don't have VCs/investors breathing down your neck.
- pixxel 5y ago
  And 22,000 employees to pay.
hbosch 5y ago
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.
- webwielder2 5y ago
  Apple's Motion is worth checking out.
  - PostThisTooFast 5y ago
    Motion is under-appreciated, for sure. The UI has some design flaws, but the product is unmatched for what it does.
- adfm 5y ago

adamnemecek 5y ago

What GUI toolkit do they use?

ComputerGuru 5y ago
It’s their own.

bschne 5y ago

OT: The video really made me wonder if someone actually hand-crafted that ginormous testing file and how long it took

gaetgu 5y ago
oh my goodness that is an absolutely massive file! I think that at this point serif is just bored and thinking of edge cases to fix.

CoryAlexMartin 5y ago

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.

codeptualize 5y ago
100% agree! 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.
- perardi 5y ago
  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.
  - codeptualize 5y ago
    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)

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

brailsafe 5y ago

Great. Publisher is one of the only pieces of software I like.

codeptualize 5y ago
I second that. Recently I had to use Adobe Indesign for a bit and I was honestly shocked.
- brailsafe 5y ago
  Ya it's a bit clunky. I never hated it, but I was also not pushing it that hard. Publisher doesn't feel clunky.
- BashiBazouk 5y ago
  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.

Mandelmus 5y ago

Love their software but Designer still (with 1.10) takes almost 30 seconds to launch on my maxed out MacBook Pro 16”.

planb 5y ago
I just updated and the first start definitely took less than that on my Fusion Drive iMac from 2015. Something’s not right there…
- Toutouxc 5y ago
  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.

Chris_Newton 5y ago

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.

overcast 5y ago
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.
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y ago
  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.
  - fouric 5y ago

intellix 5y ago

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.

pjlegato 5y ago
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.

intellix 5y ago

jstsch 5y ago
I force myself to use it in the same way. With time, it gets better. But the speed I had from working 20 years in Photoshop is gone.

mortenjorck 5y ago

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.

Eric_WVGG 5y ago
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.
- fmajid 5y ago
  Have a look at Vectornator. I have no experience with it, but it was used to demo the M1 Macs when they were introduced.
  - Eric_WVGG 5y ago
    INTERESTING. I've been using this on the iPad for a couple years, how did the Mac version escape me…

agys 5y ago

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).

iaml 5y ago
>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.
Toutouxc 5y ago
> 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.
- riekus 5y ago
  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.
- agys 5y ago
  A few: - 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)”.

mitjak 5y ago

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. inappropriate feature request: "divide" layer blending mode.

mm983 5y ago

Affinity Designer is absolutely fantastic. Very polished, better UI than Illustrator imo and incredibly cheap for what it offers.

aviraldg 5y ago

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.)

car 5y ago

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?

junon 5y ago

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.

Pulcinella 5y ago
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.

OzzyB 5y ago

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. Thank you.

ddon 5y ago

Also use all Affinity products, and what is missing for me is a timeline tool in Photo or Designer, so we can make animations. This is off topic, but a lot of Affinity users are here, so may be anybody can give recommendations for this?

shantnutiwari 5y ago

Another "I love Affinity" reply-- in my case, I dumped Gimp, which made me cry everytime I used it (due to its poor UI/UX)

lazycouchpotato 5y ago

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.