Affinity Designer now released for windows

[iamtheblues]

Also, using Xara interface nowadays feels like being Cypher watching Matrix world through the console... I mean... it's so old style!

...and I thought that was one of the things in its favour!
Bob.

[iamtheblues]

@ Peter, that's not exactly what I wrote, as I was talking about vector tools. The Shape Painter Tool is the stand-out addition for me.
I wouldn't cross the street to use most of the rest of the later additions to the non-vector tools, with the exception of the Photo Heal Tool.
If that is the rate of progress since Xtreme 5, then the new subscription wheeze certainly isn't for me.
I can honestly say that since its inception (subscription) I have seen nothing to get excited about whatsoever.
Bob.

[angelize]

In regards to brushes while affinity has the ability to create your own vector profile strokes the rest of their brushes are just as bitmap as Xara. But I don't mind that in either program. Until Xara finishes their brushes (they really are an unfinshed work) and I can set heads and tails and exactly how much of a brush repeats and they work on the awful pulling in tight corners Affinity will give me a way to create some nice borders. (mind you Affinity's brushes aren't perfect either) Also I'll use affinity when I need to work with Open type fonts. As others have said Affinity will be an addition to my tool box but XDP will remain my main tool.

[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]

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).

[gwpriester]

Great to hear from you Bones, and very good review.

[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.

[handrawn]

Really?

indeed....

[Acorn]

indeed....

With my main PC I get 0%. with my laptop, I sometimes get 35%.
Bizarre,
Acorn

[handrawn]

the screen shot is from 6 core AMD FX PC - on i3 INTEL laptop, its a bit less, but still 12% ish