XLS for features and ideas - Megathread
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Ohhh, it was just a misunderstood term. Not a feature. UX copywriting – yeah, I definitely know what that is. I work with a handful of UX designers who take our products through a thorough UX design phase before a single end user even gets near them.
I was in my own little world and, unbelievably, thinking about something like a copy-paste-style feature in export persona. I probably just should’ve gone to bed earlier.
But yes, UX and UX design, as you wrote – starting with collected observations and then designing from a holistic perspective across the whole program, not in bits and pieces based on ad-hoc customer feedback.
Affinity is beyond saving – they apparently want to play UX designers themselves, or maybe no UX designers want to work there. Respecting others’ specialties – that’s the first step on the road to being a professional.
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@Ingolf: There are so many inconsistencies in the way the program is designed, it is breathtaking. They've let their commercial agenda ruin their UX. Consider this: You can't add multiple artboards directly in Affinity Photo. You have to switch to Affinity Designer and come back. Mixer brush is unavailable in Pixel Persona within Designer. Live Filters are available through Publisher when you click into Affinity Photo persona (is that what it is called?), but not when you switch to Pixel Persona within Designer. Export Persona is unavailable in Affinity Photo and Publisher. At first, I was really cofused. Then it dawned on me. If you make everything available in the same program, you're screwed commercially. Contrary to what fanboys say, it does not have to be bloated. Xara and PL both belie that argument.
So, they decided to bugger their UX for the sake of making it commercially viable.
By the way, Find and Replace in Publisher is an unwashed, unsalvagable mess.
I discovered this about myself recently: I can't say or think the word persona, without grimacing and violently gritting my teeth. It is such poor copywriting.
Persona: Meaning: "The particular type of character that a person seems to have and that is often different from their real or private character." So, if I got this right, Affinity Designer has a private life that we are not privy to.
Work: Windows 11 | Intel i9 14900HS (24 Cores/32 Threads) | GeForce RTX 4070 | 64 GB RAM
Personal: Windows 11 | Amd Ryzen 9 7950X (16 Core, 32 Threads) | GeForce RTX 3060 | 32 GB RAM -
@Daniel said in XLS for features and ideas - Mega Thread:
You're welcome, and I'll have to confess that I have my own selfish reasons too.
No problem with that, who isn't?
Your Research looks very impressive and from the research you've
done, it's easy to understand how much you dislike Adobe.When I started with vector graphics a while ago, I tried Adobe Illustrator,
but didn't like it the first time. So I opted for Xara and CorelDraw. I've
never looked back.What I like about VectorStyler is the many ways one can combine
things. That's why I sometimes feel like I'm in a research lab
researching highly advanced alien technology. Because it's often a bit
beyond my comprehension of what the developer has come up with.
But I love it.
Win 11
CPU: AMD Ryzen 5 9600X, 6-core.
GPU: Nvidia Geforce RTX 5070. -
@Daniel said in XLS for features and ideas - Mega Thread:
@Ingolf: There are so many inconsistencies in the way the program is designed, it is breathtaking. They've let their commercial agenda ruin their UX. Consider this: You can't add multiple artboards directly in Affinity Photo. You have to switch to Affinity Designer and come back. Mixer brush is unavailable in Pixel Persona within Designer. Live Filters are available through Publisher when you click into Affinity Photo persona (is that what it is called?), but not when you switch to Pixel Persona within Designer. Export Persona is unavailable in Affinity Photo and Publisher. At first, I was really cofused. Then it dawned on me. If you make everything available in the same program, you're screwed commercially. Contrary to what fanboys say, it does not have to be bloated. Xara and PL both belie that argument.
So, they decided to bugger their UX for the sake of making it commercially viable.
By the way, Find and Replace in Publisher is an unwashed, unsalvagable mess.
I discovered this about myself recently: I can't say or think the word persona, without grimacing and violently gritting my teeth. It is such poor copywriting.
Persona: Meaning: "The particular type of character that a person seems to have and that is often different from their real or private character." So, if I got this right, Affinity Designer has a private life that we are not privy to.
Affinity reeks of being created by old-school developers and managers who were blinded by their initial success but never took usability or professional expertise seriously. On top of everything you and many others have already described.
I honestly think the company is an insult. Much of their product line consists of licensed or open-source components they've cobbled together without any real understanding of customer workflows — especially those of professional users. They have the weakest vector algorithms on the market. They were even releasing pre-2000-style software in 2014 and beyond, completely missing the trends of the time. And then there are their iPad versions. They clearly have no idea how a proper tablet app should function.
On top of that, they use a hypersensitive, old-fashioned, serialized file format that can’t be reliably saved to external hard drives or cloud-shared folders without the files corrupting or self-destructing.
