FYI: Affinity Users, version 2.0 has been released.

[DL Signs]

Affinity released version 2.0. Unfortunately you have to purchase the new version, but It's on sale. Now they have a universal license that lets you download all programs for Win & Mac, and iPad for one price, still subscription free, still decent price in my book. From the little bit I've played with it this morning, haven't had any issues.

 

[jochwat]

Yeah, less than two months after I bought all of V1! Damn it. I sent support a message asking if there was anything that could be done (credit, upgrade, promo code, ?), but no reply yet. Probably too busy handling all the other requests for the same thing. Hopefully they'll offer something, but since they have a low-priced initial launch, I'm not so sure...

 

[DL Signs]

Yeah, less than two months after I bought all of V1! Damn it. I sent support a message asking if there was anything that could be done (credit, upgrade, promo code, ?), but no reply yet. Probably too busy handling all the other requests for the same thing. Hopefully they'll offer something, but since they have a low-priced initial launch, I'm not so sure...

That sucks, and usually the kind of luck I have... I've been using it for a couple years, got em' on a half price sale of $25 each when I first got them, so I definitely got my money's worth. That new universal license is $99 till it goes off sale, gets you all 3 programs for all platforms, plus the ipad version, free updates till version 3 comes out (which probably won't be for at least 2-3 years). So it's like $33 each if you get the package, still a decent price.

 

[jochwat]

That sucks, and usually the kind of luck I have... I've been using it for a couple years, got em' on a half price sale of $25 each when I first got them, so I definitely got my money's worth. That new universal license is $99 till it goes off sale, gets you all 3 programs for all platforms, plus the ipad version, free updates till version 3 comes out (which probably won't be for at least 2-3 years). So it's like $33 each if you get the package, still a decent price.

I guess on the positive side, I also got all the apps on sale. So by getting the V2 apps on sale (if I don't wait too long), it's like I got them for regular price. But I hate regular price. Regular price is for suckers! Which may be me soon.

 

[Notarealsignguy]

Were there any updates or improvements with V2?

 

[Bobby H]

$99.99 doesn't seem like too bad a price for the whole 2.0 suite (Designer, Photo & Publisher) considering it can be installed on a Windows PC or Mac and the iPad versions don't cost anything extra. The price rises to $169.99 after a limited time.

I only have Affinity Designer 1.10.5 (for Windows and iPad). Designer 2 costs $40.99 (rises to $69.99 later). The iPad version of Designer 2 on its own costs $11.99. It looks like a flat price; customers pay the same thing regardless if they own the prior version or not.

Were there any updates or improvements with V2?

There's a decent number of improvements, but nothing that blows my socks off. A lot of it looks like features that exist in Illustrator and/or CorelDRAW.

What’s New in Affinity?

We regularly update our apps to ensure they deliver the best possible creative experience for our users. Here’s what’s new in the latest update.

affinity.serif.com

I'm disappointed there aren't more improvements with typographic controls, such as sizing and alignment of type with other objects. There is still no support for OpenType Variable fonts or OpenType-SVG fonts.

 

[DL Signs]

Were there any updates or improvements with V2?

Haven't played with all of them yet, 99% of what I do is vector... Designer has a lot of new features and improvements like shape builder, vector mesh warp, you can duplicate styles, gradients across different elements... And they FINALLY made it easy to make things like strokes scale with objects without having to check every one off (one of my peeves), the transform tool has a drop-down now to select all that stuff. I've been playing with it throughout the day, and keep finding new stuff. I think it was worth the money, especially with the universal license, because you get all 3 for both windows and Mac, plus the ipad version.

 

[Ronny Axelsson]

There's a decent number of improvements, but nothing that blows my socks off.

Vector Warp looks very promising and is definitely comparable to, or even more powerful than, CorelDRAW's Envelope and Perspective features, and it has real time preview.
Can't get constrain or snapping to work when dragging a vector warp though, but maybe I'm missing something.

Shape Builder is something that's been asked for a lot, maybe especially from those coming from Illustrator, and from what I've seen so far it seems to work very good.

These two alone should be enough to justify an upgrade for most Designer users, I think.
And for a very reasonable price you also get the new versions of Publisher and Photo, and they all work on Windows, Mac and iPad.
And no subscription.

 

[Bobby H]

The vector warp and shape builder tools are not unique. It's debatable whether the vector warp effect in Affinity Designer is better than the Envelope functions in CorelDRAW (which have long been kind of glitchy). The warping effects in Adobe Illustrator work very well. Illustrator has had a shape builder feature for a few years.

The lack of support for OpenType Variable and OpenType SVG fonts is a growing problem. More and more commercially sold typefaces feature variable versions. Even the Google Fonts web site has a growing collection of variable fonts.

