As a graphics designer of almost 20 years i have to heavily agree. Firefly is nice for drafting and dabbling with stuff that once would've been served by stock sites, but aside picking a few demo images or making some abstract pattern backgrounds here and there, this has close to zero overlap with the UI/UX into development & design system management process Figma serves. It's almost like saying the Bing bot eats away at Laravels user base.
As a personal aside:
I'd like to commend the initial push you guys did with XD. While Figma was still out of my scope back then, and XD played a major role for me in transitioning away from oldschool Photoshop or Indesign mockup processes into a modern workflow that integrates with my dev team and focuses on component & design token centric thinking.
Figma may have left XD thoroughly in the dust by now, and i honestly couldn't be happier that the merger won't happen, seeing how Adobe has been committed to absolutely dismantling the UX of Photoshop to the point of it only remaining installed on my workstation because Affinity Designer still lacks some core feature parity - but in its earlier days XD has been absolutely crucial to the development and modernization of my whole thinking and workflows!
Curious: what do you find missing in the affinity stuff? I see a bunch of people referring to it generally lacking 'stuff' but I'm curious about the sort of stuff it lacks. Maybe my use case won't be impacted much.
I'm grandfathered in with the introductory CC pricing but there aren't too many threads left in the rope anchoring me to that. I rarely do print design anymore so InDesign isn't the huge sell it used to be, and photoshop is just annoying me more each day. If it weren't for illustrator, I'd probably be gone already, and inkscape just doesn't cut the mustard for that stuff... the type tools alone in illustrator keep me there. Audition suits me way better than audacity but I don't do anything remotely intensive enough with sound to warrant a hundreds-of-dollars a year subscription.
Affinity has various workflow interrupting issues and missing features, from things Adobe figured out 20 years ago. And to be clear, I'd love Affinity to succeed at being a more serious competitor.
Just a handful from one notes file:
- No percentage document scaling drop-down option, despite featuring some uncommonly used units for design work. Instead it's hidden as a non-discoverable feature where you enter a percentage in the pixel field and it auto-converts to that absolute pixel value in-situ...
- Re-opening a document doesn't restore the state of opened/closed groups in the layer panel
- Lack of keyboard navigation for UI dialogs
- Lack of smart objects equivalent (only workaround is placing pre-existing documents).
- Can't paste clipboard contents directly as mask. In PS this is trivial using quick masks and the way they handle masks in general. Brought up in topics as old as 8 years. Agreed with sibling that masking needs love.
- Up until v2 (afaict) there was no way to disable layer auto select for the move tool
- Default zoom when opening documents can't be set to 100%
- Only has binary layer lock option, rather than separate move/edit/etc locking
- Lack of blend/interpolation of vector paths feature (another old and popular requested feature Adobe has had for decades)
- Have experienced random crashes for simple actions (opening menus, preferences, pressing warp transform, dragging layers).
- Vector node editing takes a dive in speed after just a dozen paths in a single layer. Only workaround is using multiple paths instead.
The list goes on. That said Affinity is usable if you don't mind dozens of little things that have been ironed out and included for a long time in PS. And to be fair, it's very fairly priced as such.
I really, really, really want to use the Affinity suite for more stuff, but just the other day when I was trying to knock up a basic drawing of something that exists in real life (a bicycle frame) I found that Designer couldn't draw a line of X length at N angle. It just... didn't have the option.
All I wanted to do was draw a few lines of given lengths and angles and join their ends. Then overlay another set of the same in different colors so I could see how the two groupings compared visually.
But... I couldn't.
That's such a fundamental part of Illustrator that I guess I'll be going back to it.
Quick note on Audition. It's not 100% the same, but Davinci Resolve comes with Fairlight included.
And Davinci Resolve is free.
It's an DAW that is definitely at a professional level and isn't too hard to learn as someone who was used to multitrack editing in Audition. All my VST3 plugins carry over and some of the builtin effects are just as good or better than those in Audition. It's not a light-weight program at all, but comparable to Audition.
I only find myself missing Audition when it comes to repairing original .wav files. But I haven't actually had to do that in many years at this point.
If you haven't tried it, I highly recommend giving it a try.
(I've heard good things about Reaper as a DAW and think I'll try it on my next project.)
Yeah, I love Davinci. Usually when I'm doing sound editing, it's for a pretty different focus, and I've been using Audition since it was Cool Edit Pro in the 90s. I've got a license for Ableton that I'll probably end up switching to.
The Affinity apps being slow to adopt improvements has nothing to do with “enshittification”. They’re not actively doing user-hostile stuff for the sake of their stock price, or anything in that ballpark.
The fact is that different things are “essential” to different users. Whenever they ship a new feature, some users are like “I wanted this!” while many are like “Still not shipping what we’re asking for!”
I do think Affinity should pick up the pace (and they maybe have, a tiny bit, since V2?) and address recurring forum topics more openly. But they’re not “enshittifying” their apps, they’re just not doing what some people wish.
There's also a tradeoff between implementing features and controlling stability that Adobe regularly gets wrong. Show me a professional-- supposedly their target demographic-- that would prefer to have the latest whiz bang sloppy neural network feature or some cockamamie 3D bolt-on before fixing their huge list of shitty bugs.
To be honest it took a long time in Photoshop to have something as good as it is now. Masking is the bane of my existence when I have to do it (but I'm only an amateur, so, not often).
Totally true, but that doesn't change the cost/benefit ratio of actually using the product for professional work. Masking is one of those fundamentally necessary tools for efficiently making professional looking photo composites and even more so for regular graphic design type work. Doing hobby work it would definitely be less of an issue.
As a personal aside: I'd like to commend the initial push you guys did with XD. While Figma was still out of my scope back then, and XD played a major role for me in transitioning away from oldschool Photoshop or Indesign mockup processes into a modern workflow that integrates with my dev team and focuses on component & design token centric thinking.
Figma may have left XD thoroughly in the dust by now, and i honestly couldn't be happier that the merger won't happen, seeing how Adobe has been committed to absolutely dismantling the UX of Photoshop to the point of it only remaining installed on my workstation because Affinity Designer still lacks some core feature parity - but in its earlier days XD has been absolutely crucial to the development and modernization of my whole thinking and workflows!