A bit blown away..

[Jonopen]

Just wanting your (all) opinion on the purchase of Affinity products. My situation is that I am pretty much occupied taking care of old dad who is sick and the little time i get, I work on a number of repeat clients that need updates with their website and print materials all done with Xara. So really as for my time, I hardly have any spare to sit and learn a new set of programs. Would you say this kind of offering by Serif only comes once in a lifetime, should i take advantage of it and BUY now or buy when I am ready to delve into it (down the road, can be years from now)?

As mentioned, [I think] Serif (Affinity) will have many more special offers in the future. Unless you have an immediate use for them, I would hang on.

That said...

Personally I have all their apps but (a bit like cmpan1) still have to fight the urge to go back to 'Xara' when things get frustrating. Although as time goes by, more often than not, I now do stick it out and finish what I started. I think it’s just the case of familiarity - the more you use them, the more comfortable and productive you become. Learning a few keyboard shortcuts definitely speeds things up.

A big incentive for me is they are Windows scaling aware. Basically, this means I can better see what I’m doing! Unfortunately changing Windows settings in this way, instantly makes the Photo & Graphic Designer interface blurry!

I’m not hugely experienced yet with the Affinity apps yet and have mainly been using AD, but the ‘Xara’ things I miss so far, are:

1. Right-click shift copy (you have to use Ctrl-drag)
2. Blending between two lines (you have to use power copy - sort of)
3. Built-in Fractal clouds and Plasma fills (need to use imported clipped bitmaps)
4. Quick creation of bitmap copies (have to make a copy of object, then rasterise it)
5. Stroke shapes and custom brushes (have to change properties and pressure graphs etc - good but fiddly)
6. Live FX (have to swap into Affinity Photo to use plugins and some effects)
7. Feathering tool (have to apply a Gaussian blur to whole selected objects)
8. The Shape tool (you have to switch between the move tool and node tool)
9. The Eraser tool (there isn't one! I think you have to mostly subtract one shape from another or delete nodes)
10. Attributes are not remembered, ie line styles and object fill colours etc (you can copy and paste styles and attributes though)

None of these are major 'deal breakers' for me at least, and of course there are plenty of Affinity features which I much prefer, for example their grids, pencil stabilisation options, built-in noise/grain effect option, text handling etc.

One thing that might be useful to know is, it's possible to easily cut and paste from 'Xara' and directly paste into 'Affinity'. See below for example of what that looks like. Note that 'Xara' shaped strokes/lines are converted into vector curves (simple lines are fine).

Hope this helps rather than confuses you. If it does, just read the first sentence of this post and ignore the rest! (hope you and your dad are ok).