A bit blown away..

[pauland]

Adobe is more than any of its desktop applications. They make more money in other endeavors.

Tell us more!

I know about the image library, but exactly what else you'll have to tell me.

But hey, feel free to not care.

I won't!

[mwenz]

Tell us more!
...

Adobe makes gobs of money from other SaaS companies they own that basically track users online and the sales of that data. I think they now own 4 of those companies that are not named anything "Adobe." Other Adobe named SaaS services also make 'em money--what those are is half a mystery but I have a spreadsheet somewhere on a backup that listed them up until 2015, but include the umbrella terms of: Analytics Cloud, Marketing Cloud and Magento Commerce Cloud, as well as Adobe Advertising Cloud. These "cloud services" garner revenue in the billions versus what they make for the roughly 13 million CC users.

Their old standby, licensing PostScript makes 'em a lot of yearly revenue. They own a bazillion patents and make money off the licensing. But there's more.

[pauland]

Adobe makes gobs of money from other SaaS companies they own that basically track users online and the sales of that data. I think they now own 4 of those companies that are not named anything "Adobe." Other Adobe named SaaS services also make 'em money--what those are is half a mystery but I have a spreadsheet somewhere on a backup that listed them up until 2015, but include the umbrella terms of: Analytics Cloud, Marketing Cloud and Magento Commerce Cloud, as well as Adobe Advertising Cloud. These "cloud services" garner revenue in the billions versus what they make for the roughly 13 million CC users.

Their old standby, licensing PostScript makes 'em a lot of yearly revenue. They own a bazillion patents and make money off the licensing. But there's more.

Wow. Thanks for the info.

[mwenz]

You're welcome.

Since 2015 or 2016, Adobe no longer reveals how many CC licenses there are nor its revenue from the same as line items in its accounting. Beginning in 2012/2013 it was holding fairly static at a 10% or so year over year growth. Many/most volume of licensing is to government bodies, educational seats & larger businesses. So realize that the average person doesn't get the volume pricing that governments and larger business do, and educational licensing is pretty inexpensive.

From what I can ascertain the way Adobe is now reporting their revenue for CC desktop applications, it accounts for about 1.5 billion of the 9 billion in revenue as of year's end 2018.

[behzad]

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)?

[pauland]

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)?

I expect a similar offer may arrive at some time in the future - most likely when the next major update arrives.

If Xara works for you for web development and that's what you do, then you have less reason to be interested.

I think you've answered your own question.

[handrawn]

affinity programs do not do websites, as mentioned before in this thread

the workflow is quite different to xara programs - no point in going there unless your xara program[s] cannot do something affinity can

[cmpan1]

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)?

behzad, your statement about having the spare time to learn a "new set of programs" is what's having me add my 2 cents. I own all of the Affinity suite. I believe that Affinity Designer would be the their equivalent to Xara (cept for the ftp capabilities) I found it, and publisher easy to get going because the concepts between all programs of the like have many similarities. But here's my problem.

As many hours that I have spent in the Affinity apps to do a non-web related project, I ALWAYS abandoned it and popped back into Xara to get it done quick. As beautiful as the Affinity UI's are and with a sort of sophistication that Xara doesn't have, (I guess that would be a matter of opinion) I ALWAYS find myself back into Xara to 'get the job done'.

Probably because I'm so used to it? Maybe? But I have patience and love new learning curves... learning new apps does not bother me, I actually enjoy it. It's SO MUCH easier/faster to hop around Xara's UI than the Affinity apps.... for me...

anyway... just thought I'd say so... LOL

[mwenz]

Maybe to those interested, Serif is doing a new video every day through May and putting it up on their YouTube channel. These will be pre-recorded sessions and the person doing them will be live to answer questions.

They will be at 4pm BST every day through May. More info:

https://affinityspotlight.com/articl...tive-sessions/

And a link to the announcement thread on the Serif Affinity forum, which has links to the YouTube channel as well...

https://forum.affinity.serif.com/ind...-events-in-may

Today's begins in a little less than an hour from the time of this posting.

[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).