Affinity Designer v2.0
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Just tried it out. A few improvements, but several bugs and several limitations carried directly over. Major update my ass.
Changes in the user interface amateurish and insignificant. Bigger disappointment than I expected. I actually thought Serif wanted to come forward a bit now.
The marketing was of course ridiculously lavish and boastful, but the big words were too far from the reality of the product. Now I've been proven for real that this little overrated British company can't lift their products any higher than they could with the previous ones over 20 years. And they are still nowhere near being able to make products for professionals.
Maybe I'll ask for a refund. I'm sleeping on it.
Make your own experience with v2 and make your own choices. I'm not even wasting time elaborating on the above. But all in all good news for Vectorstyler that a competitor wants so little and does it so slowly.
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@Ingolf Yes, it is very interesting what they are doing. it was of course over-hyped by a lot. I was expecting some new "redefined" workflow.
I was also expecting to have at least the basics (blend, pattern, vector brushes, list goes on).Also there was a lot of expectations on a new app.
But the most surprising thing is that it runs only on Catalina and above. No more Mojave, Sierras, El Capitan.
And this could be because they moved to a new Apple framework (Universal), and this is not available on older Macs.
I think they invested a lot of effort here, as probably most of their UI was rewritten.On the positive side: there is no subscription, and for now it is quite cheap, especially the combo.
Maybe they will continue the previous model of free updates.I downloaded the trial (initially on Mojave, but not running), and tried on Mac Mini M1. The two main new features are Warp and Shape Builder.
I was expecting envelope also with the ability to copy the shape, but not possible.
Also, I was surprised that the Shape Builder requires an extra step to actually get the shape.
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I was wondering when the Affinity 2.0 thread would get started on here, lol. I had planned to share my thoughts, but I haven't had a lot of time yet to play around with it and form strong conclusions. I dabbled a little here and there this morning.
I went ahead and upgraded it because the original version 1 set was not very useful to me in my professional workflow and knowing there will be a series of updates and upgrades to version 2.0 before they hit 3.0 - and with the intro discount, I decided to go ahead and update. I'm also looking into doing raster separations for screen print using Affinity photo more and I wanted to update that, etc....
I noticed I can no longer drag and drop vectors from VS into Designer2 - though I can from Designer2 into VS. Maybe I'm needing to edit a setting?
I still prefer VS for most of what I do - I feel like Affinity limits customization and user control of features and it feels constricting.
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The second I saw the old "styles" (just lame presets) and to my horrow experienced that my mainsteam high-dpi mouse still lags massively while dragging simple content (like a circle), they had lost me. I am not into toys for kids. And no, no "redefined" workflow.
Although they deny it I have seen several algorithms carried over from the old Plus programs, and I wouldn't be surprised if the shape builder is more or less the same lame shapebuilder tool that it was in DrawPlus X8.
They simply don't have enough devs to upgrade the framework AND to add features. On top of that, their developers are not that great.
The year is 2022 according to my calendar. Serif is stuck in the 1990's.
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I have nothing to contribute to this discussion (not an AD user, didn't download the trial).
I just write to say that I hope none of us VS forum members has the "genius" idea to go on
their forum and annoy their users by bashing AD 2.0 and hawking VS.
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@b77 said in Affinity Designer v2.0:
the "genius" idea to go on
their forum and annoy their users by bashing AD 2.0 and hawking VS.Certainly not! Any sharing of VS over there should only be meant to let others know of it as a solution for what's missing in Designer. I'm grateful someone shared about VS over there in the Affinity forum a couple years back or I'd have never heard of VS and been able to use it and be a part of things here.
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@VectorStyler said in Affinity Designer v2.0:
I was expecting envelope also with the ability to copy the shape, but not possible.
You sort of can, but it doesn't really work all that well. The deform is applied to a new type of group and the original object is inside the group. If you duplicate the group with copy/paste, you can then delete the content within the copy of the group and replace it with something else, but the deform retains the coordinates of the original object and if the new content of the group is at a different set of coordinates that results in a less than stellar match of the shape of the deform to the object that was added to it.
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@Boldline said in Affinity Designer v2.0:
I'm grateful someone shared about VS over there in the Affinity forum a couple years back or I'd have never heard of VS and been able to use it and be a part of things here.
Same here actually
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I stayed with AD 1.0 for the time being.
Watched a AD 2.0 video today, the only thing I can say
is that I found the graphics they used for the presentation
the most interesting.And as for the new features they should have been built
into 1.0 long ago.seemed all a bit overblown to me
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Serif was always about mediocore software sold via (too) heavy marketing that promised too much with capital letters and lots of colors. Small incremental updates with features the competition offered for decades. Selling affordable software to as many as possible over decades, keeping the company alive.
