Sadly, I've given up on Xara and I am switching to Affinity Designer for Mac

[Frip]

I'm going to put together a Xara VS Affinity feature list.

Hey gingerbeardman, that would be great to have such a list. Are you still working on it?

[pauland]

That'll be the only way the mods don't move posts about it out of sight.

That's really unfair. Given that this whole setup is courtesy of Xara and Magix, I think they've been entirely tolerant and fair.

I can't see much value in bullet point comparisons. They show the superficial differences but not the real difference in user experience.

The Xara user-base is almost completely PC based, so Affinity is not really an option for them.

Affinity Designer is in the top ten paid apps for Mac.

[Nathan Heagy]

It's been a long time since I fully switched to Mac. I stopped using Xara within a few years since maintaining a windows VM just for Xara ended up consuming a lot of time. However, I've kept checking out stuff like TalkGraphics and the Xara Insider because no other graphics software on Mac has been able to replicate many of the awesome features that Xara has had for basically 20 years.

That is, until I found this thread. Within the last month I've totally fallen in love with Affinity Designer. It's got most of the things I miss from Xara that don't exist on Photoshop (I don't both with Illustrator), and it is very well made software. I'm thrilled.

I'd still love to see Xara Designer on Mac, and will probably always tell PC-using friends to get Xara apps, but for me right now Affinity is my surprise find of 2014. So thanks for the recommendation!

[KIR23]

Curious if Affinity has something like Xara name tags or Photoshop styled switchable layers compositions? Does it have a brush that could scatter randomly selected bitmap images like Xara brushes?

Can it crop and feather bitmap edges Xara style?

[pauland]

I think that if you want affinity info, then an affinity-specific forum would be a more appropriate place to ask.

[KIR23]

Well, Affinity specific forum may not necessarily have people who know Xara features so it would be not so easy to explain what Xara names mean.

[pauland]

It's never a great idea to do direct comparisons of software features. Just because Xara does something one way, it doesn't mean the same effect can't be achieved another way.

Why not try it and see for yourself and get some more specific answers from the affinity forum.

[Rik]

Well, Affinity specific forum may not necessarily have people who know Xara features so it would be not so easy to explain what Xara names mean.

If you go to the Affinity forum, I think you will find at least one (that I know of) person there who knows Xara extremely well.

[bshand1]

I'm not sure if a 'Feather' tool exists, so I used their Gausian Blur option.

Hi Rik

How are you using the Gaussian Blur to feather an image? When I try it blurs the whole image rather than just the outside edge as 'feather' does.

Brett

Edit: I have just discovered in AD 1.3.5 that there are all kinds of ways to refine a selection, including feather. Now I just need to find out how to use it :-)

[gwpriester]

Brett - Did you mean to post in this old thread? Maybe you could re-post this question in the Xara Graphics Chat.