Sad update for users of the perpetual licence of Designer Pro X19

[jaydear]

I have to say Xara+ now seems to be very focused on Real Estate website features. The ongoing premium to keep it alive is definitely not for me. XDP18/19 is good if you already have it and just want to do something quick, but I find trying to do fancy effects frustrating and I seldom need XDP's website features now, as BONES says, social media is easier.

Affinity Designer and Photo work excellently together and suit my personal way of working learnt from years using CorelDRAW. The Affinity apps start up promptly and don't have the constant threat of huge delays or failing to proceed like anything linked back to Magix. XDP18 and 19 do handle PDFs extremely well, but so do Affinity Designer and a slew of PDF editors.

[BONES]

I have both Designer and Photo and I really hate them. Photo is even clunkier than Photoshop, which I wouldn't have thought possible. I also have issues with it when exporting images - I often get white rectangles of varying sizes randomly placed in the image, kind of like it was doing bucket processing - where the image is split into smaller areas which are processed separately, usually sent to different CPU cores/threads - and some of the buckets didn't give a result.

[jaydear]

I've certainly had annoying thin white borders appear on edited pics in XDP, but no 'unwanteds' in Affinity. They'd likely jump on that and find the cause if you send them samples. Might be a RAM or graphics driver issue. Mostly I keep my edits simple, but when I do use clever effects in Affinity they work well. Bringing in photos, adding graphics and text into the Affinity apps, resizing them, changing transparency, selecting borders, etc. all work so much better than XDP because the handles and borders and control points all stay visible and the effects just work without crashing. I love that. XDP was very nice for me back in v11, but they kept messing about with the UI and Magix became intrusive.

I know what you mean about buckets - I recently sampled a picture resolution enhancer from Nero. The online version works fairly well, but results from the installed app are nowhere near as visually impressive and as you describe, it writes new files out from a matrix of little blocks... really s.l.o.w.l.y!

[handrawn]

I've had affinity programs since they first came out on windows; yes the Ui takes some getting used to but they all do, xara did when I first started using it 20 years ago it was nothing like photoshop, but then it wouldn't be would it

affinity designer has now added vector mesh warp and a flood fill tool, things that xara was asked for 10 years ago but [apparently] are not interested in; affinity are geared for the kind of vector work I usually do

on the subject of PDF, again 10 years or more ago, PDF became a preferred transfer format for vector objects; xara seems to have forgotten this and is now only dealing with PDF's as paginated documents, the ability to drag/drop mutliple PDFs all onto the same page ended at version 15.1 or thereabouts

why does xara not have a workspace view ['canvas'] rotate? - this is surely a no brainer to anyone who actually draws.... in xara this is really more trouble than it is worth:

https://www.talkgraphics.com/showthr...-xara-designer

you need to think about preserving layers and stack position and... well... hello affinity