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

[omegaman]

Since switching to Mac many years ago I have been running Xara in a virtual environment using Parallels. A few weeks ago I came across Affinity Designer (by Serif) for Mac and have been wowed by it's performance and Xara like usability. The program has a lot of features that will make it my replacement for Adobe Illustrator. I recommend anyone who has been wanting to have a dedicated Mac program similar to Xara to check it out. I really wish Xara had been ported to Mac, but alas that has not happened. Affinity have just moved from beta to release candidate 1, so that's great news and it's cheap as chips at £34.99 or around $56.00 US.

[mwenz]

Hey, Omega...I understand comepletly. Affinity Designer is almost enough to make me wanna buy a Macbook to run it. Maybe once Affinity Publisher comes out, I will.

See you on the Quark forum...

[Blackkat]

Please let us know how you get on

[omegaman]

Will do.

[Rik]

Just tried the beta version of Afinity Designer.
Please bear in mind that it's for Mac only.

It's a pretty intuitive programme.
Without looking at any instructions about the tool, I was able to do, what I sort of tried to do when I started with Xara.

I made a simple button. With a linear fill, highlight and transparency.
All the tools were reasonable easy to find and use.
I'm not sure if a 'Feather' tool exists, so I used their Gausian Blur option.

The export process (of the button) was a bit tricky though!

I'm very used to Xara's Shape Tool. In fact, I use nothing but that for all my drawings.
Afinity's Pen Tool, is not bad though. It's much easier to use than Illustrator's Pen Tool.
I'm also very used to having many tools as buttons, whereas in Afinity, things like shadow are hidden within the 'Effects' tab where the Layers are.

But, Afinity is a mere £34.99.

[handrawn]

does it have bitmap trace or calligraphy pen [freehand touch-sensitive] Rik?

[Rik]

I'm not sure it has bitmap trace.
And I'm not sure what you mean by 'calligraphy pen [freehand touch-sensitive]'

Give me an example (so that I can understand what you mean) and I can try and find out.

[handrawn]

ok - like the 'freehand and brush' tool in xara, as opposed to the pen/shape tool that you use, that varies in width with pressure when you draw with a graphic tablet

also there may be tilt functions for pens that support tilt

'calligraphy' strictly means it would have a variable shaped tip option, such as xara has for the shape-builder tool, but not for freehand

thanks Rik

[omegaman]

From the website:

Beautiful vector brushes

Affinity Designer allows you to stay in the vector domain while harnessing the organic properties of texture and pressure. You can use pressure from a stylus – or even velocity – as a controller to produce beautiful, clean strokes that are fully editable. With the added flexibility of brush texture and variable opacity you can create truly natural looking artwork with all the benefits of vector editing.

Use pixel brush tools to paint inside and erase away from vectors in a non-destructive manner. Paint shadows, highlights and textures onto your vectors shapes and continue to benefit from their precision and sharpness. Affinity Designer even lets you paint away the edge of a vector shape with pixels tools, leaving all your curves intact.

[handrawn]

ok - no mention of tilt? - no mention of tip size adjustment? calligraphy is usually done with oval or chisel edge tips, not spherical

Affinity Designer even lets you paint away the edge of a vector shape with pixels tools, leaving all your curves intact.

what does that actually mean - is it like the shape-builder tool in xara or something else?