They certainly did something right when they mixed a fast engine with vector and bitmap graphics but apart from that they have nothing to offer as a tech company. With v2 it is easy to call their bluff. This time they have nothing to offer besides catching up a bit.
Serif reminds me of companies that sell Chinese made watches inspired by expensive brands, at too high a price normally, and then go out with 40% discount, and still profit from it. Nice functioning watches, but they have nothing to do with what they signal and cost.
But if you take it all a bit more seriously, and look at the big picture, Serif has in many ways been incredibly behind the game with the feature-weak Affinity since 2014, and also with their old Plus programs since the 1980s. That's fine for amateurs and hobbyists, but it's a group I simply don't belong to professionally or mindset wise.
With version 2 and the consistently ridiculous circus-like marketing, I now have definitive proof that this company will never move forward. I simply have to take myself seriously and say no thanks to discount sellers and tupperware.
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One of the affinity forum moderators gave a little insight into the approach for version 2.
"V2 of the Affinity apps and the new licensing procedure has been built from the ground-up for this version, we've had to work directly with both Apple and Microsoft to get this working across platforms - unfortunately none of the same processes are compatible or available in V1, as V1 wasn't originally designed to be cross platform (we launched on macOS only, before porting to Windows and then iPad)"
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I always try to see the glass as half full and finally some new features have been added to the v2. However, I don't think I'll be upgrading to v2 for several reasons. As an incentive to upgrade, I would say that support for any tech company that does not require a subscription is a good reason... but Serif is growing and does not need another customer. I don't run a tech company -so I certainly can't understand and grasp all the implications- but the company seems to be doing very well and so why not allow a final update of suite 1 first and at least fix some long-lasting bugs? Were they in a hurry to offer ASuite 2 when 1 is still very unstable and deserved to have still a bit of attention?
Also, as they don't publish any roadmap, we don't know anything about their intentions regarding future updates/upgrades. If in a year or two a new suite 3 is proposed leaving v2 to its (buggy?) fate, etc. especially I don't see any point in their universal license as I can't manage to work seriously on an iPad… and indeed their marketing department irritates me to no end, which makes me turn away (yes, I know, it's not rational... only human).
For vector work/art, we now have VectorStyler
For photography there are alternatives and subscribing to the Adobe photo plan is now becoming cheaper than paying for regular upgrades from competitors.
This brings me to what I would like to put forward as a major development by @VectorStyler. What is missing is an alternative to InDesign and it would be great if @VectorStyler would think of developing such a program. I know I already mentioned that
There aren't many alternatives to InDesign, especially if you're only interested in non-subscription software. APub is one of them but again with stability issues that I've had so often. I still use it for small and minor jobs like simple posters, flyers, postcards etc. (for a non-profit association) but I would never try it for a large job like a (photo)book... and I enjoy working on the layout of books and other stuff.
This is not my living job and so, not practising often enough, I don't subscribe to InDesign. But laying out a beautiful book - and one's own book - is a beautiful exercise and an art in itself. I dream of desktop publishing software like VectorStyler ("PageStyler"). I know it would slow down the development of VS but wouldn't it be a good time for @VS to think about a possible integration of two software?
Not only for personal work but also in the academic world where it is necessary to use these various types of software. Being able to work with VS is already amazing (great great opportunity), integrating vector drawing with page layout would be even more amazing. I'll come back to this later.
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One thing I noticed the second time I looked at Affinity Designer 2.0
Before the release of Affinity Designer 2 if one told in the Affinity forum
about VectorStyler the higher price was mentioned negatively.In the meantime the price of Affinity Designer 2 without sale is at 84.99 €
in the range of VectorSyler ca 92 € ($ 95.-) and this although Affinity Designer 2
has considerably less features than VectorStyler
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@Subpath said in Affinity Designer v2.0:
In the meantime the price of Affinity Designer 2 without sale is at 84.99 €
in the range of VectorSyler ca 92 € ($ 95.-) and this although Affinity Designer 2
has considerably less features than VectorStylerIn terms of purely vector manipulation features, yes - but don't be too quick to discount the integration with the rest of the suite and the shared file format among the three apps. There is value in that integration for many use cases where people do more than one thing. Designer also has the pixel persona and the ability to do raster manipulation alongside vector manipulation, which as far as I can tell VectorStyler currently lacks - sensibly since it is not really designed for that.
If you are purely a vector graphics artist then VectorStyler is the clear winner here, at least at this time, but for users who do more than one thing within a given project, the waters are bit muddier.
The iPad version is also of use to many people, being able to start projects with sketches and the like on the go, having a significant portion of the desktop feature set in an ultra-portable format boosted further by the Apple Pencil, then copy the document to their desktop computer for final polishing where needed. I haven't seen an iPad version of VectorStyler yet.
Not everyone needs or would use that, but for some that is huge.