 

[DL Signs]

Vector Warp looks very promising and is definitely comparable to, or even more powerful than, CorelDRAW's Envelope and Perspective features, and it has real time preview.
Can't get constrain or snapping to work when dragging a vector warp though, but maybe I'm missing something.

Shape Builder is something that's been asked for a lot, maybe especially from those coming from Illustrator, and from what I've seen so far it seems to work very good.

These two alone should be enough to justify an upgrade for most Designer users, I think.
And for a very reasonable price you also get the new versions of Publisher and Photo, and they all work on Windows, Mac and iPad.
And no subscription.

I haven't found a way to constrain or snap in the warp yet either, something that should be added.

I never even looked to see what was new, just started using it. So far everything is smooth as silk. Besides the stuff you mentioned there's an x-ray view in the view menu, like the outline but drops opacity of all colors instead of hiding them completely, that's good for complex stuff. In the color picker there's a style picker too now. You can drag & drop effects in the layers to either move or copy them to new layers, just drag to move, drag left and drop on a new layer to copy it, and the layers panel has other new options I haven't dove into yet. The slice/ scissor and measure tools are handy. Quite a bit better overall. Best feature is having a way to globally set strokes and effects to scale with objects (having to set it to on for each is something that always drove me nuts), there's a little drop down menu in the transform panel to set it.

Overall it's a major improvement, and on par to compete with the big dogs.

 

[jochwat]

As I feared, even though I only got to enjoy 2 months of V1 updates (which equals zero updates), I will have to pony up the full $99.99 for the Universal License for all three apps. Such is life. Will still be worth it, I'm sure. Now to actually start using and learning these things after I buy them this time.

 

[DL Signs]

As I feared, even though I only got to enjoy 2 months of V1 updates (which equals zero updates), I will have to pony up the full $99.99 for the Universal License for all three apps. Such is life. Will still be worth it, I'm sure. Now to actually start using and learning these things after I buy them this time.

I've been using it for several years, trust me... It's worth it. We're down to having to pay only one single license for Illustrator, and it's more for plugin support for equipment than designing. Still used it occasionally for things that were easier than Affinity, but they just added most of those features

 

[Evan Gillette]

I will be buying a license for sure, well worth it. Like Bobby said, new features are just playing catch-up but still are welcomed additions.

 

[WildWestDesigns]

While the downside to a younger codebase is that it's going to be playing catchup (and it may always as Adobe does have the ability to buy other programs and incorporate them compared to Affinity, at least at this time), it doesn't have the tech debt that Adobe does. Adobe still uses say OpenGL (and don't get me wrong, I use OpenGL all the time for my games that I write, I'll pull my hair out with Vulkan), no longer by actively promoted by the maintainers (Khronos Group) for about 4 or 5 yrs now (Vulkan is the de facto replacement), so it's up to GPU OEMs to support it. Apple isn't even using the latest version at that 4.1 versus I think 4.6 is the latest (I think Adobe stops at 4.0 for Ai at least, probably because of Apple). I doubt Adobe is going to re-write to Vulkan (which Apple doesn't want to support at all) and going to MSs and Apple's own respective graphics API is going to be fun. Affinity does appear to use the respective OEM APIs, so that does give them a little more room.

So I think of it that way as well. It's not a glamorous as the other features etc, but I do think that's worth considering as well.

 

[marunr]

I just downloaded the trial version and I don't know how to add my icc profiles. The drop down menu only has a few. Is this because it's a trial version?

 

[jochwat]

While the downside to a younger codebase is that it's going to be playing catchup (and it may always as Adobe does have the ability to buy other programs and incorporate them compared to Affinity, at least at this time), it doesn't have the tech debt that Adobe does. Adobe still uses say OpenGL (and don't get me wrong, I use OpenGL all the time for my games that I write, I'll pull my hair out with Vulkan), no longer by actively promoted by the maintainers (Khronos Group) for about 4 or 5 yrs now (Vulkan is the de facto replacement), so it's up to GPU OEMs to support it. Apple isn't even using the latest version at that 4.1 versus I think 4.6 is the latest (I think Adobe stops at 4.0 for Ai at least, probably because of Apple). I doubt Adobe is going to re-write to Vulkan (which Apple doesn't want to support at all) and going to MSs and Apple's own respective graphics API is going to be fun. Affinity does appear to use the respective OEM APIs, so that does give them a little more room.

So I think of it that way as well. It's not a glamorous as the other features etc, but I do think that's worth considering as well.

The real question is, where can we see some of these games of yours?

 

[WildWestDesigns]

The real question is, where can we see some of these games of yours?

Various educational games for my kids, I doubt any of y'all would really care about them.