Affinity Designer now released for windows

[handrawn]

Full version of affinity designer now released - 40 GBP or 30 GBP offer, plus freebie brushes and stuff if you have been on the beta list...
https://affinity.serif.com/en-gb/des...-feature-list/

no web stuff to get in the way...

[iamtheblues]

no web stuff to get in the way...

Got mine, Steve €40.00 less 1 cent here. (no Simpliclean to remember to uncheck, either!)
Bob.

[jamesd]

Just got a copy! Less than half the price of DPX upgrade and no subscription either

[maksimon]

bought! I like some of the tools and how they work for that price, BUT in Xara there are many small and terribly convenient things that are not in Affinity. Finally - Xara is still my favorite! In any case, good that there is competition. This will contribute to the emergence of new things in Xara!

[handrawn]

Got mine, Steve €40.00 less 1 cent here. (no Simpliclean to remember to uncheck, either!)
Bob.

its not a replacement for XDPX - for instance it does not have brush fidelity [smoothing] - but it does have good typography and colour management, and the custom brushes render a lot faster on zoom [without the hack of having to group first]

plus it is not a CPU hog like xara is: xara hogs 15-20% of my CPU even with a completely blank document

and the pixel persona is very nice for colouring/painting in raster - but it won't replace SAI completely either, just complement it

The extent to which WEB has taken over from DRAWING in XDPX is understandable from the moneymaking point of view, but really the way it has gone is so skewed that other tools are becoming more and more attractive...

[Giovanni]

[...] The extent to which WEB has taken over from DRAWING in XDPX is understandable from the moneymaking point of view, but really the way it has gone is so skewed that other tools are becoming more and more attractive...

Quoted for agreement!

[iamtheblues]

The extent to which WEB has taken over from DRAWING in XDPX is understandable from the moneymaking point of view, but really the way it has gone is so skewed that other tools are becoming more and more attractive...

For me the clincher is the Open Type support that is pathetically lacking in Xara.
Not that I would rush back to join the fold now, given the monumental cock-up that is their subscription method.
To be honest, I would rather stick with Xtreme 5 as my Xara tool of choice, there really isn't that much that has been added since then that has excited me in terms of vector tools.

[BONES]

xara hogs 15-20% of my CPU even with a completely blank document

Really? I just had a look at mine and even when it was exporting a multi-page website to preview, the CPU only went up to about 40%. When it is just sitting there with a document open, CPU is zero. If I do something like move objects or make copies, CPU might go up to 5% but that's all. Memory usage seems tied to the documents I have open. With a simple one colour T-shirt design, it was showing about 140Mb of RAM but when I opened the big website it jumped to 320Mb. Affinity Designer shows similar CPU and RAM usage to Xara here on my XPS 13 with Skylake Core i7.

I only discovered Affinity Designer a couple of weeks ago. I spent a few hours with the beta and then decided to spend the money when I got my special offer. I think it does some things really well but, overall, it can't really compare to the very mature feature set of XDPro. The way it clips to the edge of the artboard is brilliant for TV work. I can just set up an HD frame and go for it. The grid system is also very impressive and quite user-friendly.

There are things I definitely don't like about it, too. I don't like the way the UI apes Adobe. I've always hated Adobe UIs, they are highly inefficient and force you to learn as many hotkeys as you can cram into your head in order to get things done. It has tools down the left side, tools across the top and more tools down the right side, so you are constantly having to shift your attention (and your cursor) all over the screen, and you can't do anything about that. At least in XDPro I have all my tools across the top and I can mostly ignore the panels on the right side unless I need something specific. But with Affinity, the Layers palette is central to the workflow, which means you are stuck with it. At least it has a proper dark UI, though, unlike XDPro's half-hearted attempt. A lot of the tools, too, are straight out of Adobe CC. e.g. They use the same selection tools, right down to the Refine Edge options. Which is fine, except Adobe recently replaced all that with infinitely better Select & Mask, so Affinity suddenly seems out of date. Mind you, so does XDPro's masking workflow, the new stuff in Photoshop is incredible (and that's the first time anyone has heard me say that in a very, very long time).

[WilliamHere]

Full version of affinity designer now released - 40 GBP or 30 GBP offer, plus freebie brushes and stuff if you have been on the beta list...
https://affinity.serif.com/en-gb/des...-feature-list/

no web stuff to get in the way...

I purchased all the affinity products and I am very happy with them. I had to move away from Xara due to the lack of support for Mac OSX. I got tired of using windows emulators just to use xara software. I was a big fan of Xara, but I had to get away and on to affinity.

[BONES]

I purchased all the affinity products and I am very happy with them. I had to move away from Xara due to the lack of support for Mac OSX. I got tired of using windows emulators just to use xara software. I was a big fan of Xara, but I had to get away and on to affinity.

Why didn't you just get rid of your Mac? I spend eight or nine hours a day on a MacPro at work and I can't wait to get home to my PC and be productive for a change. Every new version of OS X/macOS makes my job harder. e.g. We finally upgraded to Sierra last week and it has completely screwed up what was once a simple task that I have to do half-a-dozen times a day. When we finish a job, we send links to the finished files to the producer who made the request. In all previous versions of OS X, all you had to do was select all the files, copy them and paste them into the email. Instead of copying the files, it would just copy the paths to them, which was quick and easy. Now that's broken. Now we have to select the files, right-click, hold down the OPT key to change the right-click option to "Copy files path names" (or something), then copy that into a text editor (because if you try and copy straight into Outlook it will only copy the path of the first file), then select all that text and copy/paste it into the email. It's a royal PITA and on top of dropping support for the Quicktime Animation codec a few releases ago has basically eliminated the only things that made OS X bearable. On top of that, because we are on Mac we have to use Cinema 4d instead of 3DS Max, which means all our 3D takes twice as long as it should.

I used to have an open mind about Macs until I started using them. OS X was a huge improvement over MacOS 9.x but it hasn't really got any better over the years. In fact, since the upgrade my MacPro is noticeably slower than it was on Mavericks. OTOH, the last few versions of Windows have been getting leaner and faster. I remember when I first installed a Windows 8 preview build onto an old netbook that had been running XP, it went from being all but unusable to actually working well enough to use for web surfing and other light duty tasks. I even got Photoshop CS4 running on it. Today, moving from Window s10 to Sierra feels like stepping back a decade. Final Cut Pro and Logic Audio used to be legitimate reasons to stick with OS X but since Apple turned FCP into a consumer product and allowed Logic to stagnate, everyone would be better off on PC.