They’ve obviously hit a sweet spot in terms of price and features, but their stubborn refusal to learn from mistakes or hire the right expertise has effectively ensured they missed their chance to create stable, modern software and truly capitalize on their potential. The company's record-breaking out-of-touch fanboys in their forum and their reluctance to get out and engage with the market haven't helped.
I refuse to believe they have a UX designer — or even someone who's taken a night course in the subject. Much of it feels clunky and unserious, and the company’s forum replies are remarkably off the mark.
I honestly don’t think Canva truly understands what they’ve bought — or maybe they have big plans to tear it all down and rebuild it from scratch.
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@Ingolf: agreed. To every word.
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@Subpath: Thank you. That's not just mine. It's a lot of other people who worked on it. People who are more experienced and talented than me.
Oh trust me when I say this, Corel (now Alludo) are just as evil, evil as they come. They tried to kill Xara in the crib by buying the marketing rights and refusing to promote it. Charles Moir had enough wits about him to keep the source code to himself so he managed to get out of the contract eventually. That's why Xara never took off.
Now, they're doing to Gravit what Adobe did to FreeHand. Slowly degrading it. I assure you it will be gone within this decade. Gravit is a very good online app. German. Straightfoward. No frills. Robust. That's Corel bought it. They sensed a threat. -
I know that Corel owned Xara for a while and integrated its
features into CorelDRAW. I know Corel well enough not to expect
anything good from them.When I decided to go with CorelDRAW, they offered me a
reasonable package with CorelDRAW, PhotoPaint, and a good
Font Manager.Thanks to my good knowledge of CorelDRAW and vector
graphics, I got a fairly well-paying job in digital printing. I was in
screen printing before that. So, it paid off, so to speak. -
@Subpath: Corel does shine in priting industry. But they have the ethics of hyenas: Craven, bottom-feeding scavengers who feast on the leftovers of better breeds of software.
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I think that's part of so called predatory capitalism.
As I wrote before, I never really expected much from Corel.
The company that hired me had already decided on CorelDraw
and because of my knowledge of it, I got the job.(edited: deleted american)
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@Subpath: True, but Corel is Canadian. Your larger point still stands.
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Soft Groups: The ability to group objects without bringing them to the same layer. This is useful because it lets you group multiple different elements such as texts objects, objects with FX, gradients and so on. And yet, retain them each in their own categorical layers.
For instance, I can group a text object with an image, and yet, for the sake of simplicity, I can keep all the images in the image layer. Soft grouping lets me maintain layer order yet have groups outside this order.
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Export File Attributes:
This collects all the information on colour and their hex codes, stroke widths, dash patterns, corner radii, text properties, FX information, broken down per objects. It's a essentially a meta data file. In .text format. Useful to give to client's design teams. As a part of handover.
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@Daniel said in XLS for features and ideas - Mega Thread:
It's a essentially a meta data file.
One thing to note: in VS you can save the ".vstyler" file in JSON or XML format. This is not an export feature, but it is the native VS file.
The format can be selected in Document Setup -> File
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https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=xn4HuDQEPwM&pp=ygUOQ2FwcyBsb2NrIGJvb2s%3D
If anyone is interested in how Design has been ruined by vulturous, predatory capitalism, have a listen to this. It's called Caps Lock by Ruben Pater. Book of same name too.
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that's an interesting topic, but I think the "General Dicussion" section of the forum
may be a better place for this. Additionally, you could add a link to it here. -
@VectorStyler: Icons for showing screen colours, print colours, cyan, magenta, yellow and key. There should be 5 icons. One of it should be a toggle switch between print and screen colours. And there should be three 4 icons showing Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and Key separately.
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@VectorStyler: Interactive highlight for nodes, handles and curves. This is not a feature but a question of interactive feedback. As already noted, having a highlight to show which exact segment of the curve is being manipulated upon hover is useful. Likewise, the nodes and handles must enlarge slightly (AND/OR change colour?) on hover. This is again quality-of-life improvement. See Lunacy for a version of what I mean.
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Lock node coordinate position: Select nodes, and lock them to their coordinate positions. Just like you'd do to any object.
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@Daniel said in XLS for features and ideas - Mega Thread:
Lock node coordinate position: Select nodes, and lock them to their coordinate positions. Just like you'd like any object.
This I assume would be used in the Node tool, so it cannot move those nodes.
But when moving the whole objects, these should be movable, right?
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@VectorStyler: Yes, that is correct. The node position should locked relative to the rest of the nodes. Not the absolute position on canvas. That would mean that the object itself is locked. Since the object cannot be moved.
Think of it like stakes in the ground when you're putting up a tent. The stake position once hammered in remains unchanged, while you can adjust the rest of the tent flaps and cover.