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Yes, I meant that purely in terms of vector graphics. In Affinty forum,
when people complained about missing Vectorgraphic features for years,
the price argument often came up.Which is at least put into perspective, which of course
it was before in my opinion.I see your points, and I know they count too. By the way, the Pixel Persona
is one of the main reasons why I like Affinity Designer 1.
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Serif has probably been working against itself by saturating the market since 2014. I think Serif set the price too low in the last years, but waited to set a more realistic price range for v2. They pretty much saturated the discount market thoroughly and aggressively with v1, and can't count on the majority of v1 customers upgrading.
They are also now operating in a more uncertain and expensive world, and there may be fewer customers investing in software right now. Prices are just going up in Europe.
I also see on their forum that I don't envy Serif too many of their immature types of customers.
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@fde101 said in Affinity Designer v2.0:
@Subpath said in Affinity Designer v2.0:
.... Designer also has the pixel persona and the ability to do raster manipulation alongside vector manipulation, which as far as I can tell VectorStyler currently lacks - sensibly since it is not really designed for that.If you are purely a vector graphics artist then VectorStyler is the clear winner here, at least at this time, but for users who do more than one thing within a given project, the waters are bit muddier.
...@VectorStyler How difficult would it be to integrate the AD "pixel" part (& pixel brushes) into VS?
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@Pat said in Affinity Designer v2.0:
How difficult would it be to integrate the AD "pixel" part (& pixel brushes) into VS?
To some extent "pixel" layers exist, as Image Effects will result in dynamically rendered images.
But I think there are some issues with adding these kind of "image" editing features to vector apps. They immediately change the way a document can be exported (will be only image), and somewhat change the expectations also.
I would rather keep a vector and photo app separate but with the same document format, and have some form of deep integration (similar to what already exists in affinity).
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I'm a big Affinity supporter, but they botched the release of version 2. They basically updated the UI, added a couple of new features in each app (some of them – like the vector Warp – are quite buggy) but didn't do much to fix the old bugs from v1. Also it seems to me that the smaller feature requests we've been posting on their forums for years went mostly unnoticed. All the annoyances and quirks from v1 are exactly the same in v2. I'm still giving them a chance because their apps are so damn fast and good compared with Adobe's, but I do hope they'll step up the bug fixing.
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@tudor said in Affinity Designer v2.0:
I'm a big Affinity supporter, but they botched the release of version 2. They basically updated the UI, added a couple of new features in each app (some of them – like the vector Warp – are quite buggy) but didn't do much to fix the old bugs from v1. Also it seems to me that the smaller feature requests we've been posting on their forums for years went mostly unnoticed.
That's exactly how the company has been developing and marketing software since at least 1990, when I first heard about Serif. That's how they updated and sold the Plus series, and that's how they develop Affinity. 2-3 new features, little improvements in every update, but also devastating bugs that are never ever fixed. The biggest news with Affinity was probably that the Plus series bugs died with the Plus series.
My biggest concern is that Serif even really believes they are innovating. That's my impression after talking to their developers, and after reading their posts on their forum. Their marketing is downright ridiculous.
In any case, I constantly see their (young) customers blinded by an almost cult-like illusion of how hard it is to make software in 2022 and that Affinity represents the latest technology. And they are easy to impress:
Personally, I find it impossible to ignore that Publisher lacks features I could use in Aldus Pagemaker in 1990 (!), and that Designer lacks features that were in several illustration programs in the early 1990s. And contains algorithms that don't match the algorithms of that time in products from a company that were actually founded back then, in 1987. Then you know they are not a tech company and that the ambition is sales sales sales. And it was actually a company that used creepy and unpopular telemarketers right up until they started over with Affinity, and now use viral marketing instead.
I still like making a particular type of poster in Designer 1.x, which performs quite impressively with many objects even when most are with effects, but it's almost surreal to see the new generations waiting for years for things I used from the early 90s.
The definitive clue that Serif is making software for amateurs - voluntarily isolated and with big blinders on in a cave - is the big fuss about the EXE file hidden in their app version of 2.0. It's as if they didn't know anything about how their customers and the whole world work in workflows with other programs, or ignored this which will just be worse. They even thought in their own words that they were "ahead of the curve" and asked customers to contact the developers of third party products to update their products.
I got decisively wiser with v2. Serif is a smart little company that is good at selling, but the products are simply not for creatives with my profile. And now the wait starts for the yet missing features for their cult of customers.
These are fine products for people who can't afford anything else, but it was simply too burdensome to visit their forum, where many believe they are right up front and ahead of the professionals with their inferior discount product. But what do they know about professional use when they are not professionals themselves...
But so much the better to discover Vectorstyler. Coming from Affinity it must be like joining NASA after being a member of a small fireworks club.
