A bit blown away..

[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.

[Acorn]

Sad that Serif is getting more hits on TG than Xara.

Acorn

[Scotty]

Stands to reason since Magix drove all xara fans away with the marketing...

[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).